Micro

Chapter 19

Nanigen Headquarters 29 October, 2:30 p.m.

Vin Drake crossed the parking lot, moving toward Telius and Johnstone, who waited between two cars at the edge of the lot. Better to talk outdoors. Anything you said could be heard, recorded, preserved. He had to keep track of the details. Details are evidence. Evidence could escape. Evidence could fly out into the world; you could lose control of it.

“We’ve had a breach of security,” Drake said to the two men. Telius stood with his shaved head bent, listening, a short, wiry man with fierce, restless eyes that darted over the ground as if he was searching for some small object he’d lost. Johnstone, much taller than Telius, wore sunglasses and stood at ease, with his hands behind his back. A tattoo on Johnstone’s scalp shone through a fade haircut. Drake went on. “We’re dealing with industrial spies. They could destroy Nanigen. We believe these spies are working for a foreign government. As you may know, there are certain classified activities at Nanigen that unfriendly governments would very much like to know about.”

“We don’t know anything about that,” Telius said.

“That’s correct,” Drake said. “You don’t.”

Somebody drove by and parked their car, and Drake paused. He and the two men turned away, and walked along the edge of the parking lot, saying nothing for a few moments, waiting for the person to go inside the building. The trade wind rattled the seed pods of acacia shrubs growing in the empty lot nearby.

Drake turned and gazed at the metal building. “That building doesn’t look like much. But in the near future, the business inside it will be worth at least a hundred billion dollars. A hundred billion dollars.” He paused to let the number sink in. “Incredible wealth will be created for the lucky people who own ground-floor shares in Nanigen.” He squinted into the sunlight, then looked sideways at the two men. “You know what ground-floor shares are, right? The owners of ground-floor shares can sell their shares for a spectacular profit when the company goes public in an IPO.” Did they see where he was going with this? Their faces revealed precisely nothing. No thought, no emotion, nothing to be read or inferred.

Professional faces, he thought.

Drake continued. “I want you to go into the micro-world on a rescue mission to find the spies. I’ll give you a full movement kit. A hexapod and weapons, anything you need. The spies were dropped…are believed to have been lost in an area about twenty-meters radius around Supply Station Echo. So I want you to begin your search at Echo. It’s possible the missing persons are following the micro-trails, looking for supply stations in order to take refuge in them. The supply stations have all been removed—all except for Station Kilo. We couldn’t find Station Kilo. You are to follow the networks of trails, moving from the site of one station to the next, searching for the spies. And…ah…” How to put this clearly, so there would be no mistake? “You will find the missing people. But here’s the point: the rescue will fail. Understand? Despite your best efforts, the spies will not be found. I don’t want to know anything about how you do it. The spies have to disappear, but I don’t want to hear any rumors about what happened to them, either. If no trace of them is found, there will be a…reward.” Drake put his hands in his pockets, and felt the wind kissing his face. “Failure,” he added softly, “is the only option.”

He turned around and looked at the two men. He saw nothing there. The men’s faces held no expression. A small bird whipped past and landed in the acacia bushes.

“If the rescue effort fails, the reward for each of you will be one share of Nanigen ground-floor stock. When Nanigen goes public, a single share will be worth at least a million dollars. Get it?”

The men just looked at him with eyes as flat as the parking lot.

But they got it. He was sure of that.

“You’re venture capitalists now,” Drake said, slapping Telius on the shoulder as he left.

The rain ended as quickly as it had begun. A steamy golden glow filled the forest as the clouds broke, and the water quickly receded as the rivulets emptied, and the rain ran off into the stream that drained the Manoa Valley. They had lost a lot of their gear, scattered by the water. And Jenny had disappeared. They collected themselves together in a group, and when everyone was accounted for, they spread out looking for their gear and, most of all, for Jenny. They went downhill, following the water flow, using the two headset radios to keep in touch.

“Jenny! Are you there? Jenny!” they shouted, but there was no answer and no sign of her.

“I found the harpoon,” Rick said. It hadn’t traveled far. His darts had been in a plastic case inside his duffel bag, and the bag turned up wedged against a stone. Even the chinaberry was found, underneath the edge of a leaf, glowing yellow.

Karen King moved along with a sense of dread as they searched for Jenny Linn. She was shaking; she had seen the look on Jen’s face when she went down that last time.

The worst horrors are the human ones. What had Jenny seen?

Then Karen spotted something pale, soft, draped under a twig. A human hand. She had found Jenny. Her body was pinned under the twig, crushed and oddly twisted, and speckled with mud, with the forsaken look of the drowned, her broken arm flung akimbo and contorted like a wet rag. Jen’s eyes were open, vacant. Her body was covered with spaghetti-like threads, which crisscrossed and draped her like a veil. They were threads of fungus, already beginning to grow.

Karen knelt by the body and pulled a thread from Jen’s face, and closed Jen’s eyes, and wept.

The others gathered around. Rick found himself weeping, and it embarrassed him. He tried to control his tears, but it didn’t work. Peter put his arm around Rick, and Rick shook him off.

“I tried so hard,” Danny said, and cried. “I just couldn’t save her.”

Erika enfolded Danny in her arms. “You are a brave man, Danny. I never realized it until now.”

There was a creaking sound. The veil of fungus threads that covered Jen’s body seemed to twitch.

“What was that?” Erika said…and her eyes widened with horror as she saw a thread of fungus bend and wave, like a crooked finger, and the tip of the thread touched Jen’s skin. It went in through the skin, making a scratchy sound, piercing the body, probing for nutrients. The fungus veil had already begun to consume the body. Erika cringed, and stood up.

Peter spoke. “We need to bury her—quickly.”

Using the harpoon and the machetes, they hacked apart the soil. It was soft and rich, and alive with small creatures moving and squirming. The soil was almost a living organism in its own right. The only nonliving thing was seemingly Jenny. They lowered her into the grave they’d dug, and crossed her arms over her chest, arranging the broken arm. They tried to clear the fungus off her, but the threads had tightened, clamping themselves to the body, penetrating it everywhere.

Erika Moll wept uncontrollably. Peter cut a part of a petal from a fallen hibiscus flower lying on the ground, and he laid the piece of petal over Jenny like a white shroud. It covered the activity of the fungus beneath it.

Then Erika suggested that they say a prayer. She wasn’t a religious person, at least she didn’t think she was, but she had been raised a Catholic, and had been taught by nuns in a nursery school in Munich. The nuns had taught her how to say the twenty-third Psalm in German. “Der Herr ist mein Hirte,” Erika began, haltingly, trying to remember it.

Peter picked it up in English: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…

“Magical incantations,” Danny commented. “The words have no reference to so-called ‘reality,’ but possibly they help us in a psychological way. I suspect praying stimulates primitive parts of the brain. Actually, it even makes me feel a little better.”

Then they piled soil on top of Jenny. The body would not last long, and would soon be consumed by the fungus and nematode worms; it would be digested by bacteria, and devoured by the soil mites that crawled everywhere. Soon there would be no trace of Jenny Linn left in the soil, her remains swallowed and recycled, her body returned to the bodies of other creatures. In the micro-world, no sooner had life ended than it became life again.

Afterward, Peter gathered the group, and spoke to them, trying to rally their spirits. “Jenny wouldn’t want us to give up. She went on bravely. We can honor her by looking to our own survival now.”

They assembled the backpack and the two duffel bags. They couldn’t linger at Jenny’s grave; they had to keep moving toward the parking lot.

The lab notebook containing the map hadn’t been lost; Karen had tucked it into the backpack. They took it out; it was crumbling, mushy, soaked, but they could still read the map. It showed a trail or path running from Station Echo to Station Delta, and finally to Alpha by the parking lot. They had a lot of travel ahead of them. “We don’t know if any of the stations remain. But we can still follow the trail.”

“If we can find it,” Karen said.

They couldn’t find any sort of trail. The rain had altered the landscape, shifting debris around, cutting new channels in the soil. Peter took out the compass and, studying the hand-drawn map, he sighted a line toward the parking lot. They began walking, with Peter leading the way, cutting a path with a machete. Karen stepped along behind him, carrying the harpoon across her shoulder. Rick Hutter brought up the rear, silent and wary, holding a machete ready for action.

Danny kept stopping to rest.

“Don’t your feet hurt?” Peter asked him.

“What do you think?” Danny muttered.

“We could make you some shoes.”

“It’s hopeless,” Danny said.

“But we must try,” Erika said to him.

“I tried so hard to save Jenny.”

Peter cut up strips of dead grass, while Erika wrapped Danny’s feet in the grass, making rough moccasins out of the grass strips. Amar remembered the duct tape he’d found at Station Echo. He dug it out of a duffel bag and began winding strips of tape around Danny’s grass moccasins to hold them on his feet. Danny stood up and took a few steps in his duct-tape-grass mocs. They were surprisingly tough, and remarkably comfortable.

A thudding noise drifted high overhead, sounding strangely like a helicopter. A mosquito appeared. It soared downward out of the trees and dodged around them. Despite its large size, the mosquito held itself effortlessly suspended in the air on its beating wings, and it seemed to be studying them. It had a black-and-white striped body and striped legs. A long proboscis hung from its head. They could see twin razor-sharp cutting blades at the tip of the proboscis; the blades were caked with dried blood. The mosquito’s bloodsucking tools looked sharp enough to stab straight through the body of a micro-human.

Danny Minot lost his nerve. “Get away!” he shouted at the mosquito, and ran, waving his arms and shuffling in his moccasins.

Perhaps attracted to Danny’s motion, or perhaps to his scent, the mosquito chased after him, hovering just above his neck. Without warning, it dove down, almost spearing him between the shoulders with its proboscis. Danny flung himself to the ground and rolled over on his back, kicking his legs in the air. “Get off me!”

The mosquito buzzed over him, and lunged at him again—until Karen King leaped on top of Danny, straddling him and waving her machete, trying to scare off the mosquito.

It didn’t scare easily.

“Form up,” Peter shouted. “Make a defensive circle.”

The humans formed themselves into a defensive ring around Danny, who lay on the ground in terror. They faced outward with their machetes held ready, watching the mosquito while it circled around them. The mosquito evidently smelled their blood, and may also have sensed the carbon dioxide they gave off as they breathed. It darted in and out, seeming to stare at them with goggly eyes, its proboscis dangling.

“Uh-oh,” Erika Moll said.

“What?”

“It’s a female Aedes albopictus.”

“Meaning?” Danny said, lurching to his knees.

“An Asian tiger mosquito. The females are aggressive, and they carry diseases.”

Rick Hutter grabbed Karen King by the arm. “Gimme that harpoon—”

“Hey!” she said, whirling on him, but he’d snatched the harpoon from her. Rick advanced toward the mosquito, raising the harpoon. “Be patient, Rick,” Peter said. “Wait for an opening.”

The mosquito darted in toward Rick. He saw his chance. He whirled the harpoon, using it like a stick, and whacked the mosquito across the head with it. “Go pick on someone bigger than you!” Rick yelled.

The mosquito thundered off, wobbling in the air.

Karen King began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Rick ripped at her.

“The mosquitoes ran you back to your hotel in Costa Rica. You’ve come a long way, Rick.”

“That’s not funny,” he said to her.

“Give me that back,” she said, grabbing the harpoon from him. They got into a tug-of-war over the harpoon. Karen won. She yanked the harpoon away from Rick, who swore at her.

Karen couldn’t take that. She lost it. She stepped toward Rick, pointing the harpoon at his face. “Don’t use a word like that with me.”

“Whoa, now.” Rick backed away, holding up his hands.

Karen flung the harpoon at Rick’s feet. “Take it.”

Peter stepped between them. “We’re a team, hey? You two have to stop fighting with each other.”

Karen smoldered. “I wasn’t fighting with Rick. If I was, he’d be holding his softies and puking his guts out.”

Peter Jansen stayed out front, picking the route, cutting tirelessly at obstacles with the machete, and pausing every now and then to sharpen the blade with the diamond sharpener. The blade could cut anything as long as its edge was maintained. He tried to keep everybody’s spirits up. “Do you know what Robert Louis Stevenson said about travel?” he said, calling back to the others. “He said, ‘It is better to journey hopefully than to arrive.’ ”

“Fuck hope, I’ll settle for arrival,” Danny Minot remarked.

As he marched along at the back of the line, Rick Hutter glanced at the others, studying them. He considered Karen King. He really couldn’t stand her. She was full of herself, arrogant, aggressive, thinking she was such an expert in spiders and arachnids and hand-to-hand combat. She was good-looking, but beauty wasn’t everything. Even so, Rick felt somewhat better that Karen was with the group. She was a fighter, you could say that much for her. Right now she seemed icy, cold, alert, on edge, weighing every move. As if she was in a fight for her life…well, of course she was. He despised her and yet…he was glad to have Karen around.

Next Rick studied Erika Moll. She walked along pale, frightened. Erika was holding herself together, on the edge of some kind of emotional crack-up. The fungus devouring Jen’s body…this had gotten to Erika, Rick thought. If Erika didn’t pull herself together, she might be doomed. But who could say just which of the humans possessed the strength and cunning to get out alive from this kingdom of tiny horrors?

As for Amar Singh, Rick thought he seemed resigned to his fate, as if he’d already decided he was going to die.

Danny Minot trudged along in his duct-tape slippers. That guy’s tougher than he looks, Rick thought, watching Danny. He could be a survivor.

Rick looked at Peter Jansen. How did Peter do it? He seemed so calm, almost gentle, at peace with himself in some deep way Rick couldn’t fathom. Peter Jansen had become a true leader, and it fit him well. It was as if Peter had come into his own in the micro-world.

There was Rick Hutter himself.

Rick was not a reflective person. He rarely thought about himself. But he did now. Something strange was happening to him, and he couldn’t quite understand it. He felt okay. Why, he wondered, did he feel okay? I should feel terrible. Jenny is dead. Kinsky got ripped by ants. Who’s next? But this was the expedition Rick Hutter had always dreamed of, yet never thought possible. A journey into the hidden heart of nature, into a world of unseen wonders.

In all likelihood, he would die on this quest. Nature was not gentle or nice. There was no such thing as mercy in the natural world. You don’t get any points for trying. You either survive or you don’t. Maybe none of us will make it. He wondered if he would vanish here, in a small valley on the outskirts of Honolulu, swallowed up in a labyrinth of threats almost beyond imagining.

Got to keep going, Rick thought. Be smart. Be clever. Get through the eye of the needle.

After what seemed like miles of walking, Rick noticed a strange, bittersweet smell drifting in the air. What was it? He looked up and saw tiny white flowers overhead, scattered like stars through a tree that had snaky limbs and smooth, silver-gray bark. The odor of the flowers resembled semen, but with a nasty edge of something harmful.

Yes.

Nux vomica.

Rick called to the others to stop. “Wait a minute, guys. I’ve found something.”

He knelt by a gnarled root, which poked from the ground. “It’s a strychnine tree,” he said to the group. With his machete he began hacking at the root, until he’d revealed a strip of inner bark, which he chopped out, working carefully with the machete. “This bark,” he explained, “contains brucine. It’s a drug that induces paralysis. I would have preferred the seeds, because they are incredibly toxic, but the bark will do.”

Handling the bark carefully, trying not to get any sap on his hands, he tied a rope to the bark and started dragging it along behind him. “We can’t put this in my pack. It would poison everything,” Rick explained.

“That bark is dangerous,” Karen said.

“You wait, Karen, it’s going to get us food. And I’m hungry.”

Erika stood aside and sniffed the air, watching, keeping alert for the warning smell of ants. The air felt slightly heavy as it went in and out of her lungs. Everywhere she looked, every crack and cranny in the soil, every blade of grass, every little ground-hugging plant, teemed with small living things—insects, mites, nematode worms. And she could actually see masses of soil bacteria, tiny dots in clumps. Everything was alive. Everything was feeding on something else. It reminded her…she had begun to feel really hungry.

They were ravenously hungry but had nothing to eat. They drank water from a hole in a tree root, and moved on, Rick dragging the piece of bark. “We have strychnine and we have the chinaberry,” he said. “But it’s not enough. We need at least one more ingredient.” He kept looking around, scanning the vegetation for plants he recognized, for anything toxic. And eventually he found what he was looking for. He discovered it by scent. He recognized a sharp odor coming from a mass of vegetation.

“Oleander,” Rick said, and he went toward a mass of shrubbery with long, pointed, shiny leaves. “The sap is the wicked stuff.” Crashing through leaf litter, he arrived at the trunk of the shrub. He drew his machete, sharpened it, and hacked into the trunk. A translucent, milky sap surged forth, while Rick backed away quickly. “That liquid will kill you fast if it touches your skin. It’s got a lethal mix of cardenolides in it. It’ll stop your heart, bam. You don’t want to breathe the fumes, either. The fumes could give you a heart attack.” While the sap oozed down the bark, Rick rummaged in his duffel, and he put on the lab apron and the rubber gloves and goggles he’d found at Station Echo.

Amar grinned. “Rick, you look like a mad scientist.”

“Madness is my style,” Rick said. He opened one of the plastic lab jars and advanced toward the running sap. Holding his breath, he let the jar fill up while the sap dribbled over his gloves. He screwed on the cap, then rinsed the outside of the jar in a drop of dew. He filled a second jar the same way, and held up both jars with a triumphant smile. “Now what we need to do is cook everything into a paste. For that, we need a fire.”

But the forest was soaking wet after the rain. Nothing would burn.

“No problem,” Rick said. “All we need is Aleurites moluccana.”

“What the hell is that, Rick?” Karen King said.

“It’s a candlenut tree,” he answered. “The Hawaiians call them kukui trees. There are kukui trees growing all over this forest.” He stopped, and looked up, and turned around, staring upward. “Yeah! That’s a kukui, right there.” He pointed at a tree with large, silvery leaves. The tree stood out like a pale thunderhead, ten meters away. It was hung with greenish balls of fruit.

They pressed on toward the candlenut tree. When they reached its base, they saw pulpy fruits scattered on the ground around the tree. “Let me have a machete,” Rick said. “Now watch.”

He began hacking into a fruit, chopping off the pulp using the machete. Soon he reached a hard core, a nut. “That’s a kukui nut,” he said. “The nut is loaded with oil. The ancient Hawaiians filled stone lamps with kukui nut oil. It’s a great source of light. They also put the nuts on a stick and used it as a torch. The nut burns.”

The kukui nut, covered with a glossy hard shell, proved difficult to crack. However, they took turns chopping away at it with a machete. The weapon had a heavy blade and an exceedingly sharp edge, and it cut slowly into the nut’s shell. A few minutes of chopping revealed the oily nutmeat. They began hacking out chunks of the nut, and they made a pile of the nutmeat on the ground. They added husks of dry grass, which Peter peeled out of the center of dead grass stems, which had stayed dry despite the rain. Rick set his metal pot on top of the nut pieces and put on his chemical equipment. He adjusted his goggles and loaded the pot with strips of strychnine-root bark, chunks of the chinaberry, the two jugs of oleander sap, and water collected from the top of a leaf.

Rick lit the fire with the windproof lighter.

The tinder began to burn, and the kukui-nut fire blazed up, yellow and bright. It was a small fire by the standards of the normal world, not much bigger than a candle flame, yet to them it seemed like a bonfire. The fire heated their faces and made them blink and shy away, and it brought the water in the pot to a boil within seconds. Two minutes of boiling time was enough to reduce the contents of the pot to a tarry goo.

“Fresh curare,” Rick said. “Let’s hope, anyway.”

Working carefully with a splinter of wood, wearing rubber gloves, and holding his breath, Rick packed the curare into a plastic lab bottle. He could dip his darts in the stuff to arm them with poison. He hoped the goop was poisonous, but he wouldn’t know for certain until he used it in a hunting situation. He screwed the top on the bottle, then lifted the goggles from his eyes and parked them on his forehead.

Peter stared at Rick’s plastic bottle and the brown-colored gunk in it. “So you think that’ll take down big game? Something as big as a grasshopper?” he asked.

Rick offered him a wry smile. “It’s not finished.”

“How so?”

“We need one more ingredient.”

“Which is—?”

“Cyanide.”

“What?” Peter said, while the others gathered around, listening.

“You heard me—cyanide,” Rick said. “And I know where to get it.”

“Where?” Peter wondered.

In answer, Rick turned his head around slowly. “I can smell it. Hydrogen cyanide. Also known as prussic acid. That whiff of bitter almonds…can you smell it? Cyanide—a universal poison, it’ll kill practically anything, and fast. Cyanide—a favorite of Cold War spies. Get this—there’s an animal around here that makes cyanide. It’s probably hiding under a leaf. Probably asleep.”

The others stared, while Rick set out through the super-jungle, stopping occasionally to sniff the air, following his nose. He started turning over leaves, dragging them with both hands. The smell grew stronger; it tickled their noses now, once Rick had pointed it out to them. He stuck his head under a leaf. “Got it!” he whispered.

Under the leaf, a brownish, oily, jointed carapace gleamed, along with many curved legs. “That’s a millipede,” Rick said. “I’m just an ignorant botanist, but I know these guys make cyanide.”

Erika moaned. “Don’t! It’s a very big animal. It’s dangerous.”

Rick chuckled. “A millipede?” He turned to Karen King. “Hey—Karen! What’s the behavior of this animal when it’s threatened?”

Karen King smiled. “Millipedes? They’re scaredy cats.”

“Wait! Are you sure it’s not a centipede?” Danny quavered, remembering that Peter had said a centipede can deliver a nasty sting.

“Nah, this baby isn’t any centipede,” Karen said, kneeling and looking under the leaf. “Centipedes are predators. A millipede doesn’t eat meat, it eats rotten leaves,” she explained. “It’s a peaceful animal. Doesn’t even have a sting.”

“What I thought.” Rick hauled the leaf off the millipede, revealing it. The millipede lay curled up and seemingly asleep. It was a cylindrical animal with segmented armor and at least a hundred legs. In relation to the micro-humans, the millipede appeared about fifteen feet long, akin to the biggest boa constrictors. It breathed gently, making whistling noises through holes in its carapace; a millipede’s version of snoring.

Rick drew his machete. “Wake up!” he cried, and slapped the millipede with the flat of the blade.

The animal thrashed suddenly. The humans backed away, and the odor grew stronger. The millipede curled its body into a tight spiral, a defensive posture. Holding his nose, Rick darted forward and whacked the animal again. He didn’t want to hurt the millipede, he wanted to frighten it. The trick worked. A pungent smell of almonds mixed with a nasty, bitter stench filled the air, and blobs of an oily liquid oozed from pores in the millipede’s armor. Rick opened a clean plastic jar and quickly put on his gloves, apron, and goggles.

The millipede wasn’t going anywhere. It remained curled up, apparently frightened.

Wearing his gear, Rick advanced and scooped some of the liquid into the jar, until he’d collected about a cup of the stuff. “It’s an oil. It’s full of cyanide,” he explained. He dumped the oil into the jar that held his curare goo, and stirred the mess with a stick. “I scared the cyanide out of the poor bastard,” he said, holding up the jar of curare, which reeked of lethal chemicals. “And now,” he added, “it’s time to start hunting.”