Micro

Chapter 47

Tantalus Drive 1 November, 1:40 a.m.

W hen Eric Jansen swung into the parking area by the Diamond Head Lighthouse, the place had been deserted. There was no sign of Vin Drake’s car. He had arrived too late. Or maybe too early? Maybe Drake hadn’t shown up yet. He had parked in the corner of the area and debated what to do next. Wait for Drake? But Drake might have already been here. Should he go to the police? But that might cost the survivors their lives, because Drake knew where they were, and he might be heading for Tantalus to kill them.

Eric knew he had to go to Tantalus.

And so he drove up the Tantalus Drive, the truck roaring and misfiring, past expensive homes on hairpin turns. The road came to a gate with a rutted dirt track beyond it; the gate wasn’t locked. He started driving up the track. It wound up the steep mountainside through guava forests, and came out at the lip of the crater, and it followed the lip down through dips and gullies, washed out in several places. This was a four-wheel-drive track only, and Eric was glad he had a fat-tire truck. Eventually he reached a turnaround; still no sign of Drake’s truck. The place was deserted.

He did not have a flashlight; that was a problem. But he got out of the truck, leaving the headlights shining toward the Great Boulder, and stood there, listening. There was a reddish glow through the trees, and he began crashing through the undergrowth toward it. When he reached the Great Boulder he saw what had happened. Embers were dying down, the soil smoking, and the ground reeked of gasoline.

Drake had done the deed. He had killed everybody.

Regretting that he hadn’t brought a flashlight, Eric got down on his knees and found the entrance to the rat warren: Rourke’s hideout. “Anybody there?” he called.

It was useless. He waited for a while, though, poking his finger into the soil, wondering if there were survivors. It was too dark to see much, and they would be very small; he worried he might crush somebody by accident.

But there weren’t any survivors, anybody could see that.

He stumbled through the woods back to the truck.

Rick and Karen, parked on the branch, saw the headlights of another vehicle bumping slowly around the rim of the crater. It was a truck.

Rick watched for a while, then said to Karen, “I’m going to investigate.”

“Don’t.”

He ignored her. He untied his plane and started it, and taxied off. She heard it whining upward, toward the crater rim, toward the Great Boulder.

“Damn you, Rick!” Karen yelled. She wasn’t going to be left alone, so she started her plane and followed him.

Rick saw a man get out of the truck. He circled through the branches, listening for bats, but he didn’t hear any sonar, and he flew closer to the man. The man walked to the Great Boulder and got down on his knees in the darkness. His face wasn’t visible. The man stood up from the boulder and walked away, crashing through the underbrush, a black silhouette. Rick followed him, dodging among branches and trunks.

The man arrived at the parked vehicle. It was a strange-looking truck with fat tires and a weird paint job. The man got in, and the dome light came on, revealing his face.

Rick had seen the man before. Where? He circled past the window as the truck started with a roar.

“Karen!” he called on the radio. “Who is this guy?”

She swooped past Rick and made a steep turn by the truck. She was getting the hang of flying; it was pretty easy. “It’s Peter’s brother!”

“I thought he was supposed to be dead. Is he in with Drake?”

“How would I know?” Karen answered testily.

The truck started and began rumbling off, moving along the dirt track.

Karen ran her engine up to EMERGENCY MAXIMUM. Running at full power, their planes could barely keep up with the truck, even though it bounced slowly along the dirt road. The moment the truck arrived at a paved road it would speed up and they would never catch it, and it would be gone. They had to get Eric’s attention soon.

He was driving with the windows rolled up. Karen flew alongside the window, close to the man’s face, and waggled her wings. No reaction. Then the truck sped up, leaving them behind in swirling dust.

“Get in the slipstream,” Rick said. There would be a zone of dead air behind the truck’s cab, he thought, so he dove for it, watching the back of the man’s head in the glass. His plane flipped over and tumbled: the air behind the cab had gone turbulent and chaotic, and he nearly crashed on the truck’s bed.

The truck came to a bad spot in the road, where rain had washed a gully. The man slowed, and rolled down his window and leaned out to get a better look.

Karen flew through the window into the cab. She circled once, and the man drew his head back in. She made a slow pass in front of his eyes, and rolled the plane, its lights winking.

He saw that. He jammed on the brakes. “Hey—!” His eyes followed her as she banked and turned and flew low over the dashboard. He held out his hand, palm upward, and she landed on his hand. She climbed out and stood on his hand, while he looked at her.

Rick flew in and landed on the dashboard.

“Which-ones-are-you?” he said, his voice rumbling. He held Karen delicately, and he tried not to breathe too much as he spoke. He didn’t want to blow her off his hand.

Karen held up her radio headset and pointed to it. She remembered that Jarel Kinsky had said the radios could be used to communicate with full-size people. Maybe it would be easier to talk by radio.

“You-bet.” He put her down on the dashboard, with her plane, and opened the glove box and took out a headset, and plugged it into a mess of electronic equipment sitting on the seat. “Go-to-seventy-one-point-two-five-gigahertz,” he said.

Rick and Karen put on their headsets and tuned their aircraft radios.

The man opened his mouth and spoke words that rolled out: “Can-you-understand-me-now?” An instant later the same words sounded on their headsets in Eric’s normal speaking voice: “Can you understand me now? This is a squirt radio. It collects my voice and speeds it up and squirts it at you. It also slows down your voices so I can understand you.”

They explained to Eric what had happened. “We need to get into the generator as soon as possible,” Karen said.

“First…about my brother.”

They told him. As Karen described Peter’s death, Eric’s palms hit the steering wheel, throwing the micro-humans and the planes into the air. They came down amid choking dust particles, and waited. They gave him time. When he opened his eyes, his face had become set and calm. “I’m taking you into Nanigen. Then I’m going to find Vincent Drake.”