The others stared, while Rick set out through the super-jungle, stopping occasionally to sniff the air, following his nose. He started turning over leaves, dragging them with both hands. The smell grew stronger; it tickled their noses now, once Rick had pointed it out to them. He stuck his head under a leaf. “Got it!” he whispered.
Under the leaf, a brownish, oily, jointed carapace gleamed, along with many curved legs. “That’s a millipede,” Rick said. “I’m just an ignorant botanist, but I know these guys make cyanide.”
Erika moaned. “Don’t! It’s a very big animal. It’s dangerous.”
Rick chuckled. “A millipede?” He turned to Karen King. “Hey—Karen! What’s the behavior of this animal when it’s threatened?”
Karen King smiled. “Millipedes? They’re scaredy cats.”
“Wait! Are you sure it’s not a centipede?” Danny quavered, remembering that Peter had said a centipede can deliver a nasty sting.
“Nah, this baby isn’t any centipede,” Karen said, kneeling and looking under the leaf. “Centipedes are predators. A millipede doesn’t eat meat, it eats rotten leaves,” she explained. “It’s a peaceful animal. Doesn’t even have a sting.”
“What I thought.” Rick hauled the leaf off the millipede, revealing it. The millipede lay curled up and seemingly asleep. It was a cylindrical animal with segmented armor and at least a hundred legs. In relation to the micro-humans, the millipede appeared about fifteen feet long, akin to the biggest boa constrictors. It breathed gently, making whistling noises through holes in its carapace; a millipede’s version of snoring.
Rick drew his machete. “Wake up!” he cried, and slapped the millipede with the flat of the blade.
The animal thrashed suddenly. The humans backed away, and the odor grew stronger. The millipede curled its body into a tight spiral, a defensive posture. Holding his nose, Rick darted forward and whacked the animal again. He didn’t want to hurt the millipede, he wanted to frighten it. The trick worked. A pungent smell of almonds mixed with a nasty, bitter stench filled the air, and blobs of an oily liquid oozed from pores in the millipede’s armor. Rick opened a clean plastic jar and quickly put on his gloves, apron, and goggles.
The millipede wasn’t going anywhere. It remained curled up, apparently frightened.
Wearing his gear, Rick advanced and scooped some of the liquid into the jar, until he’d collected about a cup of the stuff. “It’s an oil. It’s full of cyanide,” he explained. He dumped the oil into the jar that held his curare goo, and stirred the mess with a stick. “I scared the cyanide out of the poor bastard,” he said, holding up the jar of curare, which reeked of lethal chemicals. “And now,” he added, “it’s time to start hunting.”
Chapter 20
Nanigen Headquarters
29 October, 4:00 p.m.
V in Drake stood before a window that looked into the tensor core. The window was bulletproof, and it gave the scene in the chamber the appearance of a fish tank. Inside the chamber, the hexagons of the size-translation tubes were set flush with the plastic floor. Two men walked around the core: Telius and Johnstone.
They were suiting up. They put on segments of lightweight Kevlar armor, vests, arm coverings, greaves for the legs. The armor was tough enough to turn away the jaws of a soldier ant. Each man carried a .600 caliber Express gas rifle. The gun was powered by a pressurized gas tank. It fired a heavy steel needle tipped with a broad-spectrum super-toxin. Long range, total stopping power. The super-toxin was equally effective on insects, birds, and mammals. The gun had been designed especially for the protection of humans in the micro-world.
“Wait for the hexapod,” Drake said.
Telius nodded and searched the floor with his eyes as if he was looking for a coin he’d dropped. Telius was a man of few words.
Drake went to a door marked RESTRICTED AREA. Under the sign there was a symbol that looked vaguely like a biohazard symbol, and a word: MICROHAZARD.
This was the entry door that led from the tensor core directly to Project Omicron. No sign on the door advertised its name, of course.
Drake took up a hand controller, a device that looked a little like a video game control, and punched a code into it. This disarmed the bots inside the Omicron zone, and he entered a cluster of small, windowless labs with its own special access to the tensor core. Nobody was permitted inside Omicron except for a handful of top Nanigen engineers. In fact, few of the Nanigen employees were even supposed to know of the existence of Omicron. Inside the rooms, several lab benches stood about, and on the benches sat a series of objects draped in black cloth shrouds.
The shrouds concealed the objects. Whatever they were, they were secret. Even people permitted to enter the Omicron zone were not allowed to look at them.
Drake took a shroud off one of the objects. It was a robot with six legs, and it vaguely resembled a Mars robot lander or possibly a metal insect. It was not very big, about a foot across.
Drake carried the six-legged robot back into the tensor core, and handed it to Johnstone. “Your transportation. It’s got a full charge. Quad micro-lithiums.”
“We’re good,” Johnstone mumbled. He was chewing something.
“God damn it,” Drake barked. “What’s in your mouth?”
“Energy bar, sir. You get so hungry—”
“You know the rule. No eating in the core. You could contaminate the generator.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“It’s okay. Just swallow it.” Drake clapped the man on the shoulder in a friendly way. A little bit of mercy goes a long way with people who work for you.
Telius placed the six-legged device into Hexagon 3. The two men stood in Hexagons 2 and 1. Drake went into the control room. He would operate the generator himself. He had cleared all employees out of the core. Nobody could see him shrinking these men and this equipment. That would be a loose detail. He programmed Hexagon 3 to shrink the walker somewhat less than the humans would be shrunk. Just as he had locked down and started to initiate the sequence, Don Makele came into the control room behind him.
Drake and Makele watched together as the generator hummed and the power structures under the floor ramped up, and the hexagons descended. After the men had been shrunk, Drake placed the micro-humans in a transport box, and he put the hexapod in another box. He handed the boxes to Don Makele. “Let’s just hope the rescue succeeds.”
“Let’s hope,” Makele replied.
It was dangerous enough that Peter and the rest knew he had murdered Eric. But Drake also worried that Eric might have shared with his brother a very sensitive fact about Drake’s activities that could not be made public—and that Peter might have passed it on to the other students. This particular fact, if it were known, could destroy Nanigen’s business.
It was just business. Nothing personal, only logic. Just what had to be done in order to keep the business moving. Had Don Makele figured anything out? Drake couldn’t be sure quite what the security man thought or knew. Drake gave his security chief a sharp sidelong glance. “How many ground-floor shares do you own?”
“Two, sir.”
“I’m giving you two more shares.”
Makele’s expression didn’t change. “Thank you.”
Don Makele had just made two million dollars on this conversation. The man would keep his mouth shut.
Chapter 21
Fern Gully
29 October, 4:00 p.m.
Be quiet and don’t move. They have keen eyesight and sharp hearing.” Erika Moll was speaking. She was looking up into the branches of a mamaki plant, which extended some distance over their heads, unfolding large, lobed leaves. Clinging to a leaf was an enormous creature, a winged insect. The animal shone with brilliant greens, and its body was enclosed by a pair of lacy, green wings that looked like leaves. The animal had long antennae, bulging eyes, jointed legs, and a bloated abdomen, visibly packed with fat. They could hear a faint hiss, uhh, hisssound as it breathed, the air flowing in and out of a line of hol
es in its flanks.
It was a katydid.
Rick took one of the blowgun tubes he had made and balanced it on his shoulder. He fitted a dart into the tube. The steel tip had a glob of stinking poison smeared on it, wafting a smell of bitter almonds and nastiness: Rick’s curare. A wisp of mattress stuffing, which Rick had taken from Station Echo, was fastened to the butt of the dart.
Rick knelt and brought the tube to his lips, being exceedingly careful not to get any curare in his mouth. The cyanide made his eyes water, and his throat felt tight.
“Where’s the heart?” he whispered to Erika Moll, who crouched beside him. She would direct his shot, for she knew insect anatomy best.
“The heart? It’s posterior dorsal to the metathorax,” Erika said.
Rick grimaced at Erika. “Huh?”
Erika smiled. “Just under the top of the animal’s back.”
Rick shook his head. “Can’t make the shot. The wings are covering the area.” He aimed the tube this way and that, and finally decided on a gut shot. He took aim at the animal’s lower abdomen, took a deep breath, and fired.
The dart sank deep into the katydid. The creature gasped and shivered its wings. For a moment they thought it would take off and fly, but it didn’t. The animal let out a deafening shriek, an earsplitting cry. Was it a cry of alarm, of pain? Its breathing sped up, and it sagged, and slipped, and dangled from the edge of the leaf.
Amar cringed, watching this. He had never realized how the suffering of an insect could affect him. Rick’s curare was very powerful.
They waited. The katydid now dangled upside down. Its breathing slowed, the hiss, uhh, hissdragging out and sounding raspy. Then its breathing stopped. Shortly afterward, the katydid fell to the ground.
“Nice work, Rick!”
“Rick the hunter!”
At first the dead katydid didn’t seem appealing to anyone except Erika Moll. “I ate some termites once in Tanzania. They were quite delicious,” Erika said. “People in Africa consider insects a delicacy.”
Danny Minot sat down on a twig, feeling sick. He felt like he might heave just looking at the dead bug. “Maybe we’ll find a burger joint around here,” he said, trying to make a joke.
“Insect meat is not as bad as hamburger,” Amar Singh said. “Mashed muscle, blood, and connective tissue of a bovine mammal really grosses me out. I will not eat a cow. But a katydid…well…maybe.”
As they stared at the dead animal, their hunger grew sharper and more insistent. Their small bodies had been burning energy at a high rate. They simply had to eat. Had to. Their hunger overcame their squeamishness.
They butchered the katydid with machetes, while Erika guided them through the anatomy. As they pulled out meat and organs, Erika insisted that everything edible be washed in water. The animal’s blood, the hemolymph, was a transparent, yellow-green liquid, and it dripped out as they cracked open its armor. They removed the legs, cutting through the tough bioplastic to get at the meat inside the legs. The upper rear legs, once split open, revealed masses of lean white muscle. They sliced steaks out of the largest parts of the legs. The animal’s blood might contain toxins from the dart, and so the meat had to be washed. But after they’d dipped and rinsed the flesh in dewdrops, it smelled clean and delicious. They ate the meat raw. It had a mild, sweet flavor.
“Not bad,” Rick said. “Tastes like sushi.”
“Really fresh,” Karen said.
Even Danny began eating the meat, gingerly at first but with increasing gusto, until he was cramming katydid steak into his mouth. “Needs salt,” he mumbled.
The fat of the animal, soft and yellowish, oozed out of the abdomen. “The abdominal fat is good for you, I’m sure,” Erika said. When none of them would try it, she scooped some fat out with her hands, and ate it raw. “It’s sweet,” she said. “Slightly nutty taste.”
Their bodies craved the fat, and soon they all dug into the katydid’s abdomen, scooping out the fat and gulping it down, licking their fingers.
“I feel like we’re lions at a kill,” Peter said.
The katydid yielded far more meat than they could possibly eat. They didn’t want to let it go to waste, so they gathered up bundles of moist moss, and wrapped some of the meat in the moss, as much as they could carry, and stuffed it down in the duffel bags to keep it cool. They ended up with enough katydid steaks to keep them going for a while, anyway.
Feeling much better, they consulted the hand-drawn map. Peter had been carrying the map, and had been guiding them with the compass. He pointed to features.
“We’re right here, I think,” he said, noting a cluster of tree ferns that appeared on the map. “We’re pretty close to Station Bravo. We might make Bravo by nightfall.” He looked around and up at the sky. The light was going; it was late afternoon. “Let’s just hope the station is intact.”
Peter sighted the compass on the distant trunk of a palm tree, and they headed out, carrying the duffel bags and stopping once in a while to smell and listen for ants. Whenever they ran into an ant, they knew there would be more. As long as they moved quickly away, the ants wouldn’t get too excited. The big danger was a nest entrance. As the sun began to set, shadows deepened on the forest floor, and Peter, who was leading, became more cautious about ants and more worried about stumbling into an ant nest. But so far, so good.
“Stop!” Peter said. He examined a mark on the stem of an ilihia plant growing up from the ground like a miniature tree: the stem had been cut with three V-shaped notches, and above them was splashed an X made of orange paint.
It was a blaze.
They had come to a trail.
Peter advanced, and found another orange X sprayed on a pebble. The trail proceeded onward, a faint disturbance of the soil marked with blazes at points along the way.
Minutes later, he stopped at the edge of a large, ragged hole in the ground. The soil around it had been dug up and turned over. Around the hole, giant footprints were impressed in the ground. The footprints had filled with water, like swimming pools. Peter consulted the map. “We’re at Station Bravo,” he said. “But there’s no station.”
The footprints told a story. Somebody had dug the station out of the ground and taken it away.
“We have to assume the worst,” Karen King said, taking off her backpack and sitting down by the hole. She wiped her brow. “This is Vin Drake’s work. It means he knows or suspects we’re still alive. He’s taken away our means of survival.”
“So Drake could be hunting for us,” Peter said.
“But how would he find us?” Rick wondered.
It was a good question. Their bodies, less than an inch tall, would not be easily noticed by a normal-size person. “Radio silence is essential now,” Peter said.
The disappearance of Station Bravo meant that they had no place to hide during the hours of darkness. The sun was setting, and night was coming on fast, as it does in the tropics.
Erika was becoming increasingly alarmed as she watched the sun go down. “Just to point out,” she said to the others, “the vast majority of insects come out at night, not during the day. And many of them are predators.”
“We need to make a bivouac,” Peter said. “We’re going to build a fort.”
Not far away, a hexapod walker vehicle strode rapidly across the forest floor, climbing over pebbles and pushing leaves aside, its six legs working with seemingly boundless energy. Motors on the legs whined.
Johnstone was driving, his hand sunk in a glove-like device, a hand controller, while he watched the readouts. The readouts told him the levels of power the servomotors were delivering to the vehicle’s six legs. Telius sat next to him in the open cockpit, his eyes tracking left and right, up and down. Both men wore full-body armor.
The walker was powered by a nano-laminate micro-lithium power pack. It had a long range and plenty of power. Regular vehicles didn’t work well in the micro-world; they got stuck, the wheels spun uselessly. Wheeled vehicles couldn’t climb ove
r obstacles, either. Instead, the Nanigen engineers had copied the design of an insect. The design worked extremely well.
The walker arrived at a hole in the ground.
“Stop,” Telius said.
Johnstone brought the vehicle to a halt and stared into the hole. “That’s Echo.”
“Was,” Telius corrected him.
Both men leaped out of the vehicle in soaring jumps, their armor clattering. They landed on their feet. They had a lot of practice at physical movement in the micro-world, and they knew how to use their strength. They began circling around the hole, examining moss, crumbs of dirt. The rain earlier in the day had obliterated most traces of the students’ passage across the surface, but Johnstone knew that clues remained. He could track anybody anywhere. A growth of moss on a rock attracted his attention. He went up to it and studied it. The moss stood waist-high. He touched a narrow stalk that came up out of the moss: it was a spore stalk with a broken spore capsule at the end of it. The stalk was bent at a right angle, broken, and spores had spilled out, some of them clinging to the moss. In the sticky fluff of wet spore granules Telius found the imprint of a human hand. Somebody had grabbed the spore stalk, broken it, spilled the pollen, then put their hand in it. Farther on, Telius found a confused set of human footprints, clambering over a lump of dirt, in a spot under a spreading leaf that had protected the ground underneath from rain splashes.
Johnstone knelt and examined the footprints. “There’s five of them—no, six. Walking in a line. He looked off. “Heading southeast.”
“What’s southeast?” Telius said.
“Parking lot.” Johnstone narrowed his eyes and smiled.
Telius looked at him quizzically.
Johnstone picked a mite off his shoulder plate, crushed it, flicked it away. “Fucking mites. Now we know their plan.”
“What plan?”
“They’re looking for a ride back to Nanigen.”
He was right, obviously. Telius nodded and began walking swiftly ahead, following clues. Johnstone jumped back into the hexapod and began driving it, following Telius as he moved swiftly ahead of the walker, often leaping over things, traveling at a pace somewhere between a dogtrot and a flat-out run. Occasionally Telius stopped to examine tracks in the soft soil. The targets hadn’t made any effort to cover their tracks. They didn’t suspect they were being followed.