Micro

“Try not to be too scared. It’ll be okay,” Karen said.

Erika didn’t reply. She didn’t seem able to handle the pressure of this journey. Karen felt sorry for Erika, and worried about her.

Don Makele paid a visit to the communications center at Nanigen, a small office equipped with encrypted radio gear and corporate wireless networking equipment. He spoke to a young woman who was monitoring all the corporate channels. “I want to try to get a ping from a piece of equipment we’ve lost in Manoa Valley,” he said to the young woman. He gave her the serial number of the piece.

“What kind of equipment is it?” she asked him.

“Experimental.” He wasn’t going to tell her it was an advanced hexapod from the Omicron Project.

Typing commands by remote, the young woman switched on a high-power seventy-two-gigahertz transmitter on the roof of the greenhouse in the Waipaka Arboretum. It was a line-of-sight transmitter. “Where should I point it?”

“Northwest. Toward Supply Station Echo.”

“Got it.” Tapping a keyboard, she oriented the transmitter.

“Now ping.”

The young woman entered a command and stared at the screen. “Nothing,” she said.

“Start pinging in a search pattern around that location.”

She worked the keys for a while. Still nothing happened.

“Now point the transmitter up the mountainside. Do sequential pings.”

After she worked some more, she brightened. “Got it. It pinged me back.”

“Where is the equipment?”

“Gosh. It’s on the cliffs. Halfway up Tantalus.” She called up an image of the terrain on her screen and pointed to a spot on the mountainside, far above the bottom of Manoa Valley. “How did the equipment get there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Makele answered.

Somebody had survived. They were now driving the hexapod straight up the mountain. Interesting.

Makele returned to Drake’s office. “Just for the hell of it, I pinged the hexapod. I got a ping back. Guess what. The hexapod is halfway up to Tantalus Crater.”

Drake’s eyes narrowed. What the hell. Somebody had survived the predator that had eaten Telius and Johnstone. “Can we find that hexapod, retrieve it?”

“Those cliffs are really steep. I don’t think we could reach the hexapod right now. Plus we can’t get a tight fix on it. We can get its approximate location on the cliffs. Only good to a hundred meters.”

A tiny smile formed at the corner of Drake’s mouth and grew wider, until it had become a grin. “I wonder…maybe they’re heading for Tantalus Base.”

“Yeah, could be.”

Drake broke into laughter. “Tantalus Base! Ha! I would like to see their faces when they see Tantalus. They’re in for an ugly surprise-if they get there.” He became serious. “You go up to the crater and make sure they get a surprise. I’ll keep track of their progress.”

Rick was driving when there was a beep, and the hexapod’s communication panel lit up. A display flared: ANSWERBACK 23094-451.

“What the hell was that?” Rick said.

Danny slumped in the passenger seat next to him. “Turn that thing off.”

“I can’t. It’s just doing this shit on its own.” Rick began to wonder: was somebody trying to talk to them? Maybe it was Drake. But then the panel went quiet again. He had a feeling, though, that Drake might know where they were. If so, what would they do if Drake found them? The gas rifle would have no effect on a human of normal size. Karen walked alongside.

“The radio’s acting funny,” he said to Karen.

She shrugged.

The terrain trended upward at a steep angle. They came to a low cliff, and the walker climbed it. At the top of the cliff they made their way around a bunch of sedge grass, and came to a rock. “Stop!” Rick said. He advanced toward the rock; he had seen something under it. Something black and shiny. “It’s a beetle hiding under there,” he said. “Erika, what kind?”

Erika focused her attention on the beetle. It was a Metromenus, the same kind they’d seen when they’d first arrived in the micro-world.

“Be careful,” Erika said. “They have a nasty spray.”

“Exactly,” Rick said.

“What’s up?” Karen asked him.

“It’s a chemical war out there. We need chemical weapons, too.”

“We don’t need it,” Karen said to him. “We’ve already got the benzo spray.” She lifted the spray bottle out of her pocket-the self-defense compound that she had made in the lab, which she’d hoped to show to Vin Drake. But when she squeezed the pump, nothing came out. It had been used up spraying the centipede.

Rick was determined to reload the bottle with spray. He crept ahead with the gas rifle, took aim, and fired at the beetle. The needle penetrated the beetle’s shell. There was a muffled explosion, and the beetle shuddered and sprayed chemicals around in its death throes, until the air reeked of acids.

Erika assured them there would be a lot of spray left in the beetle. Rick put on his mad scientist outfit: the rubber apron, the goggles, and the gloves, and he went to work.

First, he flipped the dead beetle over on its back. Next, with his machete, he began tapping around on the jointed segments of the abdomen, looking for an opening.