“Northwest. Toward Supply Station Echo.”
“Got it.” Tapping a keyboard, she oriented the transmitter.
“Now ping.”
The young woman entered a command and stared at the screen. “Nothing,” she said.
“Start pinging in a search pattern around that location.”
She worked the keys for a while. Still nothing happened.
“Now point the transmitter up the mountainside. Do sequential pings.”
After she worked some more, she brightened. “Got it. It pinged me back.”
“Where is the equipment?”
“Gosh. It’s on the cliffs. Halfway up Tantalus.” She called up an image of the terrain on her screen and pointed to a spot on the mountainside, far above the bottom of Manoa Valley. “How did the equipment get there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Makele answered.
Somebody had survived. They were now driving the hexapod straight up the mountain. Interesting.
Makele returned to Drake’s office. “Just for the hell of it, I pinged the hexapod. I got a ping back. Guess what. The hexapod is halfway up to Tantalus Crater.”
Drake’s eyes narrowed. What the hell. Somebody had survived the predator that had eaten Telius and Johnstone. “Can we find that hexapod, retrieve it?”
“Those cliffs are really steep. I don’t think we could reach the hexapod right now. Plus we can’t get a tight fix on it. We can get its approximate location on the cliffs. Only good to a hundred meters.”
A tiny smile formed at the corner of Drake’s mouth and grew wider, until it had become a grin. “I wonder…maybe they’re heading for Tantalus Base.”
“Yeah, could be.”
Drake broke into laughter. “Tantalus Base! Ha! I would like to see their faces when they see Tantalus. They’re in for an ugly surprise—if they get there.” He became serious. “You go up to the crater and make sure they get a surprise. I’ll keep track of their progress.”
Rick was drivingwhen there was a beep, and the hexapod’s communication panel lit up. A display flared: ANSWERBACK23094-451.
“What the hell was that?” Rick said.
Danny slumped in the passenger seat next to him. “Turn that thing off.”
“I can’t. It’s just doing this shit on its own.” Rick began to wonder: was somebody trying to talk to them? Maybe it was Drake. But then the panel went quiet again. He had a feeling, though, that Drake might know where they were. If so, what would they do if Drake found them? The gas rifle would have no effect on a human of normal size. Karen walked alongside.
“The radio’s acting funny,” he said to Karen.
She shrugged.
The terrain trended upward at a steep angle. They came to a low cliff, and the walker climbed it. At the top of the cliff they made their way around a bunch of sedge grass, and came to a rock. “Stop!” Rick said. He advanced toward the rock; he had seen something under it. Something black and shiny. “It’s a beetle hiding under there,” he said. “Erika, what kind?”
Erika focused her attention on the beetle. It was a Metromenus, the same kind they’d seen when they’d first arrived in the micro-world.
“Be careful,” Erika said. “They have a nasty spray.”
“Exactly,” Rick said.
“What’s up?” Karen asked him.
“It’s a chemical war out there. We need chemical weapons, too.”
“We don’t need it,” Karen said to him. “We’ve already got the benzo spray.” She lifted the spray bottle out of her pocket—the self-defense compound that she had made in the lab, which she’d hoped to show to Vin Drake. But when she squeezed the pump, nothing came out. It had been used up spraying the centipede.
Rick was determined to reload the bottle with spray. He crept ahead with the gas rifle, took aim, and fired at the beetle. The needle penetrated the beetle’s shell. There was a muffled explosion, and the beetle shuddered and sprayed chemicals around in its death throes, until the air reeked of acids.
Erika assured them there would be a lot of spray left in the beetle. Rick put on his mad scientist outfit: the rubber apron, the goggles, and the gloves, and he went to work.
First, he flipped the dead beetle over on its back. Next, with his machete, he began tapping around on the jointed segments of the abdomen, looking for an opening.
Erika gave him advice. “Cut between segment six and segment seven. Lift the sclerite plates off—gently.”
Rick sliced into the beetle, working the blade along a joint between segments, then pried with his machete, lifting up the armored plates. They came off with a tearing sound, revealing fat. He started cutting into the fat carefully.
“You’re looking for a pair of chemical sacs at the base of the abdomen,” Erika explained, kneeling next to Rick. “Don’t burst a sac or you’ll be sorry.”
Rick lifted out a football-shaped organ, then another one. These were the chemical sacs. They were closed—muscles clenched them shut. Following Erika’s instructions, he cut the muscle, and the sac began to leak liquid. It stank.
“That’s benzo,” Erika said. “It’s mixed with caprylic acid, a detergent. That helps the chemical stick to surfaces, which enhances its power as a weapon. Don’t get it on your skin.”
It pleased Karen to see Erika interested in something, for a change. Erika had gotten so quiet, so depressed. At least this would distract her.
Rick collected the liquid in a bottle and screwed on the top. Then he handed it to Karen. “There you go. For your protection.”
Karen wondered at Rick. He certainly had energy. She should have thought of collecting more chemicals herself. Rick seemed quite skilled at this business of getting along in the micro-world; he even seemed to enjoy it. It didn’t make her like Rick Hutter any better, but, somewhat to her surprise, she found herself glad to have him along on the journey, anyway. “Thanks,” she said to him, stuffing the bottle back in her pocket.
“Don’t mention it.” Rick took off his outfit and stored it away, and they resumed their upward climb.
The land grew impossibly steep. It went almost vertical, and they arrived at the base of an endless cliff. The cliff ran upward as far as the eye could see, an expanse of bubbly volcanic rock draped with lichens and hanging moss, and dotted with clumps of uluhe ferns. There seemed to be no way around it.
“Damn the cliff, full speed ahead,” Rick said.
They made sure the equipment was tied down, and then Rick jumped in back with Erika, and tied himself in. Karen drove. The truck’s feet stuck to the rock beautifully, and the truck moved upward. They made excellent speed, gaining altitude fast.
But the cliff just seemed to go on forever.
The day was coming to a close, and they didn’t know how far they had come, or how far they had to go. The battery readout showed that the power had been draining steadily; the vehicle had only about a third of its battery power left.
“I think we should bivouac on the cliff,” Rick finally said. “It might actually be safer than anywhere else.”
They found a ledge and parked the truck on it. It was a lovely spot, and it looked out over the valley. They ate the last of the katydid steaks.
Danny spread out some things in the back of the truck, where he intended to spend the night. His arm was clearly swollen. It felt bloated and lifeless. It didn’t seem to belong to him anymore, but had become a dead weight.
“Oooh,” he whispered. He clutched his arm and made a face.
“What’s the matter now?” Rick Hutter said to Danny.
“My arm just popped.”
“Popped?
“Nothing. Just a noise in my arm.”
“Let’s have a look,” Rick said, bending over Danny.
“No.”
“Come on. Roll up your sleeve.”
“It’s fine, all right?”
Danny’s left arm had remained paralyzed, and it hung in the sling. The arm had packed the shirt sleeve, giving the sleeve a bulging
, taut appearance. The shirt was filthy, too. “You might want to roll up your sleeve to let your skin get some air,” Rick said. “That arm could get infected.”
“Go away. You’re not my mother.” Danny stuffed a rag under his neck as a pillow, and curled up in the truck bed.
Darkness fell over the Pali. The night sounds rose up again, the cryptic noises of insects.
Rick settled down in the passenger seat. “You sleep, Karen. I’ll stay up.”
“That’s all right. Why don’t you sleep, Rick? I’ll do the first watch.”
They both ended up wide awake, keeping watch in smoldering silence as Erika and Danny slept. The bats came out, and squeals and echoes sounded near and far, crisscrossing the sky, as the bats plucked moths and other flying insects from the air.
Danny stirred. “The bats are keeping me awake,” he complained. But soon they heard him snoring.
The moon climbed high over the Manoa Valley, turning the waterfalls into silver threads falling into emptiness. Around one of the waterfalls an arc of light glimmered. Rick stared at it: what was that light around the waterfall? The light seemed to shimmer, change.
Karen had noticed it, too. She pointed the harpoon at it. “You know what that is, right?”
“No idea.”
“It’s a moonbow, Rick.” She touched his arm. “Look! It’s a double moonbow.”
He hadn’t even known moonbows existed. Here they were, travelers in a dangerous Eden. It would be just his luck to be stuck in Eden with Karen King, of all people. He found himself glancing at her. Well, she was beautiful, especially in the moonlight. Nothing seemed to keep Karen down for long, nothing seemed to defeat her. Karen King made a good partner for an expedition, even if they didn’t get along personally. She did not lack courage, that was for sure. It was just too bad her personality was so unruly, so contrary. He drifted off, and woke later to find that Karen had fallen asleep against him, her head nestled on his shoulder, breathing gently.
Chapter 31
Beretania Street, Honolulu
30 October, 4:30 p.m.
I t’s strange.” Dorothy Girt, senior forensic scientist with the Honolulu Police Department, kept her eyes focused on the eyepieces of a Zeiss binocular microscope. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
She stood up, and Dan Watanabe sat down at the microscope. They were in an open area subdivided by lab benches. The benches were stocked with testing equipment, imaging equipment, microscopes, computers. He adjusted the eyepieces, and focused.
At first, he saw…a small object with a metallic look.
“How big is it?” he asked.
“One millimeter.”
It was somewhat larger than a poppy seed. But it was a machine. Or looked like one.
“What the hell… ?” he said.
“My feeling, too.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Fong’s office,” Dorothy Girt said. “The evidence team dusted the office for prints. They lifted this object on a print tape, from a window near the lock.”
Watanabe changed the focus, and moved his gaze up and down the object. It was damaged; it appeared to be crushed, and was covered with a dark, tarlike material. The object vaguely resembled a vacuum cleaner, except that it had something that looked like a fan on it. Fan blades inside a housing. A little bit like a jet engine. There was a long, flexible neck, a gooseneck, and at the end of the neck two sharp, flat metal pieces stuck out.
“It must have fallen out of somebody’s computer,” he said.
Dorothy Girt was standing next to him, leaning on the lab bench. She straightened up. “Does a computer have knives in it?” she said quietly.
He looked again. What he had thought were two flat pieces of metal coming off the gooseneck now looked more like blades. Crossed daggers, gleaming, at the end of a flexible arm. “Do you think… ?” he began.
“I want to know what you think, Dan.”
Watanabe turned the zoom knob. He went down into the view, deeper and deeper, magnifying the daggers. They became precision instruments, forged and polished. Each blade reminded him of a tanto, a Japanese dagger used by samurai. There was some kind of dark, dirty material smeared on the blades. And then he saw the cells. Dried red blood cells. The cells were mixed with fibrin.
“There’s blood on it,” he said.
“I had noticed.”
“How long are those blades?”
“Less than half a millimeter,” Girt answered.
“Then it doesn’t work,” he said. “The victims bled to death from cuts up to two centimeters deep. The cuts opened their jugulars. These blades are far too small to cut somebody’s throat. It’s like trying to kill a whale with a pen knife. Can’t do it.”
They both were silent for a moment.
“Except at birthdays,” Watanabe added.
“Excuse me, Dan… ?”
“You’re wrapping a birthday present. You cut the paper with… ?”
“Scissors.”
“Those blades are scissors,” he said. “They could have snipped large wounds in the victims.”
He began scanning the device, searching for identifying marks—a serial number, a printed word, a corporate logo. He found nothing of the sort. Whoever had built the device had not put on identifying marks, or had carefully erased them. In other words, whoever had made the device didn’t want it to be traced.
He said, “Did the autopsies turn up any more of these devices? In the wounds, in the blood?”
“No,” Girt said. “But the examiners probably wouldn’t have noticed them.”
“What’s the status of the bodies?”
“Fong was cremated. Rodriguez got buried. John Doe is in the fridge.”
“He needs a second look.”
“Will do.”
Watanabe stood back from the microscope and put his hands in his pockets, and began to walk up and down the lab. He frowned. “Why was the device found on a window? If it came out of a body, how did it get to the window? How did it get into the body in the first place?” He returned to the microscope, and studied the little device’s fan-like housing. Whoa—it was a propeller. “My gosh. This thing could fly, Dorothy.”
“That’s speculative,” Dorothy Girt said dryly.
“It could swim in blood.”
“Possibly.”
“Can you recover DNA from the blood that’s stuck on the device?”
A prim smile. “I can get DNA from a flea’s sneeze, Dan.”
“I’d like to see if the blood on the device matches any of the victims’ blood.”
“That would be interesting,” Dorothy Girt said, her cynical eyes brightening a little.
“They make small robots,” he murmured.
“What, Dan?”
He stood up. “Nice work, Dorothy.”
Dorothy Girt gave Lieutenant Watanabe a faint smile, hardly a smile at all. What did the lieutenant think she did with her time in the forensic lab, other than nice work? With exquisite care, she picked up the tiny object with a pair of tweezers and lowered it into a plastic vial smaller than her pinky, and carried the vial into the evidence locker area. After all, she could be handling a murder weapon.
Watanabe went out thinking. Nanigen. Small robots. Now there seemed to be a link between the Willy Fong mess and Nanigen.
Time to have a chat with the CEO.
Vin Drake had dropped by the communications center. He had kicked the young woman operator out of the room and locked the door, and had taken over the pinger himself. Now he gazed into a screen that displayed a three-dimensional terrain map of the northwest cliffs of Manoa Valley, from the valley’s bottom to the structure of Tantalus Crater, two thousand feet above. Near the top of Tantalus Cliffs, at the base of the crater, he saw a circle with crosshairs over it.
This showed the approximate location of the stolen hexapod. The survivors, he could see, had made it nearly to the lower slopes of Tantalus Crater. At the rate they were climbing, they would
reach Tantalus Base maybe by tomorrow morning, unless a predator got them. He couldn’t control the predators. What he could control was Tantalus Base.
Sitting in the communications room, Drake got out his encrypted corporate phone and called Don Makele. “The hexapod is getting close.”
Chapter 32
Tantalus Cliffs
31 October, 9:45 a.m.
T he truck climbed up over a lip of rock and emerged into a pocket of mossy ground. A small pond gleamed, and a miniature waterfall dribbled into the pond. As the drops landed in the water, they made the water shimmer with prismatic flashes.
Rick, Karen, and Erika climbed down from the truck. They stood by the pool, gazing into it. It was crystal-clear, with a mirror-like surface.
“We’re so dirty,” Erika said.
“I could use a swim,” Karen said.
They saw their reflections in the water; they were tired-looking and sweaty, and their clothing had become ragged and grimy. Karen knelt and touched the water. Her finger dented the water but didn’t break it. She was touching the meniscus, the rubbery surface of the water. She pushed against the meniscus, putting her weight into it, and her hand broke through the surface. “It’s so tempting,” she said.
“Don’t do it. You’ll be killed,” Danny said from the truck.
“There’s nothing dangerous here, Danny,” Karen said.
Rick wasn’t so sure. He took the harpoon and probed it around in the pool, jabbing it into the bottom and stirring the water. If any nasty creature lived in the pool, he hoped the disturbance would lure it out. The water flickered with single-celled organisms drifting and corkscrewing, but none of these little creatures seemed dangerous.
The pool was small and shallow enough that they could see all of it. Nothing seemed threatening.
“I’m going for a swim,” Erika said.
“I’m not,” Danny said.
Rick and Karen glanced at each other.
Erika went off behind a clump of moss, and returned naked. “Is there a problem?” she said to the others, while Danny stared. “We’re all biologists here.” She stepped onto the surface of the pool. The water dimpled under her toes, but it supported her weight, didn’t break. She pressed down harder, and suddenly she broke through and went in up to her neck. She waded over to the waterfall and stood under it. The droplets tumbled down, bursting on her head and making her gasp. “It’s magnificent. Come in.”