Micro

Chapter 50

Tensor Core 1 November, 5:10 a.m.

It’s not a bad way to die,” Drake was saying. “You hardly feel a thing.” He worked the controller.

Eric lay propped up with his back against the wall of the Omicron lab, by the door to the generator room, dizzy from the beating Drake had given him. Drake held the gun at his face, shining the light into his eyes. Eric could feel a bot cutting through his forehead. Blood had begun to drizzle down his face, getting in his eyes. He could see specks hovering in front of his eyes, their props whining like mosquitoes. Apparently Drake could direct them with the controller, because they all suddenly flew toward his face. He felt them landing on his cheeks, his neck, exploring his eyelids. A bot crawled into his shirt; he could feel it, and heard its engine buzzing.

“You see how they ignore me?” Drake worked the controller. “It’s because I have the controller.” Drake thumbed a joystick, and a bot crawled up Eric’s cheek and stopped by the corner of his eye. “I can make them crawl into any orifice in your body.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Research, Eric.”

Eric felt a slight sting near the corner of his eye. The bot had planted its scissors in his skin and was making a hole. It tucked its head into the hole, and began wiggling in, snipping through skin cells with the blades. A droplet of blood beaded up on his cheek.

The police cars closed off the access road to the industrial park and set up a security perimeter around the Nanigen building. The vans moved into position, and the hostage rescue squad deployed. The flashers on the police cars played across the metal building.

Dan Watanabe waited behind one of the cars, watching the building’s door. He had made the handoff to the SWAT unit, so he didn’t have operational authority now, but he wanted the op commander, Kevin Hope, to pay attention to him. “Where’s Dorothy?” he said.

“She’s on her way,” Hope answered.

“What about the FD decon unit?”

In answer to his question, a yellow van came roaring in and ground to a halt. A squad of fire department people deployed from it, pulling on Tyvek protective suits. As soon as they’d put on protective gear, they began setting up a decontamination center, with a tent, washing equipment, and a processing line for victims.

“What’s in the building, a virus?” Commander Hope said to Watanabe. He had gotten the call to deploy only twenty minutes earlier, and he didn’t yet know what the investigation involved.

“Not a virus. Bots,” Watanabe said.

“Say again—?”

“Tiny robots. They bite.”

Commander Hope gave him a weird look. “Don’t tell me this is gonna be a shooter with robots, Dan.”

“Not a chance. You can’t hit ’em.”

“Any hostages in there?”

“Not that we know. Can’t assume anything,” Watanabe answered. Somebody handed him a tactical vest, and he put it on. Somebody else brought him a handheld multichannel communicator. He took the device and keyed it on, and said to Commander Hope, “You want me to make the call?”

Hope gave a wry grin. “You talked us into this deployment, Dan. You talk us out of it.”

Watanabe shrugged and referred to a slip of paper upon which he’d written a phone number. He called it.

In the Omicron lab, Eric could feel a half-dozen bots entering his skin, pricking him as they burrowed, while Drake held the gun and light pointed into his eyes. Eric debated which way to go: to force Drake to shoot him in the head, or to wait a few minutes for the bots to open his arteries.

Just then a faint buzzing sounded in Drake’s jacket. He took out his phone and looked at the caller ID. BLOCKED, it told him. He decided to answer it. He took a deep breath to get his heart rate down. “Yes?”

“Vincent Drake?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Dan Watanabe, sir, Honolulu Police. Sir, is there anybody in the building with you?”

“Oh, my goodness, Dan. I’m by myself. Working late. What’s this all about?”

“Sir, we have the building surrounded. Would you please walk out slowly with your hands placed on your head? You will be safe, I promise.”

“Good grief, Dan! There’s obviously been a mistake. I’ll be happy to comply—just give me a moment.”

“Sir, we need you to come out immediately—”

“Certainly. Absolutely.” Drake switched off his phone and advanced toward Eric, his face contorted in fury. “You went to the police.”

Eric shook his head. He was losing a lot of blood. His shirt was darkening in streams, he could feel warmth running down his neck.

Drake leaned over Eric and hauled him to his feet. “You’re just like your fucking brother—sticking your nose into things.” They were eye to eye. “Oops,” Drake said, touching Eric on the cheek. “I think there’s one in your eye.”

Get the controller.

Eric had his left hand on the door handle, behind him, and he pressed it. The door opened, and Eric fell backward into the generator room, with Drake landing on top of him. He reached out with his right hand and felt his fingers close over the controller, and he ripped it out of Drake’s hand as he fell backward.

Drake swore and staggered, sprawling past Eric into the generator room, and he fired the gun. Eric felt the impact in his leg, the bullet passing through his thigh, but oddly he didn’t feel any pain. He was in shock. But he had the controller now, and that was the main thing. He knew what to do with it. He slammed the controller against the floor again and again, smashing it, feeling it break into pieces beneath his hand.

Now nobody could control the bots.

And then, to his surprise, he saw the gun lying on the floor right in front of him, while Drake was getting to his feet. Drake had dropped the gun. Drake and Eric lunged for it simultaneously.

On the floor, Karen and Rick saw the door open, and two gargantuan human figures fell into the room. The gun went off, and the shockwave of the blast rolled over the micro-humans. Moments later the two men fell with a floor-shaking impact, which hurled Rick and Karen into the air. A droplet of blood splashed, exploding into secondary droplets. They picked themselves up and continued to run toward the white circle.

One of the men rolled over on his back. He held the bot controller, and smashed it repeatedly on the floor. It broke apart, and pieces of electronic boards flew past Karen, knocking her to the ground. She saw the gun skidding across the floor toward her, and felt sure it would crush her. She dove away while the two men collided over the gun. A moment later Eric was holding the gun, pointing it at Drake, who was lying on his back.

Eric lay on the floor near Drake. He rolled over and propped himself up, blood running from his leg, and pointed the gun at Drake’s face. “You move…I’ll shoot you in the head.”

Drake said, “Wait, Eric. We can get out. Alive. Together.”

“Not going to happen. You killed my kid brother.” Eric steadied his finger on the trigger.

“But Eric…you’re completely wrong…I did everything to save him.”

“You’re insane.”

Rick and Karen reached the circle. They could hear a deep thrumming sound—the pulse of robot propellers around them. They had lost track of what the big humans were doing. In the center of the circle there was a hatch like a manhole cover, with a sunken handle. Karen and Rick reached the hatch at the same time.

Rick got down on his knees and tugged on the handle.

Nothing happened.

The hatch seemed to be stuck. By now, several bots had converged on them and were hovering aggressively. A bot flew in and jabbed at Karen with its knives. She swung her blade, and, with a clang, knocked the bot away. It fell back.

Karen held up her machete. “Back to back!” she shouted.

Rick Hutter straightened up, and stood with his back to Karen King, his machete drawn. The bots surrounded them, and began darting in, flying and hovering, steel blades snicking. Rick slung a roundhouse blow with his machete and blinded a bot, shearing off its compound eyes. The bot hit the ground, its neck writhing, and it took wing, flying off erratically.

They continued to hack at the bots, but the bots had no fear, no sense of self-preservation. Whirling her machete, Karen said, “Open it. I’ll cover you.”

Rick bent over and tugged on the hatch again, while Karen straddled him, facing the bots, fending them off. But the hatch wouldn’t come up. He began prying at it with the tip of his machete, then tried hacking at it. If he couldn’t open it, he could cut through it. But the blade bounced off the plastic. “I can’t get it open!”

“Listen Rick—ow!” She cried out in pain. A bot had slashed her. She swung her machete over her head. “Try again! Hurry!” She yelled.

That did it. He threw himself on the door, and wrenched it open. Inside was a single red button. He jumped on the button with both feet.

The floor shook. The hexagon began to descend into the floor, until they were swallowed in a hexagonal chamber.

A bot had gotten inside the hexagon with them. It seemed confused. Rick fended it off, banging at it with his machete as it bounced against the chamber walls.

The lights changed color, followed by a humming sound, and then a dreamy feeling came over Rick Hutter until he felt as if he was floating in space, and dancing with the bot, and dancing with Karen King, the three of them whirling around and around in a mad waltz.

The tensor generator powered up, and the fields crossed and recrossed, and wound up in poloidal loops, and the hexagons raised up and met the floor. Rick Hutter, Karen King, and a gigantic, enlarged bot were left resting on the floor. The people were full-size. The bot had been expanded to the size of a refrigerator.

Eric was lying on the floor, bleeding heavily from a wound in his leg and from several bot cuts, but he was conscious, and he kept the gun trained on Drake, who had started to crawl across the floor toward Eric, an expression of fear working on his face.

“Get Eric,” Rick said to Karen. They scooped Eric up by the shoulders and feet and began dragging him out of the chamber. The gun slipped out of Eric’s hands and hit the floor. Drake got to his feet, and made a mistake. Instead of going for the door, he went for the gun.

In that split second, Rick and Karen got Eric Jansen out of the generator room, and they slammed the door shut. Karen saw that it had a simple deadbolt. She threw the bolt.

This left Drake locked inside the generator room, in the company of a hundred flying micro-bots and one giant bot. The big bot sat on the floor, its compound eyes turning left and right, its gooseneck waving, its turbofan blades shrieking, but it couldn’t lift off. It had become too heavy to fly.

Drake glanced at the big bot, then stood up, holding the gun. Rick and Karen watched from behind the bulletproof window as Drake picked up the bot controller: Eric had smashed it thoroughly. He tossed it away.

They saw Drake’s lips moving, and heard his voice faintly through the glass: “Let me out.”

Rick shook his head.

Drake fired at the window. The bullet starred the glass, but didn’t break it.

Drake walked up close to the window. “Please help me. I’m very sorry.” A bead of blood appeared, hanging at the tip of his nose. He backed up a few steps, and looked around wildly, and swatted at a bot circling his head. He cursed, and waved his gun around, the light beam crisscrossing the chamber. He caught a bot in the light, and fired the gun at the bot. Pointing the light around, he fired again. And again and again Drake fired at the bots, until the tensor room filled with a haze of cordite smoke.

Then he took his cell phone out of his pocket; it was ringing again. “Hello, lieutenant. Would you please come get me? I’ll tell you everything, of course. I’m in a bit of trouble in the generator room. The generator room. In the center of the building. Bots? There are no bots in here, Dan, it’s perfectly safe…” The phone slipped out of his bloody fingers and clattered to the floor. A nosebleed drenched the front of his shirt.

Drake coughed, spraying blood. He staggered forward and pressed himself against the window and stared at Rick and Karen. “I will have you killed! I swear it—!” His eyes went wide, and a bead of blood appeared in the corner of his right eye. A bot emerged through the white of his eye and began crawling across the surface of Drake’s eye, dragging blood along with it as it crawled. Drake seemed to be watching the bot as it crossed his cornea. “Get off me,” he whispered, and dug a finger into his eye, and stared at his bloody fingertip, and screamed.

Then he turned the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. He had emptied the clip shooting at the bots.

Behind Drake’s back, the giant bot had turned its eyes on Drake. It advanced upon him, dragging its arms. Its gooseneck lashed out and the blades thrust up through Drake’s body cavity from below and burst out his chest. The bot raised him up, shook him on its gooseneck, and shrugged, slinging the body across the room.

Rick and Karen had turned their attention to Eric Jansen. Rick tore off his shirt and wrapped it around Eric’s leg to make a compress. He took Eric under the shoulders and began half-carrying, half-dragging him through the Omicron lab. He was barely conscious, having lost a lot of blood.

Then they heard the humming sound of bots. Karen felt a stinging sensation on the back of her neck, and slapped at it. Her hand came away bloody.

“Room’s contaminated! Move it, Rick!” Without thinking, she grabbed Eric with one hand and tried to sling him over her shoulder, but she couldn’t do it. For a moment she thought, What’s wrong? Her superpowers had vanished.

They managed to drag Eric into the hallway, and there they were met with a team of police officers, running, guns drawn, wearing body armor. Just behind came a slightly potbellied plainclothes detective. He wore a tactical vest but clearly wasn’t a member of the SWAT team.

“Get back!” Rick shouted at them. “Bots!”

“I know,” the detective said calmly. He turned to the men. “Get them out, quick.” To Karen and Rick, he said, “Is there anybody else in the building?”

“Drake. He’s dead.”

“Everybody out,” the detective said.

The officers bundled Rick and Karen along, and they scout-carried Eric, who had lost consciousness.

The last man out of the building was the detective. He came out through the door into the light of dawn, a trail of blood streaming from his forehead. The bots had found Dan Watanabe.

“Where’s Dorothy?” he called out.

Dorothy Girt had arrived in her Toyota. She came forward.

“You brought your magnet?”

“Of course.” She held up the industrial horseshoe magnet. She had grabbed it out of the forensic lab on the way over.

“Everybody into decon, hostages and officers,” said Watanabe, as he took off his vest. “Dorothy will decontaminate you.” An EMT squad brought Eric into the tent first, then loaded him into a medevac helicopter. Last of all, after everybody else had taken their turn, Lieutenant Watanabe walked into the white tent to have Dorothy get the bots out of him.