second from his ammo pouch, slamming it home and releasing the charger, which had locked open after the last round. There was no slide to drive home for there were no cases to eject. The weapon simply blazed out its projectiles without the chatter and rattle of conventional automatic weapons.
Cap still had half his ammo left. Carefully aiming each rapid shot, he squeezed off an even dozen at the onrushing helicopter. Every one hit their mark, punching twelve holes in the cockpit windshield. He avoided the fuel tanks, knowing that the tracer bullets could turn the onrushing aircraft into a fireball.
Rock blasted another deafening burst at the chopper, many of the fiery streaks making an impact on fuselage, rotor, and turbines.
“Run for it!” he shouted, scrambling to the left.
The chopper, its engines and murderous pilot both dead, hurtled toward them, a mass of metal, glass, and inflammable fuel. Cap estimated where it would hit and jumped far afield, running across the roof to the right and rear, practically under the advancing, falling machine.
With a shattering collision, it hit the edge of the building and tore out a section of the roof. Without even slowing, it dragged the debris along as it twisted and cartwheeled to the pavement four stories below. A sickening crunch of impact arose from the street.
Cap rushed to the demolished edge of the building to look down at the scene.
The helicopter lay in ruins a few yards in front of the advancing silver tide. The smell of spilled jet fuel rose from the wreckage. The other helicopters overhead—police and reporters—jockeyed for the best view of
the disaster.
Without a word, Cap holstered his pistol and climbed down into the gaping wound in the side of the building. Rock followed, warily testing each shattered beam to ensure that it supported his not-inconsiderable weight. Cap moved with far more agility, maneuvering down the tangle of musty old wood and crumbling masonry like an experienced mountain climber on an alpine peak.
The damage reached to the windows of the second story. Cap gained his footing and paused on the ledge to search for a landing spot clear of detritus. After an instant’s deliberation, he lightly bounded from the ledge and plummeted feet-first toward the sidewalk. Extending his legs without locking his knees, he braced himself for the impact. Feet slammed against the concrete, powerful leg muscles contracted to absorb the energy of the fall. Like a cat he stayed on his feet, bending under the impact of a twenty-foot drop until his haunches very nearly touched his heels. Hands splayed, his fingertips hit lightly against the pavement to steady him and absorb the last few foot- pounds of energy from his fall.
From that position, he leapt forward like an Olympic sprinter, leaving Rock on the second story to contemplate a less drastic method of reaching ground level.
Captain Anger bounded over to the crushed bubble of the helicopter. Tearing open the door with one mighty hand, he reached in with the other to feel the throat of the blood-spattered corpse inside. Cap regretted the death of someone who could have provided valuable information. A quick pat search of the body turned up no identification. Cap’s hand came up from its exploration smeared with kerosene and lifeblood.
He turned the man’s head up; having lost his videocam on the roof, he memorized every feature that might still be recognizable. One ten-millimeter slug had hit the pilot in his jaw, shattering the bone and rendering the lower part of his face an unidentifiable red mess.
“Cap!” Leila cried. “Get out now!”
Cap’s gaze darted around the ruined aircraft interior, lighting upon a set of Jeppesen air charts. He seized the binder and jumped back out of the copter just as the advancing microbotic sea engulfed the wreckage.
The force of his retreat threw him back against the curb. With grunt, he stood and watched the blob overrun the helicopter, coating it as if an invisible artist electroplated everything in sight with a silver patina. Its contours softened. Within less than a minute, the billions of microbots devoured the obstacle and reduced it to microscopic bits. The minuscule electro-mechanical creatures utilized some of the chemicals—the kerosene and oil in the turbine engines, the glucose and oxygen in the pilot’s flesh and blood—as fuel. Some—the silicon in the electronics, the steel and aluminum in the fuselage—they used to build more copies of themselves.
They moved westward with unstoppable vehemence.
Captain Anger eyed the colony of artificial life coolly, considering his options.
Rock managed to kick in a second story window, climb through, and rush down to join his compeer. He skidded to a halt beside Anger and gaped in renewed awe at the voracious slime, allowing to slip from his tongue on of the few pieces of English slang he’d bothered to incorporate into his vocabulary.
“Geez, Cap,” he said, “that stuff’s hungry!”
A truck skidded around the corner at the west end of the street. Cap eyed it with relief. “Here comes an appetite suppressant.”
A harried young man jumped out of the driver’s seat and bounded over to Dr. Bhotamo. Cap and Rock set to unloading the truckload of cryogenic material. Firemen and police joined in—nervously—and within minutes they had surrounded the moving lake with a perimeter of large dewars—insulated fifty-five-gallon drums.
At Captain Anger’s request, the driver from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory handed the cryogenic suits to Rock and Leila. The thick, layered suits—similar to the suit Cap wore, if less versatile—glittered with a reflective coating of silvered Mylar. The three, when fully suited, looked like living extensions of the mirror pool. They surrounded the westward-moving lake at equidistant points, each standing near a drum of liquid nitrogen and holding a cryogenic spray gun.
“Go,” was all Cap had to say.
The three opened the nozzles and doused the lake with the ultra-cold liquefied gas. As the streams hit the warm afternoon air, clouds of icy vapor erupted, filling the street with an eerie mist that imparted the smell of a snowy day to the block.
As soon as the flow of nitrogen touched the microbots, the forward motion ceased. The surface took on an unreflective grey cast. Minuscule cracks appeared all over the frozen zone, making a snapping, popping sound similar to the cracking of an icy pond in a spring thaw.
Whenever a dewar emptied out, they disconnected the nozzle and attached it to another. Working in a clockwise fashion, they soon had the entire sea of electro-mechanical scavengers frozen solid. Cap continued to pour the liquid nitrogen onto the crumbly puddle, its peripheral edges, and the ditch-like scar it left in its wake.
“Spray everything it might have touched,” Captain Anger said over the commlink. “If even one single unit survives, it could start dismantling the damaged ones and replicate all over again!”
“ Gospodi polimya,” Rock said in awe. He sprayed even more widely, dousing the unreflective grey mass with every last droplet of the nitrogen.
After a few more moments, Leila’s last drum of nitrogen drained to empty. Cap’s and Rock’s soon followed. Cap set his nozzle on the drum and turned his attention to the smaller puddle that had once been the paramedics and their van. It seemed quiescent at the moment, though Cap knew that a beehive of microbotic activity churned on a molecular level.
Weir and Kompantzeff wrangled a shiny, studded sphere out of the van. About the size of a soccer ball, it possessed the same hexagon/pentagon design on its surface. At the intersection of each silver pentagon, though, a knob protruded. From each knob dangled a cable shielded in wire mesh. The cables ran to a briefcase-sized control board hefted by an assistant of Dr. Bhotamo. The trio set the equipment down beside Captain Anger at the edge of the puddle.
Carefully, Cap—still wearing the cryonic insulation suit— knelt and dipped an acid-resistant probe into the mass. It welled up around the plastic scoop like mercury adhering to gold.
“This stick’s made of long-chain polymers,” Cap said to Dr. Bhotamo, who watched from a respectful distance. “I suspect it will take the microbots longer to break the molecules down than it would something simpler, such as a steel probe.”
With utmost care, Captain Anger lifted up a silvery blob the size of a pea and turned on his knee toward the metal soccer ball. Lei had opened it along its equator. Rock switched on the power and a humming sound registered just below the level of hearing. With utmost care, Cap held the probe over the center of the containment vessel’s lower half and with one controlled snap of his wrist shook the droplet off the end of the rod. The tiny gob fell an inch and then floated, suspended in the absolute center of the sphere. Cap swiftly tossed the probe into the small pool of microbots, its purpose served, and turned his attention back to the magnetic levitation device. He gingerly hinged the upper half of the sphere into position over the lower half, taking care not to jostle the half that
