Chapter 49
Kalikimaki Industrial Park
1 November, 3:40 a.m.
D rake had been sitting on a chair in a dark space behind the rack of computers. He wore an earbud, and he was holding a gun in his right hand. It was a Belgian FN semiautomatic pistol with a tactical light attached to the trigger guard. The light dodged around. In his left hand he held a bot controller. He wore a black shirt, black jeans, mud-stained boots. He walked to the center of the room and pointed the gun into Eric’s eyes, then toward Eric’s forearm, and caught the two aircraft in the light beam.
“Peek-a-boo, I see you,” said Drake.
The two micro-humans heard him perfectly on their headsets. He was using a squirt radio. Rick said to Karen, “Launch.”
They powered up the aircraft and fell off Eric’s arm, diving, the props ramping up.
Drake didn’t seem to care what they did. He aimed the gun and light into Eric’s eyes, standing with his body turned sideways and his gun arm held straight out. Drake held up the bot controller in his other hand. Its screen made his hand glow. He touched a button with his thumb and said, “Your bot controller doesn’t actually work, Eric. Only mine does.”
Rick banked his micro-plane and circled over Eric’s head. He couldn’t see Karen. He called to her on the radio: “Stay close to me.”
“Rick—can Drake hear us?”
“Of course I can hear you,” Drake’s voice came on their radios. He swung the gun around suddenly, and the laser beam dodged around their planes, and they saw his vast, leering face. For a moment Rick thought Drake would fire the gun at them, but then he realized that the bullet probably wouldn’t hit their planes. They were too small, dodging around too fast.
Drake kept the gun pointed at Eric’s head. He held up the bot controller, pressed a button. “There,” he said.
“What did you do?” Eric said, looking up.
Drake looked around and smiled. “I activated the bots.” He took a step backward, waiting.
“You’ll be attacked by them, too—” Eric said.
“I don’t think so.” Drake lunged forward and hit Eric in the face with the butt of his gun. Eric groaned and fell to his knees.
“What is it about you Jansen brothers? You seem to require beatings on a regular basis,” Drake said. He kicked Eric in the ribs. Eric gasped and went down on all fours and began to crawl.
“Where are you going, Eric? Looking for something?”
“Go to hell.”
Drake kicked him in the side of the head, viciously. Eric slumped down and curled up, and seemed to lose consciousness, while Drake’s pistol light danced over him.
Eric tried to struggle to his feet, but couldn’t.
“Well, Eric, there’s something you don’t realize. The bots ignore my body scent. They’ll go after anybody except me.” He chuckled. “They respect me.”
Eric put his hand up to his face, then took it away. His hand was spotted with blood. A small razor cut had opened on his forehead.
“Too bad, Eric. Looks like one of them found you.”
Eric crawled toward Drake, who darted backward and smiled. Eric began swatting at his hair, at his ears, shaking himself.
“Trying to get the bots off, Eric? Can you feel them crawling on your face? In your hair? Soon they’ll be in your bloodstream. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt. You just watch yourself bleed.”
As Drake worked on Eric, Rick flew toward the door to the generator room. That’s where he and Karen had to go. He circled in close to the door, and he made a slow pass near it. He saw a small vent at the top of the door. It might be big enough for a micro-plane to pass through; he couldn’t tell. He backed away and flew up close to Karen, until their wings nearly touched. He switched off his radio, and shouted at her: “He can’t hear us when we shout. Fly toward the door to the generator room. Looks like there’s a way through.”
He got some altitude above the vent in the door, and ran up to full power, and dove at the slot. His wings clipped the slot as he went through, and he ended up inside the generator room, spiraling out of control. Karen followed him a moment later. Rick recovered, got his plane under control. He flew straight toward the center of the generator chamber, the pattern of hexagons below him. He picked out the central hexagon and banked, looking down. He could see a small white circle in it, far below: it marked the location of the control panel. He could see Karen King flying off his right wing. “I’m going to land by the circle,” he shouted to her, hoping his voice carried over the rushing wind as his plane flew.
Just then Drake’s voice came on their radio headsets. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “I saw you fly into the generator room. However, you may wish to know that the bots in there can see you. Smell you, too.”
They saw Drake’s face staring in the window, now, his eyes moving, tracking them as they flew. Drake held up the bot controller where they could see it, and he pushed a series of buttons. “I changed the sensitivity. Now they can find you,” he said, and looked up at the ceiling of the generator room.
Karen followed Drake’s gaze. She saw them: glittery specks, scattered across the ceiling. The specks were moving. Dropping and falling like tiny raindrops. As they fell, they fanned out, flying under their own power. She saw one of them turn toward Rick, and it began tracking him, flying after him. As Rick went into a dive toward the floor, the bot dove as well. It was powered by a turboprop fan in a housing, and it had a snaky neck, with knives on the end of the neck. As it flashed past her, following Rick, she saw the eyes: the bot had a pair of compound eyes like an insect’s, but it was a machine vision system. A pair of eyes meant it had binocular vision, depth perception, she realized.
“Rick,” she shouted. “Behind you!”
He didn’t hear her. He was heading for the floor and the white circle. The bot closed in on him; she had to get that bot off his tail. Not sure what to do, she dove her plane, chasing the bot and Rick. Out of the corner of her eye she saw more objects flying, and she looked over her shoulder and saw dozens of bots, maybe more, flying behind her. They seemed to be converging on her and Rick. The bots shimmered as they flew, and some of them hovered, darting, seeking. “Rick, behind you!” she shouted.
He turned his head and saw the bot following him. He immediately pulled up and banked, getting out of the dive, twisting upward, trying to shake the bot off his tail. The bot flew at least as well as Rick did. It was closing in on him.
Karen accelerated and dove behind the bot that was chasing Rick. Maybe she could knock it out of the air by hitting it with the nose of her plane. Her propeller was in the tail of her plane, so the plane’s nose could be used as a blunt weapon. She aimed for the bot and pushed the throttle forward. Just before the strike, she hunched down in the cockpit and tucked her head, bracing for impact. Her plane slammed into the bot.
There was a pinging sound and her plane ricocheted one way and the bot went the other way, both corkscrewing through the air. The crash didn’t hurt the plane or the bot: they merely bounced off each other. The bot whirled around and stopped itself in midair, and hovered, and oriented itself, and then began to follow her plane. Karen regained control of her plane and peeled away, watching the bot. The bot accelerated toward her, putting on a burst of speed, and then, to Karen’s surprise, the bot unfolded two jointed arms.
It grabbed hold of the wing of Karen’s plane with the sticky pads on the ends of its arms. The bot clung to her plane as she flew. She tried to shake it off, slamming the stick around, banking left and right, but the bot had gotten a firm grip and wouldn’t let go. It began cutting into the wing with its blades.
It was breaking up her wing.
Rick turned back when he saw the bot attach itself to Karen’s plane. Karen was in trouble. He flew toward her, asking himself what he could possibly do to free her plane from the bot’s grip. His plane wasn’t armed. No guns, no fire control buttons, nothing. But wait—Rourke had armed the planes with machetes. The
re was one in here somewhere. He groped around and felt a handle, and swooped toward Karen’s plane, holding out the machete like a cavalry rider. “Ayah!” he shouted and hacked through the bot’s neck as he passed, severing it. The blades and neck spun off, squirming, and the beheaded bot released Karen’s plane and zigzagged away, seemingly disoriented. Karen regained control of her plane.
The bots were hovering—dozens of them.
Rick circled through them. A bot darted in and clamped its arms on Rick’s plane as he passed, and the bot began jerking his plane around. Then the bot began snipping through the wing with its scissor-swords while Rick struck at it with the machete, but he couldn’t reach the bot. Rick’s plane went into a spiral. Another bot grabbed his plane, and stopped its fall. The bots held Rick’s plane in midair, hovering, as if they were quarreling over their prize while they cut it up.
Rick bailed out, taking his machete with him. As he fell, he flipped over on his back and saw Karen’s plane above him. Bots clung to it; she was spinning out of control. One bot shredded Karen’s propellers while another tore into the side of the plane. At that instant, Rick landed on the floor on his back, unhurt, still holding his machete.
He stood up. The generator room seemed enormous. He had no idea where the micro-control panel was; he couldn’t see the white circle. The plastic floor, glowing with light from below, was strewn with golf-ball-size grains of dirt. Looking up and around, he tried to see where Karen’s plane had gone. He couldn’t see her. The floor was a mess.
He heard a sound like “Oof!” Karen King landed on both feet, like a cat, about a hundred yards away. She had bailed out, too. She was holding her machete and staring up at the bots. A dozen of them were bobbing high overhead, holding the planes and pieces of the planes, and chopping everything up. Debris from the planes rained down. For the moment the bots seemed distracted by the planes.
“It’s this way!” Karen called, pointing with her machete.
Now he could see the white ring. He was surprised by how far away it was. They both started a desperate sprint toward the ring, jumping over debris, running an obstacle course through grit. Rick tripped while leaping over a human hair, and he sprawled.
He picked himself up. He had lost sight of Karen. “Karen?” he shouted.
Overhead, the bots had finished cutting up the planes and were now flying this way and that, hovering, swooping, fanning throughout the room, as if in seek mode. Rick wondered if the bots would be able to see them as they ran. Dozens more bots dropped from the walls and ceiling, until at least a hundred bots were flying back and forth, hunting for the intruders. Were they communicating with one another? It would be only a matter of time before the bots found them.
Chapter 50
Tensor Core
1 November, 5:10 a.m.
I t’s not a bad way to die,” Drake was saying. “You hardly feel a thing.” He worked the controller.
Eric lay propped up with his back against the wall of the Omicron lab, by the door to the generator room, dizzy from the beating Drake had given him. Drake held the gun at his face, shining the light into his eyes. Eric could feel a bot cutting through his forehead. Blood had begun to drizzle down his face, getting in his eyes. He could see specks hovering in front of his eyes, their props whining like mosquitoes. Apparently Drake could direct them with the controller, because they all suddenly flew toward his face. He felt them landing on his cheeks, his neck, exploring his eyelids. A bot crawled into his shirt; he could feel it, and heard its engine buzzing.
“You see how they ignore me?” Drake worked the controller. “It’s because I have the controller.” Drake thumbed a joystick, and a bot crawled up Eric’s cheek and stopped by the corner of his eye. “I can make them crawl into any orifice in your body.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Research, Eric.”
Eric felt a slight sting near the corner of his eye. The bot had planted its scissors in his skin and was making a hole. It tucked its head into the hole, and began wiggling in, snipping through skin cells with the blades. A droplet of blood beaded up on his cheek.
The police cars closed off the access road to the industrial park and set up a security perimeter around the Nanigen building. The vans moved into position, and the hostage rescue squad deployed. The flashers on the police cars played across the metal building.
Dan Watanabe waited behind one of the cars, watching the building’s door. He had made the handoff to the SWAT unit, so he didn’t have operational authority now, but he wanted the op commander, Kevin Hope, to pay attention to him. “Where’s Dorothy?” he said.
“She’s on her way,” Hope answered.
“What about the FD decon unit?”
In answer to his question, a yellow van came roaring in and ground to a halt. A squad of fire department people deployed from it, pulling on Tyvek protective suits. As soon as they’d put on protective gear, they began setting up a decontamination center, with a tent, washing equipment, and a processing line for victims.
“What’s in the building, a virus?” Commander Hope said to Watanabe. He had gotten the call to deploy only twenty minutes earlier, and he didn’t yet know what the investigation involved.
“Not a virus. Bots,” Watanabe said.
“Say again—?”
“Tiny robots. They bite.”
Commander Hope gave him a weird look. “Don’t tell me this is gonna be a shooter with robots, Dan.”
“Not a chance. You can’t hit ’em.”
“Any hostages in there?”
“Not that we know. Can’t assume anything,” Watanabe answered. Somebody handed him a tactical vest, and he put it on. Somebody else brought him a handheld multichannel communicator. He took the device and keyed it on, and said to Commander Hope, “You want me to make the call?”
Hope gave a wry grin. “You talked us into this deployment, Dan. You talk us out of it.”
Watanabe shrugged and referred to a slip of paper upon which he’d written a phone number. He called it.
In the Omicron lab, Eric could feel a half-dozen bots entering his skin, pricking him as they burrowed, while Drake held the gun and light pointed into his eyes. Eric debated which way to go: to force Drake to shoot him in the head, or to wait a few minutes for the bots to open his arteries.
Just then a faint buzzing sounded in Drake’s jacket. He took out his phone and looked at the caller ID. BLOCKED, it told him. He decided to answer it. He took a deep breath to get his heart rate down. “Yes?”
“Vincent Drake?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Dan Watanabe, sir, Honolulu Police. Sir, is there anybody in the building with you?”
“Oh, my goodness, Dan. I’m by myself. Working late. What’s this all about?”
“Sir, we have the building surrounded. Would you please walk out slowly with your hands placed on your head? You will be safe, I promise.”
“Good grief, Dan! There’s obviously been a mistake. I’ll be happy to comply—just give me a moment.”
“Sir, we need you to come out immediately—”
“Certainly. Absolutely.” Drake switched off his phone and advanced toward Eric, his face contorted in fury. “You went to the police.”
Eric shook his head. He was losing a lot of blood. His shirt was darkening in streams, he could feel warmth running down his neck.
Drake leaned over Eric and hauled him to his feet. “You’re just like your fucking brother—sticking your nose into things.” They were eye to eye. “Oops,” Drake said, touching Eric on the cheek. “I think there’s one in your eye.”
Get the controller.
Eric had his left hand on the door handle, behind him, and he pressed it. The door opened, and Eric fell backward into the generator room, with Drake landing on top of him. He reached out with his right hand and felt his fingers close over the controller, and he ripped it out of Drake’s hand as he fell backward.
Drake swore and staggered, sprawli
ng past Eric into the generator room, and he fired the gun. Eric felt the impact in his leg, the bullet passing through his thigh, but oddly he didn’t feel any pain. He was in shock. But he had the controller now, and that was the main thing. He knew what to do with it. He slammed the controller against the floor again and again, smashing it, feeling it break into pieces beneath his hand.
Now nobody could control the bots.
And then, to his surprise, he saw the gun lying on the floor right in front of him, while Drake was getting to his feet. Drake had dropped the gun. Drake and Eric lunged for it simultaneously.
On the floor, Karen and Rick saw the door open, and two gargantuan human figures fell into the room. The gun went off, and the shockwave of the blast rolled over the micro-humans. Moments later the two men fell with a floor-shaking impact, which hurled Rick and Karen into the air. A droplet of blood splashed, exploding into secondary droplets. They picked themselves up and continued to run toward the white circle.
One of the men rolled over on his back. He held the bot controller, and smashed it repeatedly on the floor. It broke apart, and pieces of electronic boards flew past Karen, knocking her to the ground. She saw the gun skidding across the floor toward her, and felt sure it would crush her. She dove away while the two men collided over the gun. A moment later Eric was holding the gun, pointing it at Drake, who was lying on his back.
Eric lay on the floor near Drake. He rolled over and propped himself up, blood running from his leg, and pointed the gun at Drake’s face. “You move…I’ll shoot you in the head.”
Drake said, “Wait, Eric. We can get out. Alive. Together.”
“Not going to happen. You killed my kid brother.” Eric steadied his finger on the trigger.
“But Eric…you’re completely wrong…I did everything to save him.”
“You’re insane.”
Rick and Karen reached the circle. They could hear a deep thrumming sound—the pulse of robot propellers around them. They had lost track of what the big humans were doing. In the center of the circle there was a hatch like a manhole cover, with a sunken handle. Karen and Rick reached the hatch at the same time.
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