When the robots thinned out to just one layer thick, the color showed through again and the living room appeared normal. Normal, that is, except for the yawning cavity created by the scavengers. Damage already done could not be repaired. But the danger had passed.
Cap returned outside to see that the young Madsen walked with Rock and Leila toward the front of the house. Limped, more accurately, blood still dripping from the glass lacerations on the young man’s hands, arms, and shoulders.
The captain spoke to the trio. “Dr. Madsen must have used the phone in the living room when he called you. It was half-devoured by microbots. They’re partly solar-powered, so they’re slow workers in a dark room, which is why the whole block hasn’t been consumed. Our own version of the microbot will work faster on the same amount of light. It takes less energy to reprogram a microbot than to dismantle matter and build copies of itself.”
As the four walked toward the street, the kid suddenly pointed and yelled.
“Dandridge!”
He struggled to wrest himself from Rock’s grip and rush toward a man in a white lab coat. The bespectacled man looked up, saw them, and turned to run back to the chocolate-brown sedan parked at the curb. He jumped inside and flipped the ignition as Cap sped toward him. With a squeal of peeling rubber, the car roared beyond Cap’s reach and
accelerated up the street.
Cap dug into a cargo pocket and withdrew a small pistol. Taking careful aim, he fired one shot at the receding vehicle. A hole appeared in the trunk amid a small cloud of pulverized brown paint.
“Let’s roll!” he shouted to the others, ignoring the fact that he could just as well have whispered the command over the earcomm.
Captain Anger and his team ran to the van and jumped in, Jonathan tucked under Rock’s arm like a football.
They craved this excitement. Cap may have surrounded himself with men and women of exceptional intelligence and abilities, but the glue that bound them together was their shared lust for the galvanizing thrill of adventure. They who possessed powerful intellects and constantly used them needed equally powerful diversions. The members of Captain Anger’s inner circle found diversion aplenty in his fantastic exploits.
Cap gunned the engine into life and pulled away from the curb.
“We’ve lost him!” the kid cried, looking this way and that, his blond, bloodied hair whipping about the sides of his face. “I’ll bet he turned left, though. Back toward the university.”
“Relax, boy,” Rock said. “Captain Anger fired slug with homing device inside.” He tapped his thick, short fingers at the keyboard of the van’s onboard computer. “ Smotri, look at screen.”
On the screen, a digitized map of Palo Alto displayed a dizzying amount of information: Streets, riverbeds, buildings, topography, political boundaries, government buildings, hospitals, police stations. With a single keystroke, Rock made it show only the streets and two moving dots, one red and one blue. The blue dot remained at the center of the screen while the map rotated and moved.
“We are blue dot,” Rock said. “Top of screen is always front of van. Easier to visualize map overlaid on your real-world view. Red target is Dandridge’s car. We won’t lose him unless he abandons car or finds and destroys homer.” Rock switched the screen to its high-information mode and leaned back in his seat, very satisfied with himself.
Cap and Rock rode in the two front seats. The other two seats, in the compact laboratory/computer center at the rear, were occupied. Jonathan stood behind Rock’s seat, gripping it tightly to remain standing while the van pitched left and right, forward and back. Leila calmly stood at work in the back, pulling a medical kit from a compartment. With catlike steadiness in spite of the bouncing of the vehicle, she advanced on
Jonathan and set the case down, opening it up and administering to his wounds.
“You look like the loser in a cat fight,” she said as she helped him off with his shirt. His skin glistened with sweat and blood, and he smelled of salt and garden soil
Slashes from the plunge through glass crisscrossed his arms and shoulders. Braced for the sting of antiseptics, he felt nothing as the beautiful woman sprayed each cut with a clear, painless liquid and pressed the sides of the wounds together. Much to his amazement, each laceration sealed shut as if glued together, leaving only a red line to indicate that there had ever been a cut.
“It’s a cyanoacrilate compound,” Leila said. “Sort of like super-glue for tissues. Seals the wound but eventually resorbs after healing.” She smiled wickedly. “If your guts had been blown apart, we could spray everything and create a seal to stop the bleeding. Then a surgeon could put you back together. This stuff has saved a lot of lives on the battlefield even before Cap perfected it for peacetime use.”
The van took a turn at high speed. Jonathan put a steadying hand out against the wall. Leila—remarkably— stayed in place simply by shifting weight on her lithe, smoothly muscled legs.
“We’re attracting interest of law enforcement!” Rock shouted. On his screen flickered yellow dots indicating the location of radio transmissions on police-band frequencies. Several of the yellow sparks sped toward the blue.
Cap reached toward the dashboard—a vast array of aircraft-style dials, monitors, and switches—and tapped a small button. On the rear of the van, the commercial license plate morphed into a federal emergency plate with different colors, character styles, and numbers. That would be enough to ward off any attempt to pull the van over, something Captain Anger was reluctant to permit.
The plate actually contained an array of thousands of tiny rods, each with a color changing tip. The rods extended or retracted to form the numbers on the plate and the tips changed color to match the designs of all fifty state license plates, federal and state government plates, and the plates of the Canadian provinces and Mexican states. Each license plate image stored in the van’s database was valid for a white van registered in each jurisdiction.
“He’s heading toward the Palo Alto airport,” Rock said.
Cap nodded, his deep sea-green eyes never turning from his view of the road. Though his mind no doubt followed several trains of thought at the same time, he appeared to be concentrating all his powers on the simple act of high-speed driving.
“Our jet’s in San Jose!” Leila said. “If we can’t stop him or plant a homer on his plane, we’ll lose him!”
Cap monitored the car’s progress on the computer screen, never once coming so close to Dandridge as to make visual contact. The business buildings on El Camino Real whipped past them; cars screeched to a halt, narrowly avoiding the speeding white blur. Twists and turns took them away from California’s oldest highway and toward the bay.
The sedan reached the airport. Cap’s van followed.
And faced a wall of machine guns.
Chapter Eleven
The Electric Zombies
William Arthur Dandridge knew he was being followed.
Even though he could not catch more than an occasional, distant glimpse of the white van, he knew that the people from Madsen’s house hounded his heels. This caused him no fear. It merely forced him to think and act quicker.
William Dandridge enjoyed thinking quickly. Short and wiry, he gave the impression of being a nervous man when in fact his energetic intellect made him impatient with the rest of the world, which he perceived from behind his thick glasses as slothful and irresponsible. Years earlier, he had decided that the majority of mankind ought to
