Micro

Chapter 38

Tantalus Base 31 October, 2:30 p.m.

The wind blew across the ridgeline of Tantalus Crater. Karen King and Danny Minot walked along slowly, carrying Rick in a stretcher made from a space blanket. Karen wore the backpack, and the blowgun was slung across her back. They moved step by step, making their way painstakingly toward the wall of bamboo trees and the Great Boulder. Rick’s breathing came hoarsely from the stretcher.

“Put him down,” Karen said to Danny. She examined Rick. His face was pale and drawn, and his lips were turning blue. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. What especially worried her was his breathing: ragged, irregular, insufficient. The wasp venom might have affected the breathing center in his brain stem. If his breathing shut down, he was finished.

She opened his shirt and found a bruise on his chest. What was that? The bends coming on? Or just the result of being thrown around by the wasp? They had to get out of this open area. They were morsels for birds, food for another wasp.

“How are you doing, Rick?”

He moved his head slowly from side to side.

“Not so good? Just don’t fall asleep. Okay? Please.”

Karen studied the bamboo forest ahead. “We just need to get under those plants, Rick. It’s not far, now.” She hoped, prayed, she’d find what she needed there. In the leaves.

She heard a sigh. “How are you doing, Rick?”

Silence. Rick had lost consciousness. She shook him. “Rick! Wake up! It’s me, Karen!” His eyes opened and closed. He was becoming unresponsive.

All right. Maybe she could make him angry. She had always been good at that. She slapped him in the face. “Hey Rick!”

His eyes flew open. That had worked.

“I nearly got myself killed dragging your sorry ass out of that hellhole. Don’t you dare die on me now.”

“We might have to leave him,” Danny said softly.

She turned on Danny in fury. “Do not say that again.”

Finally they got beneath the plants, and put Rick down in the cool shade. Karen gave him a droplet of water to drink, holding the water in her cupped hands and pouring it into his mouth. She looked up at the leaves. She wasn’t sure of the species of plant. That didn’t matter, what mattered was whether any spiders lived on the leaves.

There was a particular spider she wanted to find.

She knelt by Rick, and talked to him. “Rick,” she said. “You need a swift kick in the pants.”

He smiled faintly.

“What are you going to do?” Danny asked her.

She didn’t answer. She rooted around in the pack and removed a clean, empty plastic lab bottle. Then she started pacing around, looking up into the leaves. She grabbed the blowgun and the dart kit, and she ran into the deeper parts of the vegetation.

“Where are you going?” Danny shouted.

“You watch him, Danny. If you let anything happen to Rick, I’ll—”

“Karen!”

She ran off. She had spotted a flash of color under a leaf. Day-Glo green, red, yellow. It might be what she was looking for.

It was.

She wanted to find a spider that wasn’t very poisonous. All spiders used venom to kill their prey, generally insects, but spider venom varied a lot in its toxicity to humans and mammals generally. Black-widow venom was among the worst. The bite of a black widow spider could make a horse drop dead. Yet other spiders seemed less toxic to humans.

She stood under the spider now, looking up at it. It was small, with legs as transparent as glass, and a body splashed with colorful markings. The markings formed a pattern that looked like a human face, grinning with laughter—it looked like the face of a smiling clown.

It was a happy-face spider. Theridion grallator. One of the most common spiders in Hawaii, much studied by scientists. Known to have essentially no effect when it bites a human.

The happy-face spider rested in a little cobweb, a tangle of threads strung randomly under the leaf.

These spiders were very shy. They tended to flee at the first sign of trouble. “Don’t run away on me,” she whispered.

She began to climb the stem of the plant. She shinnied up it a distance, and then, getting herself seated on a leaf, she took out a dart from the kit, and opened her canteen. The wasp venom had filled it almost to the neck. She dipped a dart in the venom, loaded the gun, and took aim.

The spider backed away, staring at her. It appeared to be frightened. Yes, it was scared: it scrunched itself down inside its little web.

She knew the spider could hear her, and was forming a sonic image of her with the “ears” in its legs. It had probably never encountered a human and had no idea what Karen was.

She blew.

The dart lodged in the patterned back of the spider.

The spider backed up, its legs flipping around, and it tried to run, but the venom acted swiftly, and within moments the spider stopped moving. Karen heard air whistling faintly in and out of the spider’s lungs, and she saw its back rising and falling. Good. It was still breathing and its heart was beating. That was important. The animal needed to have blood pressure in order to pump out venom.

She climbed up to the web. She took a strand and shook it. “Yah!”

The spider didn’t move. Karen swung herself into the web and crawled across the threads, right up to the spider, reached out to one of the legs and flicked at a sensory hair. Nothing happened.

Lying on the web, she unscrewed the top of the empty lab jar and positioned it under the fangs. Using two fingers, she lifted a fang from its base, unfolding the fang from its sheath as she stared into the spider’s eyes.

How to get the venom flowing? The venom glands were located in the spider’s forehead, behind its eyes. She made a fist and rapped on the spider’s forehead. The spider stirred, and a few drops of liquid dribbled out of the fangs. She screwed the cap on. She hoped the spider would wake up no worse for its experience. She cut the web below her and fell to the ground.

She bent over Rick. “This spider venom—” she held up the jar so that he could see it—“might give your nerves a jolt. It has excitotoxins in it. You understand?”

He looked at her. Blinked once. Yes, I understand.

“Excitotoxins. They’ll make your nerves fire. But there’s a real danger. I don’t know anything about this venom. I can’t control the dose. This stuff could kill cells in your body. It could start digesting you.” In her mind’s eye, she saw the sniper’s body going through that digestive meltdown.

She took his hand in hers, and squeezed it. “I’m afraid, Rick.”

He squeezed her hand back.

She said, “You want it?”

He blinked. Yes.

She removed a blow dart from the case. A clean one, no curare on it. She dipped the tip of the dart into the spider venom. The tip came up wet, barely covered with a minuscule amount of the liquid. She held it in front of him where he could see it. “Are you sure?”

Yes.

She laid the point across his forearm. She caught the point in his skin, over a vein, and pushed it in. Not too deep. Then she gripped his hand, and leaned over him. “Rick…”

For a few moments, nothing happened. She was beginning to wonder if she had given him enough—but then he gasped. His breathing sped up. She touched his neck, and felt his pulse racing. The venom was hitting him hard.

There was an explosive sound: Rick gasped, and dragged air into his lungs. Then he went into a seizure. His gaze flew around wildly and he strained upward against her, eyes staring, body trembling. She lay across him, holding his arms down, but afraid to press on him too hard. He gasped, taking huge lungfuls, hyperventilating as his spine arched. She threw her weight on him, trying to pin him down, fearful that he would hurt himself.

He groaned. And then his hand whipped out and fastened around her neck. He gripped her throat, his fingers squeezing, closing her throat off.

He was trying to strangle her. He hated her that much.

But then his fingers relaxed, his grip softened. He released her throat. He ran his hand over her shoulder. The touch became a caress. His hand worked up the side of her neck and under her ear, passed lightly over her skin, and his fingers opened and ran through her hair. Now she was kissing him and the great thing was that he was kissing her back.

She broke off, finally. “Does it hurt, Rick?”

“Hurts…like…hell…” he croaked. “I…could…get to like it.”

She helped him sit up. He was dizzy, and almost toppled over, but she held him, keeping her arms around him, talking softly to him, telling him everything would be all right. “You saved my life, Rick. You saved my life.”

Danny sat there watching Rick and Karen make up to each other, feeling extremely uncomfortable. In his opinion, this kind of stuff did not advance the effort to get back to Nanigen. He needed a doctor as soon as possible. He glanced down at his arm and almost threw up. The grubs seemed fatter than ever.

In a little while, Rick was able to stand. They began to walk. They went into the bamboo forest, where stalks of bamboo soared like redwoods. They made their way through it, and broke out onto a stunning view. They were facing the Great Boulder on the lip of Tantalus Crater, and looking down into the crater.

The crater extended beneath them, a basin stuffed with rain forest, rimmed by bare ground and patches of stunted, wind-wracked trees. All around the crater, peaks of the Ko‘olau Pali fingered into boiling clouds, and the wind pummeled the scene. At the foot of the Great Boulder lay Tantalus Base.

The base would have been virtually unnoticeable to a person of normal size. There was an aircraft runway about three feet long. At least Karen felt pretty sure it was a runway: she could see a dashed line and taxi markings. Beside the runway stood a cluster of miniature buildings made of concrete. The largest building seemed to be an aircraft hangar. The other buildings were smaller, and looked like bomb shelters. The buildings were embedded partway in the soil and were lightly covered with dead leaves and plant debris, so they blended into the micro-terrain.

Karen stopped. “Wow, Rick!” she said. “We made it!”

He turned his head and smiled, and looked at her. She rubbed his hands, his arms, to get the circulation going.

“Your hands feel warmer. You’re getting better I think.”

They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, because they didn’t know what to expect from the inhabitants of the base, Nanigen employees who might well be following orders from Vin Drake. They decided to watch the base for a time, looking for activity. They lay down under a mamaki plant. The Great Boulder loomed above like a mountain.

There was no activity on the runway. The place seemed deserted.

The runway was strewn with stones, dried mud, plant debris. A cone of dirt had risen next to it, an ant nest. An ant trail extended across the runway and headed downslope toward the bottom of the crater.

“It doesn’t look good,” Danny Minot whispered.

Karen’s heart fell. If no micro-humans lived here, then there wouldn’t be any shuttle to Nanigen, and no chance of help. This place hadn’t been tended to; it had been overrun by ants.

But there might be airplanes.

They walked slowly down the hillside and went into the hangar. There were tie-downs for aircraft, but no planes. While Rick sat and rested with Danny, Karen explored the base. She found a room that she guessed had once held mechanical parts and supplies, but it had been emptied out, leaving bent metal pins and bolts protruding from the walls and floor. She went into another room. Empty. The next room contained living quarters. It had been flooded by rain and was half-filled with mud.

There was no sign of human life anywhere. Tantalus Base had been abandoned. There was no sign of a road to Honolulu, either. No shuttle truck. No airplanes. Only the trade wind endlessly worrying the ground and whistling through the empty halls of Tantalus.

They emerged from the complex and sat by the runway looking down into the crater. They could see the city, too, through the gap in the crater’s wall, and beyond the city the Pacific Ocean ran off into blue. Nanigen was miles away from this crater, and there was no way home.

Danny Minot lay in the rubble, holding his arm. He began to cry. His sobs echoed off the hangar and drifted into a sky shot with gray rolling clouds and wind.

Karen watched an ant hurry across the runway, carrying a seed. She turned her gaze up to the Great Boulder, and then past it to the horizon line and the clouds. Something moved against the sky near the boulder, and she suddenly realized it was the figure of a man.