Micro

Chapter 48

Chinatown, Honolulu 1 November, 2:30 a.m.

Dan Watanabe woke to the buzzing of his cell phone. He reached for it in the dark and knocked it off the bedside table, and heard it hitting the floor. He groped for the light, fearing bad family news: his seven-year-old daughter, living with his ex-wife; his mother… but the caller was the security chief of Nanigen: “Got a minute, lieutenant?”

Watanabe ran his tongue over a sticky mouth. “Yeah.”

“There was a fire on Tantalus tonight.”

Watanabe grunted. “What?”

“It was small, probably didn’t get reported. Some people died in it.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Those students—they were murdered.”

He sat up fast, instantly full awake. Take the man into custody, get a statement. “Where are you? I’ll have a car—”

“No. I just want to talk with you.”

“You know the Deluxe Plate?” It was open all night.

He was nursing a cup of coffee at a back booth, the only customer in the place, when Don Makele walked in. The man seemed…resigned. Makele eased himself into the booth.

Watanabe didn’t waste time with chitchat. “Let’s hear about the students.”

“They’re dead. Vin Drake has killed at least eight people. They were small people.”

“How small?”

Makele put his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “Really small.”

“Tell you what,” Watanabe said. “Let’s pretend I believe you.”

“Nanigen has a machine that’ll shrink anything. Even people.”

A waitress came over and asked if Makele wanted breakfast. He shook his head, and waited in silence while the waitress walked away.

“Will this machine shrink another machine?” Watanabe asked.

“Well—sure,” Makele answered.

“Will it shrink a pair of scissors?”

Makele squinted. “What are you talking about?”

“Willy Fong. Marcos Rodriguez.”

Makele didn’t answer.

Dan Watanabe went on: “I understand you want to tell me what happened to the missing students. But I also want to hear about the micro-bots that cut Fong’s and Rodriguez’s throats from ear to ear.”

“How do you know about the bots?” Makele said.

“Did you think the Honolulu Police Department doesn’t have microscopes?”

Makele sucked on his lips. “The bots weren’t supposed to kill anybody.”

“So what went wrong?”

“The bots were reprogrammed. To kill.”

“By who?”

“I think by Drake.”

Watanabe took that in. “So what happened to the students?”

Makele explained about the supply stations in Manoa Valley, and about Tantalus Base. “The kids must’ve found out something bad about Drake, because he’s been pushing me to…get rid of them.”

“Kill them?”

“Yes. They ended up in Manoa Valley. Drake wanted to make sure they didn’t get out of the valley alive. They tried to escape. A few of them made it to Tantalus.” He explained to Watanabe about Ben Rourke. “Drake torched the place. Also, I’m pretty sure he murdered our chief financial officer and a vice president…”

Watanabe’s head was swimming. Vin Drake seemed to have killed thirteen people. If this was true, Drake was extremely dangerous. “Tell me why I shouldn’t decide you’re a nutcase?” he said to the security man.

Makele hunched over. “You decide what you want. I have to tell you the truth.”

“Are you involved in these deaths?”

“For seven million dollars.”

In his years as a detective, Dan Watanabe had witnessed many confessions. Even so, a confession never failed to give Watanabe a sense of surprise. Why did people decide to tell the truth? It was never in their best interest. The truth doesn’t set you free, it sends you to prison.

“Last time we talked, lieutenant,” Don Makele went on, “you said something about Moloka‘i.”

Watanabe frowned. He didn’t remember…Oh, yes—Makele used the traditional Hawaiian pronunciation…

“You said Moloka‘i is the best of the islands,” the security chief went on. “I think you meant the people of Moloka‘i, not the island.”

“I don’t know what I meant,” Watanabe answered, and sipped his coffee, and sat back, keeping his gaze fixed on Makele.

“I was born in Puko‘o,” Makele went on. “That’s a little spot on East Moloka‘i. Just a few houses and the sea. My grandma raised me. She taught me to speak Hawai‘ian—well, she tried to. She also taught me about doing the right thing. I joined the Marines, served my country, but then…I don’t know what happened to me. I started doing things for money. Those students didn’t deserve what we did to them. We left them to die. When they didn’t die, Drake sent people to take them out. I will do a lot of things for seven million dollars, but there’s some things I won’t do. I won’t take orders from Vin Drake anymore. I’m like pau hana.” Work is done.

“Where is Mr. Drake right now?” Watanabe asked. The man was beyond dangerous.

“Nanigen, I think.”

Watanabe flipped up his phone. “We’ll get him.”

“Not a good idea to just walk in there, lieutenant.”

“Oh?” Watanabe said coolly, holding his phone away from his ear; you could hear his phone ringing. “Tactical deployments are pretty damn effective, I’ve noticed.”

“Not with micro-bots. They can smell you, and they can fly. It’s a hornet’s nest in there.”

“All right. Tell me how to get in.”

“There’s no way in unless Vin Drake permits it. He controls the bots. Hand-controller. Like a TV remote.”

Watanabe got an answer to his phone call. “Marty?” he said, putting the phone back to his ear. “We’ve got a problem at Nanigen.”

Eric Jansen swung the fat-tire truck into the entrance of the Kalikimaki Industrial Park, and cruised past the Nanigen building. Apart from a sodium light splashing the entrance door, the place seemed lightless and dead, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Karen King and Rick Hutter stood on the dashboard of the truck next to their aircraft. Near them a plastic hula girl bobbled, stuck to the dashboard and swinging in a grass skirt. The hula girl loomed over Karen and Rick.

Eric drove the truck inside an unfinished building, just the frame of a warehouse and some concrete block walls, which sat next to Nanigen. He parked behind a wall, out of sight. He shut off the engine and got out, and listened for a few moments, and looked around. Time to move on Nanigen.

He put on the squirt radio headset, and spoke into the voice pickup. “Launch your planes and follow me.”

Karen and Rick climbed into their planes and took off. Eric could hear the props whining near his ears as he crossed the lot, heading for Nanigen. He realized they were flying directly behind his head, to keep out of the wind.

“You okay?” he said on the radio.

“Fine,” Karen answered. She didn’t feel fine, she felt terrible, like a bad case of flu coming on. Every joint in her body ached. Rick probably felt worse, she thought, since he’d had loads of toxins in his bloodstream. That would accelerate the bends in him, probably.

The front door was locked. Eric opened it with a key. He held it open for a moment to let Karen and Rick fly through. Then he closed the door behind him.

He moved along the main corridor at a slow walk, hearing the mosquito-like buzzing behind his head. He glanced back and saw the two micro-planes, their propellers whirring, floating along under the ceiling tiles, bobbing in air currents generated by the building’s air-handling system. His head created turbulence, and they bounced around in his wake as he walked. “Don’t get sucked into a vent,” he warned them.

“Couldn’t we land on your shoulder? You could carry us—” Karen said to Eric.

“You’re better off in the air. You might need to get away fast—if I run into…trouble.” Eric glanced back at the planes, to make sure they were still behind him, and stopped at a corner, and peered around it. He was looking down a long corridor past windows covered with black shades. There was nobody in sight. He crossed this corridor and continued down a side hallway to a door, and opened it, and went in, the planes following him. “My office,” he said on the squirt.

Eric’s office had been ransacked. Papers were strewn about, and his computer was gone. Eric pulled open a drawer in his desk, rummaged through it, and said, “Whew. It’s still here.” He took out a device that resembled a game controller. “It’s my bot controller. It should disarm the bots,” he explained to Rick and Karen.

Then he led them back to the main corridor, and they flew along behind him past the darkened windows. Eric stopped before the door marked TENSOR CORE. He pushed the door.

It wouldn’t open. There was no security pad, just a plain lock, he explained. “Shit,” he said. “This door has been locked from the inside. That means…”

“Somebody’s in there?” Rick asked.

“Could be. But there’s another way into the generator room. We can get in there through the Omicron zone.”

The bots in the Omicron zone might be programmed to kill an intruder. There was no way to know without entering the zone and seeing what the bots did. Eric just hoped his bot controller would work. He led the flyers around a corner, turned right, and stopped by a nondescript door. The door had on it only a small, unfamiliar symbol, with a single word: MICROHAZARD.

Rick flew past the symbol, a few inches from it, and said on the squirt radio, “What does this mean?”

“It means there are bots on the other side of the door that are capable of causing death or serious injury—if they’re programmed that way. It could be nasty in there.” Eric held up the controller where the flyers could see it clearly. “Let’s hope this controls them.” Then Eric tried the doorknob; it wasn’t locked. But he didn’t open it. Instead, he punched in a series of digits on the controller’s keypad. “You see, Drake thinks I’m dead,” he said on the squirt radio to the flyers. “I’m assuming Drake didn’t bother to delete my PIN number from my bot controller, since he figured I’d never be using it again.” He shrugged. “We’ll see.” He paused for a moment, pondering the danger on the other side of the door, and then thrust open the door and walked in. He stopped, holding the door open so that the micro-planes could follow him through.

They had entered the main lab room of the Omicron Project. The lights in the room were turned low, and the room was mostly dark. It was not a large space; it could have been a normal engineering lab. It contained some desks, some workstations, some lab benches with magnifying lenses mounted on them. Steel shelves held a myriad of small parts. A window made of thick glass looked into the tensor core; a door stood next to the window, an entry door that led straight from Project Omicron into the core.

Eric stood in the middle of the Omicron lab, holding the bot controller in his hand, looking around, listening. So far so good. He couldn’t see the bots but he knew they were there, clinging to the ceiling. He listened for a faint hum. He might just hear their turbines if they sensed him and started dropping off the ceiling, coming for him. If the bots hadn’t been disarmed, he’d only know when he started to bleed. But he heard nothing, saw nothing, and felt nothing. His controller still worked; he had disarmed the bots. He gave a sigh of relief.

“We’re good,” he said.

There were objects sitting on the lab benches, covered with black cloth. It was hard to see just what they were in the dim light.

“I’m going to show you,” Eric said on the squirt radio to Rick and Karen, “why Vin Drake wanted to kill me. And why he killed your friends.” Eric stopped in the middle of the room, and held out his arm sideways, bent at the elbow. “Land on my arm,” he said. “You can get a closer look that way.”

Rick and Karen landed their planes on his forearm. Moving carefully and shielding the planes with his hand so they wouldn’t be blown off by a stray gust of air, he approached the closest bench. He removed the cloth from one of the objects. It was an aircraft, small, sleek, vicious-looking. It did not have a cockpit.

“It’s a Hellstorm UAV,” Eric said. “An unmanned aerial vehicle.”

“A drone, you mean?” Rick asked.

“Exactly. A drone. No pilot.”

It had a wingspan of ten inches.

Eric brought his arm close to the drone, letting Rick and Karen have a good look.

“This is a giant prototype of a Hellstorm,” he said. “Once it’s flight-tested, it will be shrunk down to half an inch.”

Instead of landing gear, the Hellstorm had four jointed legs with what looked like sticky pads on the ends, just like the feet on the hexapod trucks. Under its wings it carried missiles: two glass tubes with long steel needles at their noses, fins, and what looked like a rocket motor in the tail.

“What does it do?” Rick asked.

“Indeed—what does it do?” Eric echoed. “It’s a military drone the size of a moth. It can be used for surveillance. It can also kill people. It can evade any security system in existence. It can fly under a door or through a crack around a window. It can cling to a person’s skin or clothing. It can also crawl, using those legs. It can fly along the electrical conduits inside a wall, then pop out and fly around inside a room. It can kill any person, anywhere, anytime. You see those rockets under its wings? Those are toxin micro-missiles. The missile is armed with super-toxins that Nanigen has discovered and extracted from life-forms in the micro-world-poison from worms, spiders, fungi, and bacteria. The missile has a flight range of ten meters. This means the drone has standoff-attack capability: it can fire toxin missiles from a distance. If one of those super-toxin missiles embeds in your skin, you’ll die fast. One micro-drone can kill two people, since it carries two missiles.”

“What are those scoops along the fuselage? Are they jet intakes?” Rick asked.

“No. Those are air samplers. They’re used for targeting.”

“How’s that?” Karen asked.

“The Hellstorm can smell you. Every person gives off a unique fingerprint of scent. Each one of us smells a little different from every other person. Our DNA is unique, so naturally the combination of pheromones given off by our body is unique, too. A micro-drone can be programmed to seek out the odor of a particular person. Even if you are at a rock concert, the drone can find you in the crowd and kill you.”

“This is a nightmare,” Karen King said.

“The nightmare has no end,” Eric Jansen said. “Think of a presidential inauguration. Think of a thousand Hellstorms released into the air, all of them programmed to seek out the president of the United States. If just one micro-drone gets through, the president dies. Micro-drones could take out the government of any nation—Japan, China, Britain, Germany—any nation could be cut down by a swarm of micro-drones.” He turned himself around slowly, while Rick and Karen took in the scene from his arm. “This room is Pandora’s box.”

“So Nanigen isn’t about medicine,” said Karen.

“Nanigen is about medicine. It’s just that Nanigen is working both sides of the street. Ways to save lives and…ways to end lives. This Hellstorm,” he touched it lightly, “is a drug-delivery system.”

“And you found out about it, so Drake had to kill you.”

“Not quite. I knew about the Omicron program all along. Nanigen has a contract with the Department of Defense to develop micro-drones. The research went much better than the DOD people got told. Vin started lying to the government. He started telling them the micro-drones were a failure.”

“Why?” Rick asked.

“Because Drake had his own plans for micro-drones. We had a problem with our patents on the micro-drone system. There’s a company in Silicon Valley called Rexatack that actually invented and patented some of this technology. Vin Drake is an investor in Rexatack. He ripped off the patents and used them to build the Hellstorm drone. Then he decided he needed to sell the technology fast, because Rexatack was getting ready to sue Nanigen and get its patents enforced. What got me into trouble with Vin was when I discovered he was trying to sell the micro-drone technology to the highest bidder.”

“Not to the U.S. government?” Karen said.

“No. Vin was looking for fast money, and there’s more money overseas. Look—there are governments out there with money to burn—and it’s dollars. Countries whose economies are growing faster than ours. They will pay anything for the micro-drone technology. Anything. I’m not saying that the U.S. government would necessarily do nice things with micro-drones. I’m just saying there are governments out there that would commit horrors with them. Some of those governments hate the United States, they have nothing but contempt for Europe, they fear their closest neighbors, and they hate and fear their own people, too. Those governments wouldn’t hesitate to use micro-drones as a means to their ends. And then there are the international terror groups—they’d love to have micro-drones. I learned that Drake had gone to Dubai where he was talking with officials of several different governments about selling them the Nanigen Hellstorm technology. I protested to Drake. I said it was a violation of U.S. law. I said it was dangerous for the whole world. But I hesitated.”

“Why?” Rick asked.

Eric sighed. “Drake had given me stock in Nanigen worth millions. If I went to the authorities, I knew Nanigen would crash and burn. My stock would be worth nothing. So I hesitated. Out of greed. I had gone into physics for the pure love of it, and I never thought, you see, that physics would make me a millionaire. Now millions would slip through my fingers if I blew the whistle on Drake, and it was my fatal weakness. Then Drake decided to kill me. I was in my new boat doing sea trials, and I’d told Alyson Bender I’d meet her in Kaneohe for lunch—it’s on the windward side of the island. Alyson, or Drake, seeded my boat with Hellstorms. Prototypes, but they were loaded to kill me. My engines failed, and that’s when I saw one of those damned things fly out of the front cabin. At first I thought it was just a bug. Then I saw it had propellers and needle missiles, and I knew it was a Hellstorm. Then I spotted another Hellstorm flying out of the cabin. So I texted my brother and dove overboard. The surf protected me. The micro-drones couldn’t smell me, couldn’t launch missiles at me because I was swimming under the waves. I made it to Honolulu and went into hiding. If I had surfaced and gone to the police, Drake would have hunted me down with more micro-drones. Vin Drake is drunk on the power of his bots.” Eric sighed, and paused, and in the silence another voice spoke:

“That was an excellent description of me, Eric. I enjoyed it thoroughly.” A small, bright light went on, and Vincent Drake stood up behind a rack of computers, the light beam swinging in front of him.