The KA-BAR blade, as tall to the micro-humans as a ten-story building, plunged through the bunker with a roar, driving shattered blocks of concrete through the room. The blade continued down into the earth, opening a gaping hole in the room. The edge began to saw raggedly through the bunker while rocking back and forth.
Rick clung to the bottom of the hatch, trying to spin it, trying to open it. He got the hatch open, and thrust out his duffel bag. But then the bunker began rising up into the air: he saw the ground below. The bunker turned completely sideways, until he was lying on the ladder. People were crowding behind him. He began reaching for the others. He grabbed Amar and pushed him out through the hatch, and saw him falling away. The bunker was rising higher, tilting. Peter Jansen got next to Rick. “Help me get the others out!” Peter shouted.
They managed to get Danny out through the hatch. They heard Danny scream, and saw him falling. Erika went next.
Inside the bunker, Jenny Linn had been pinned against the giant knife blade, her arm trapped between the blade and concrete. Karen King struggled to free Jen’s arm, while the blade moved sideways, threatening to crush them both.
“My arm,” Jenny whimpered. “I can’t move.”
A table slid up against Jenny, then a concrete fragment smashed the table and rammed into Karen. Karen kicked the concrete away, surprised at her strength, and worked frantically to free Jenny.
The bunker went down again, slammed against the ground, and the knife cut it in half, spilling Jenny and Karen out, revealing the sky above. Against the sky towered a man. A man they didn’t recognize. He opened his mouth and sounds rumbled out. He raised the knife high.
Karen picked Jenny up, and got her to her feet, watching the knife wave over them. Jen’s arm hung limply at a strange angle. “Run!” Karen screamed, as the great knife flashed downward at them.
Chapter 18
Fern Gully 29 October, 2:00 p.m.
The knife entered the ground between Karen and Jenny, driving them apart, and continued down into the earth for what seemed like a vast distance. Then it was withdrawn with a rumbling sound, shaking the world. Jenny was on her knees, holding her arm and moaning.
Karen scooped Jenny up with one hand, and began to run with her, heaving her across her back and sprinting at high speed. The knife plunged down again, but this time Karen had dived under a clump of ferns, still carrying Jenny on her back.
The ground thumped and bounced, and the thumping receded. The man was walking away, carrying the broken halves of the station in his hands. They saw him toss the pieces into a knapsack. He moved off, and was gone.
A silence descended. Jenny was crying.
“My arm,” Jenny said. “It hurts…hurts so much.”
Jen’s arm had been broken, badly. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you fixed up,” Karen said, trying to sound optimistic. Jen’s arm looked horrible, a compound fracture of the humerus, probably. Karen found a duffel bag lying on the ground nearby, and she opened it, and took out a radio headset, and began calling on it. “You guys? Anybody? I’m with Jenny. She has a broken arm. Can you hear me?”
Peter’s voice came on. “We’re okay. Everybody’s accounted for.”
They gathered under the fern, and placed Jenny on a leaf, using it like a bed. None of them had any medical experience. Karen opened the medical kit and found a syringe with morphine. She held it where Jenny could see it. “Do you want this?”
Jenny shook her head. “No. Too groggy.” She might need her wits, despite the pain. Instead, Jenny accepted a couple of Tylenol tablets, while Karen ripped up a piece of cloth and fashioned a sling. They helped her sit up. Jenny swayed, her face ashen, her lips pale. “I’ll be okay,” she said.
But she was not okay. Her arm was swelling dramatically, the skin darkening.
Internal bleeding.
Karen caught Peter’s eye, and she knew he was thinking the same thing she was. Remembering what Jarel Kinsky had said about the bends. You could bleed to death from a small cut. And this was not a small cut.
Peter looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. They’d slept for two hours.
The ground was scattered with debris. It was like a shipwreck. The duffel bags and the backpack lay in various places. Many other things had fallen out of the bunker when the knife had split it open. They found the machetes and the harpoon. Rick’s chinaberry rested on the ground nearby; it had fallen out of the tent. They had survival gear and supplies, at least, but where would they go? If Station Echo had been taken away, what had happened to the other stations? Had the man seen them? Did he work for Vin Drake?
They had to assume the worst.
They had been discovered. The stations had been taken away. Where to hide? Where to go? How to get back to Nanigen now?
As they stood pondering what to do, the sky grew darker. A gust of wind tugged at the leaves of a haiwale plant nearby, revealing the fuzzy undersides of the leaves. As Peter looked up, he saw the wind catching leaves overhead, flipping them over, tossing the leaves…
Then came a strange sound, a deep sploosh, and another sploosh. They watched in stunned surprise as a flattened sphere of water, of enormous size, fell on the ground next to them and exploded into a hundred smaller droplets flying everywhere. The afternoon rains had arrived.
“Get to high ground!” Peter shouted. “This way!” They began to run, heading upslope, grabbing whatever they could carry. Karen carried Jenny on her back, while raindrops exploded around them like bombs going off.
At Nanigen, Vin Drake turned away from his computer screen. He had been watching a weather-radar scan of the Ko‘olau Pali. Those trade winds were so dependable. As the winds ran up against the windward side of Oahu, they dropped their moisture on the mountains. The peaks of the Ko‘olau Pali were some of the wettest places on earth.
Don Makele knocked on the door. The security man entered and placed the pieces of Station Echo on Drake’s desk. “The beds are rumpled, toilet’s been used. And I saw a couple of them on the ground running. I ordered them to stop. I tried to stop ’em with my knife. They scattered like cockroaches.”
“That’s disturbing,” Drake said. “Very disturbing, Don. I told you to fix this.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?”
Vin Drake leaned back and tapped a gold mechanical pencil on his teeth. A portrait of him hung on the wall behind him, painted by an up-and-coming Brooklyn artist, in which Drake’s face seemed to fracture into bold colors; it was an image of power, and Drake liked it. “I want you to close off the security gate at the entrance to Manoa Valley. Stop the shuttle truck. The valley is to be sealed. And bring me your two best security men.”
“That would be Telius and Johnstone. I trained them in Kabul.”
“They have experience in the micro-world?”
“Plenty,” Makele answered. “What do you want them to do?”
“Rescue the students.”
“But you’re sealing off the valley-”
“Just do as I say, Don.”
“Yes, sure.”
“I’ll meet your men outdoors. Parking lot B, twenty minutes.”
The raindrops were pounding down, exploding, hurling gouts of water mixed with soil. Peter vanished in a cloud of spray as a raindrop hit him. The raindrop knocked Peter through the air and left him sprawled and coughing. The others ran, slipping and sliding, while more raindrops landed around them. Then came a sound like a freight train.
It was a flash flood running down a cleft in Fern Gully. It burst around a rock and past the base of a tree fern, and hit the people with a wall of brown water, sending them swimming for their lives. Karen was carrying Jenny along, when suddenly, as the flood hit, Jenny was torn from her back with a cry.
