Having digested its prey, the spider placed its mouth firmly on the food ball and began sucking fluids out of the mess, while its stomach made a steady pumping noise. The eyes gleamed with a faraway expression, Karen thought, or maybe a look of satisfaction.
“Do we need to worry?” Rick asked.
“Nah, she’s busy. But we should get out of here before she starts hunting again.”
They began calling for Erika and Danny. Erika had hidden herself under a hibiscus flower, and Danny had tucked himself under a tree root.
There were four survivors now. Rick, Karen, Erika, and Danny. They gathered themselves, put on the packs, and hurried off into the ferns, abandoning the bodies of Peter and Amar, while a sense of terrible emptiness swept over them. Amar Singh, a gentle person who loved plants, was gone. Peter Jansen, gone. It had not seemed possible that Peter could die.
The loss of Peter had devastated them. “He was so steady,” Rick said. “I really thought he could bring us through.”
“Peter was our hope,” Erika said. She began to cry. “I believed he would save us, somehow.”
“This is what I predicted,” Danny said. He sat down and adjusted his arm sling, then, with his good hand, unstuck some duct tape on his grass shoe and stuck it back in place, trying to tighten his shoe. Then he put his head down between his knees. His muffled voice rose up: “The inevitable has happened…The catastrophe…We are completely, totally, utterly…dead.”
“Actually we’re still alive,” Rick said.
“Not for long,” Danny muttered.
Karen said, “We all had faith in Peter. He was so…calm. He never lost his courage.” She wiped sweat from her face, and hefted her pack, adjusting it, and kept walking. Karen could hardly admit it to herself, but for the first time she had lost her nerve entirely. She was petrified. She couldn’t see how they would ever get back to Nanigen. “Peter was the only person who could lead us. Now we don’t have a leader.”
“Yeah, and it’s clear that Drake knows we’re alive and is trying to kill us—sending hired killers to take us out,” Rick said. “We got rid of two goons, but who knows who else is out there with orders to kill us.”
“Two of them?” Karen asked him.
Rick answered her with a grim smile. “Look straight ahead.” The hexapod stood crookedly on top of a mound of moss. Rick leaped into the vehicle. A moment later a body was flung out, spinning through the air, and landed with a crash at Karen’s feet. She saw the man’s armor, the dart embedded in the man’s chin, the eyes bulging…the foamy tongue, thrust out…
She drew in her breath. There had been two snipers. Rick had said nothing about it until now. “You killed—this man…”
“Get in,” Rick said, busying himself with the controls. “We’re driving to Tantalus. And we’ve got a gun.
Chapter 28
Manoa Valley 30 October, 1:45 p.m.
The pickup truck wound up the single-lane road leading to the Manoa Valley. It was a beat-up Toyota, spray-painted several different colors, with a surfboard rack and fat tires that seemed affected by elephantiasis. It arrived at the gate in front of the tunnel and stopped, and a man got out. He walked up to the gate and read the sign: PRIVATE. NO ADMITTANCE.
“Shit.” Eric Jansen rattled the gate. He examined the lock. It was a keypad. He tried some corporate codes, but nothing worked. Fucking Vin had changed the code on the lock, for sure, Eric thought.
He backed around and drove down the road a short distance, to a turnout, where he rammed the truck into the undergrowth. If anybody from Nanigen noticed it, they’d assume he was a pot farmer gone off to tend his crop on the mountain. Not a vice president of the company, looking for his brother.
He put on a knapsack and hurried down the road, slipped underneath the gate, jogged down the tunnel. Beyond the tunnel, in the valley, he went off the road and into the forest, out of sight, where he opened the knapsack and took out a laptop computer and complicated-looking box of electronic circuits. It had a homemade look: soldered boards, an antenna. He put on a pair of headphones and began to listen, scanning around the seventy-gigahertz band. He heard nothing. He switched frequency, checking the band of Nanigen’s private wireless communication network, and heard a garbled hiss. He always heard it. Intracompany chatter. The problem was to decipher it.
He waited three hours, listening, until the battery began to run down. He packed up the gear and hurried down the road, through the tunnel and back to the truck, and drove off. Nobody had noticed him; nobody had been around, anyway. He would be back tomorrow to listen again. Just in case Peter and the others were somewhere in the valley. He didn’t know where they were, only that they had gone missing.
Chapter 29
Honolulu 30 October, 1:00 p.m.
In his windowless office, Dan Watanabe called an officer in the Missing Persons Detail. “Let me know if any new information about those students comes up.”
“Funny you should ask. You want to call Nanci Harfield. She’s out in District 8 right now.”
Sergeant Nanci Harfield was in the Traffic Division; District 8 covered the southwest side of Oahu.
“I’m at Kaena,” she said to him. “We’ve got a luxury car upside down in the tidal inlet below the 1929 Bridge. The vehicle is registered to one Alyson F. Bender slash Nanigen MicroTechnologies. There’s a body trapped under the vehicle. Female, by appearance. No other bodies visible.”
“I’d like to have a look,” Watanabe said.
He got in his brown unmarked Ford Crown Victoria and drove it at an easy ninety along the freeway around Pearl Harbor. He continued into Waianae, a town that lay on the southwest coast of Oahu. This was the leeward side of the island, dry and sunny, where the beaches were lapped by gentle waves and the smallest keiki s could play and paddle. It was the rougher side of the island in terms of law enforcement, though. Lots of car break-ins and petty thefts, but little or no violence, anyway. Back in the 1800s, in the days of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the leeward side of Oahu had been a violent place, a haven for bandits, who robbed and murdered people who ventured there. Now it was mostly property crimes.
At Kaena Point, a car rested upside down in shallow water. The police department’s heaviest winch truck was parked on the road. A cable ran from the truck down through hau tangle to the car; it had been a nasty job getting the cable down through the brush. The car tipped as the cable yanked on it, and it flipped over, landing right side up. A dark blue Bentley convertible. Its soft top torn and crushed. Sand and water streamed out of the car, and a dead woman sat in the driver’s seat, creepily upright.
Watanabe made his way down the slope. He tore his slacks, and slipped and skidded, regretting that he wore street shoes.
By the time he reached the car, the cable had winched it out on the rocks. The dead woman wore a dark business suit. Her hair swirled around her face and clogged her mouth. Her eyes were gone: reef fish had eaten them.
He leaned into the car, past the corpse, and looked around. He saw articles of clothing plastered all over the wet compartment, clinging to the seats and caught in the twisted metal of the convertible’s top. Board shorts. A belt made of snakeskin, chewed by fish. A woman’s underpants, lime-green. Another pair of board shorts, with a tag still on them, just purchased. A Hilo Hattie shirt. A pair of bootcut jeans with a hole in the right knee.
“Was the lady going to do laundry?” he remarked to an officer. The clothing was the sort that younger people wear. He noticed a plastic jug wedged under the dashboard and took it out and studied the label. “Ethanol. Hmm.” He found a wallet in the backseat. It held a Massachusetts driver’s license belonging to one Jenny H. Linn. One of the missing students. But there were no bodies in the car other than the woman’s—which might or might not be Alyson Bender. That would have to wait for the medical examiner.
He climbed back up to the road. There, Nanci Harfield and another officer had photographed and measured the tire tracks in the grit leading over the shoulder of t
he road.
Watanabe looked at Harfield. “So what do you think?”
“Looks like the car stopped here before it went over. Then it rolled straight off.” Harfield had searched carefully around the tire tracks for any shoeprints in the gravel. The gravel was scuffed but there were no clear shoeprints. She went on, “It looks like the driver stopped right here. Then the car goes off the edge, no use of the brakes. If she’d braked, you’d see the skidmarks in the dirt. No skidmarks means no attempt to stop. She could have sat here for a while making up her mind, then touched the gas and went over.”
“Suicide?” Watanabe asked her.
“That’s a possibility. It’s consistent with these marks.”
The evidence squad took photographs and video. They bagged the body and loaded it into an ambulance, which drove off silently, lights flashing. The totaled Bentley followed, riding on the deck of the police tow truck, still dripping seawater.
Watanabe ended up back at his desk at headquarters, looking at the scratched metal wall he would stare at sometimes to clarify his thoughts. He couldn’t get over the feeling that somebody had put the clothing in the car. Especially that wallet. People who are planning to go off don’t leave their wallets behind. If Jenny Linn had gone off voluntarily, she would have taken her wallet with her. What if she hadn’t gone voluntarily? Maybe kidnapped? Had this been a boating accident? A lost boat would explain so many people missing at the same time.
He called the Property Crimes Unit and asked if there were any reports of missing boats. Not lately. He stared at the wall some more. It might be time to eat an emergency Spam sushi.
But then his phone rang. It was an officer in the Missing Persons Unit. “I’ve got another one for you.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“A Joanna Kinsky called to report her husband didn’t come home from work last night. He’s an engineer at Nanigen.”
“Another Nanigen missing? You’ve got to be kidding—”
“Ms. Kinsky says she called the company. Nobody’s seen her husband since yesterday afternoon.”
The Nanigen security chief hadn’t reported this one. There were just too many Nanigen people dropping out of sight in the quiet little Honolulu town.
Another phone call. It was Dorothy Girt, a forensic scientist in the Scientific Investigation Section. “Dan—would you come down and take a look at something? It’s the Fong case. I’ve found something.”
Shit. The Willy Fong Mess. Not what he needed right now.
Don Makele walked into Vin Drake’s office. He had a disturbed look on his face. “Telius and Johnstone are dead.”
Drake gritted his teeth. “What happened?”
“I lost radio contact with them. They had located the survivors. They had begun the, uh, rescue operation,” Makele said. He was sweating again. “Right in the middle of this, they were attacked by something. I heard screaming and then—Telius—well…he got eaten.”
“Eaten?”
“I heard it. Some kind of predator. His radio went dead. I called for a long time. There were no more transmissions.”
“What do you think?”
“I think everybody’s dead.”
“Why?”
“My men were the best. Something got through their weapons and armor.”
“So the students—”
Makele shook his head. “Not a chance.”
Drake leaned back. “So there was an accident with a predator.”
Makele sucked on his lips. “When I was in Afghanistan, I noticed something about accidents.”
“What’s that?” Drake asked.
“Accidents happen more often to assholes.”
Drake chuckled. “That’s true.”
“The rescue—it failed, sir.”
Drake realized that Don Makele understood exactly what was meant by rescue. Nevertheless, Drake had his doubts. “How can you be sure, Don, that the rescue…ah…failed?”
“There’s no survivors. I’m sure of it.”
“Show me the bodies.”
“But there aren’t—”
“I will not believe the students are dead until I see evidence of their deaths.” Drake leaned back. “As long as there’s hope, we will spare no effort to save them. No effort. Am I clear?”
Makele left Drake’s office without saying a word. There was nothing to say.
As for Vin Drake, he felt reasonably good about what had happened to Telius and Johnstone. It meant he didn’t have to pay them bonuses in valuable stock. Nevertheless, he could not assume that all the students were dead. They had shown some survival skills, surprising tenacity, and so he would continue to try to flush them out, just in case some of them were still alive.
Chapter 30
The Pali 30 October, 4:00 p.m.
This thing would kick ass in Boston traffic,” Karen King remarked. She was driving the hexapod up a steep slope, guiding it across a jumble of rocks and grass stems. It lurched.
“Please! Watch my arm.” Danny was sitting in the passenger seat, gripping his left arm, which hung like a sausage in the sling. It had become badly swollen, filling the sleeve of his shirt. The hexapod moved along steadily, its legs whining, climbing through a vast, vertical world glowing with a million shades of green. In the cargo compartment, in back, Erika sat huddled, tied in with rope. Rick walked along beside the vehicle, holding the gas rifle and looking around, alert for predators, a bandolier of needle-bullets slung over his shoulder.
The terrain had gotten very steep. The soil had given way to crumbly lava pebbles and grit with protruding masses of lava rock, everything festooned with grasses and small ferns. Koa and guava trees twisted this way and that, mixed with thin, straight shafts of loulu palms. Many of the trees were draped with vines. Branches rattled in a steady wind that blew across the mountain face, and the breeze occasionally battered the truck and the humans. A wall of mist drifted through the vegetation—a cloud—followed by brilliant sunshine.
The deaths of Peter Jansen and Amar Singh weighed on the students. Their group had been winnowed from eight people stranded in the micro-world down to four survivors. Their number had been cut in half in just two days. Fifty percent fatalities. That was a horrible statistic, thought Rick Hutter. It was worse than the life expectancy of soldiers fighting on the beaches of Normandy. Rick could see more fatalities coming—unless by some miracle they were rescued. But they couldn’t reveal themselves to anyone at Nanigen now; for Vin Drake had mobilized his resources to try to find them and make them disappear. “Drake’s still looking for us,” Rick remarked. “I’m sure of it.”
“That’s enough,” Karen said to him. There was no point talking about Vin Drake, since all that did was to make them feel more helpless. “Peter wouldn’t give up,” Karen said to Rick, more calmly, as she worked the controls, guiding the truck straight up the face of a large rock. Rick jumped on board for the ride.
They had gotten into mountain vegetation. Occasional gaps in the canopy revealed a striking vista. Cliffs and blades of the Pali plunged all around, and a waterfall roared nearby. Somewhere above them, a curving stretch of ridge formed the lip of Tantalus Crater. As the machine marched along, its feet stirred up living things. Startled springtails bounced away, flipping through the air; worms wriggled and seethed; mites scuttled here and there, sometimes climbing up the legs of the hexapod. They had to keep brushing mites off the vehicle, or the creatures would crawl around inside it and all over the gear, dropping small blobs of mite dung and getting everything dirty. And in the air all around, insects by the thousands flew, humming past, spiraling around, glittering in the sunlight.
“I can’t stand all this life,” Danny complained. He hunched forward over his bad arm, looking utterly miserable.
“If the batteries last,” Rick was saying, “we might make Tantalus by nightfall.”
“What then?” Karen said, working the controls.
“We do reconnaissance. Watch the base, then decide our next move.”
> “What if the base isn’t there? Torn out, just like the stations?”
“Do you have to be such a pessimist?”
“I’m just trying to stay realistic, Rick.”
“Fine, Karen. Tell me your plan.”
Karen didn’t have a plan, so she didn’t answer Rick. Just get to Tantalus and hope something turns up. It wasn’t a plan, it was a hail—Mary pass. As they moved along, Karen considered their situation. She was profoundly frightened, she had to admit it, but her fear also made her feel very alive. She wondered how much longer she had to live. Maybe a day, maybe hours. Better make the best of it, just in case your life turns out to be as short as an insect’s, she told herself.
She looked over at Rick Hutter. How did the guy do it? There he was, tramping along with the gun slung over his shoulder, swaggering a little, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world. For a moment, she envied him. Even though she disliked him.
She heard a moan. It was Erika, sitting in the back of the truck with her arms wrapped around her knees.
“Are you all right, Erika?” Karen asked her.
“All right.”
“Are you…scared?”
“Of course I am scared.”
“Try not to be too scared. It’ll be okay,” Karen said.
Erika didn’t reply. She didn’t seem able to handle the pressure of this journey. Karen felt sorry for Erika, and worried about her.
Don Makele paid a visit to the communications center at Nanigen, a small office equipped with encrypted radio gear and corporate wireless networking equipment. He spoke to a young woman who was monitoring all the corporate channels. “I want to try to get a ping from a piece of equipment we’ve lost in Manoa Valley,” he said to the young woman. He gave her the serial number of the piece.
“What kind of equipment is it?” she asked him.
“Experimental.” He wasn’t going to tell her it was an advanced hexapod from the Omicron Project.
Typing commands by remote, the young woman switched on a high-power seventy-two-gigahertz transmitter on the roof of the greenhouse in the Waipaka Arboretum. It was a line-of-sight transmitter. “Where should I point it?”
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