strode through the doors with the muscular grace of a circus strongman. The dark brown skin and long black ponytail that announced his African and American Indian heritage contrasted starkly with the dark blue three-piece suit, maroon and navy rep tie, and light blue shirt he wore. Where someone of his build ought to have looked uncomfortable and out of place in such clothes, he seemed perfectly natural and at ease. His massive hands looked like battering rams, as dangerous in a fight as gallon barrels of lead shot. His smooth, clean-shaven face supported eyebrows perpetually knotted in a meditative frown, as if he thought he could be off doing something even more important.
His name was Jefferson Sun Ra Paine, and in his profession he only used his fists to pound on the defense table in passionate pleading for his clients. Paine, quite possibly the finest attorney in the world, practiced criminal, corporate, patent, and tax law. He only defended the unjustly accused and he made his fortune from counter-suits brought against the false accusers.
In his leisure time, he sought to right the monumental wrongs that the law handled either reluctantly or not at all. That was why he enjoyed the company of Captain Anger and his compatriots. They embraced that philosophy to the hilt.
He set his briefcase down beside a chair and sat. In a deep but pleasantly mellow voice, he said, “Skipper, I’ve got to be back in court by Tuesday. I read everything in the computer on the flight out here. What do you need from me?”
Captain Anger said nothing for a moment, then turned to speak. As he was about to say something, the oak double doors of the office swung wide with a jarring crash.
“Hellfire, boy!” shouted an unmistakably Texan voice. “Ya drag me out here promising four skull jobs and they tell me I’ve got another hour to wait!”
The man who shouted stood at average height and medium build. The two-inch heels of his grey ostrich-skin cowboy boots, though, coupled with his overbearing attitude, made him appear nearly as tall as the lawyer Paine. Clad in black jeans held up by a silver concho belt and a black cavalry shirt trimmed with silver, he clompped in and made a show of
removing his jacket— a full-length grey duster as formidable as that worn by any gunslinger in the Old West. He wore no gun, though. He reached up to remove the black ten-gallon hat trimmed with a hat band of silver Indian beadwork. From beneath the sweatband exploded a riot of salt-and-pepper grey hair. The man—easily the oldest of the six people present—displayed a little mad scientist’s gleam in his southerner’s eyes. He flung the Stetson so that it frisbeed across the office, landing squarely on a bronze bust of Benjamin Franklin. That was when Jonathan noticed the man’s hands.
The hands of the latest arrival were thin and long, almost half again as long as normal for a man his size. And though the fingers looked slender and the hands and wrists narrow, they grasped, held, and tossed aside hat and jacket with a grace and strength that belied their delicate appearance. For the hands of Dr. Uriah West served as his most powerful tools, instruments of life with a healing ability of incomparable proportions.
Captain Anger nodded at the newcomer. “Tex, Sun Ra—I’d like you to meet Jonathan Madsen, grandson of Dr. Julius Madsen. Jonathan—”
“Call me Johnny, if you’d like, Mr. Anger.”
“All right.” Captain Anger smiled. “And you can call me Cap.” He looked back at Sun Ra and Tex. “Johnny, meet Jefferson Paine, Esquire, and Dr. Uriah West.”
“Call me Sun Ra,” rumbled the attorney’s pleasant, deep voice.
“And my handle’s Tex,” the doctor said with a wide grin, “as if ya couldn’t guess.”
Jonathan nodded at them, a little subdued by the strange assemblage of talent. He had seem some interesting types at his grandfather’s lab, but no one nearly as wild as this crew.
Cap said, “The patients are on a chartered commercial jet out of San Jose. I suspect they have implants controlling their gross motor functions. Your operating room’s ready and your surgical team awaits.” He turned to the other arrival. “Sun Ra, thanks for handling those weapons charges with the Los Gatos police. Where’s Glenn?”
Flash spoke up. “Glennis is in Antarctica with the greenhouse project. There’s no way she could have made it here by midnight.”
Cap shook his head. “World’s still too big,” he muttered. Looking down at the device Flash laid on his desk, Cap pulled the tiny disc out of his pocket. “Let’s see if you can get something out of this.” He tossed the disc to Flash, who peeled off the adhesive tape and cleaned it with alcohol.
Hunched over the compact disc reader, the blond man adjusted the laser tracking so that it would move closer to the center to read everything close to the tiny spindle hole of the diminutive platter. Connecting it up to the computer inside Cap’s deceptively antique desk, Flash switched on the reader.
The flat screen built into the desk glowed as text appeared. It said:
Project Lilliput Titan Drexler College of Nanotechnology Julius Madsen, Ph.D.
William Arthur Dandridge, Ph.D.
I. Goals and Objectives
II. Flowcharts, Circuit Diagrams, Photo-Masking
III. A History of Microbotics
IV.
The Future of Microbotics
V.
Specific Military Applications
VI. Prototypes and Testing
VII. References Which?__
Cap tapped in the Roman numeral V and watched the information pop up on the screen. The muscles in his jaw tightened as he read of the military uses imagined by Madsen and Dandridge for their invention. Whether smuggled in over land or dropped down by aircraft or missile, the microbots could lay waste to entire cities, reducing buildings and people to their constituent molecules.
Cap’s aides clustered around the desk screen, joined by Jonathan who stared in a disbelief at what he read.
“My grandfather wouldn’t suggest such things,” he said. “He’d never think up ways to kill people.”
Rock spoke as gently as his Slavic tones allowed. “Sometimes people have to say or print things they don’t believe in order to get funding. Sometimes scientists don’t realize what they consider interesting theories somebody else considers real and useable weapons. My own father built missiles for Soviet Union. He dreamt of travelling into space, but missiles he built military just used for atom bombs. He kept doing it, though. He had family to think of. Now rockets used for space travel, but my father is dead.” Rock shrugged. “Very little justice in world.”
Cap nodded. “Well, we’re going to provide a little in the case of Dr. Dandridge.” He keyed in the section concerning prototypes and testing. After scanning the pages scrolling past, he said, “Johnny, do you know what Pacific Test Site Three is?”
“It could be a pair of islands off Baja California called the Escollos Alijos. Dandridge has a research lab there.”
“Then we’ll go as soon as Tex removes those implants from the zombies. We may need to know what makes them tick.” Captain Anger stood and gazed at his five fellow adventurers. “We can’t stop the spread of technology just because it is sometimes misused. But we can stop those who seek to pervert science toward evil ends.”
He switched off the disk reader and called up a map of the Baja California coastline. In the Pacific Ocean roughly 250 miles west of the town of Santo Domingo lay Escollos Alijos.
He looked up at Flash. “Call Long Beach,” he said, “and have the Seamaster prepped for takeoff. Fully prepped.”
“What about me? Am I going?” Jonathan asked.
Captain Anger took a moment to address the eager young man. “My friends and I are used to danger—we choose it freely, even enjoy it a bit. I have no right to endanger you, though. Stay here with Flash. You’ll be in radio contact with us every step of the way.”
Jonathan’s expression faded to disappointment. “All right. Say—is there anyplace to eat around here?”
Cap smiled. “Second floor cafeteria. Help yourself.”
After the boy departed, Captain Anger gazed thoughtfully at his five companions. Rock, Leila, Flash, Sun Ra,
