“We can’t go there, lieutenant.”
They were doing secret government work, classified, something with small robots. Drake was warning him off, hinting he’d have trouble with the government if he pursued this. Fine. Abruptly, Watanabe changed gears. “Why did your vice president jump off his boat?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Eric Jansen was an experienced boater. He knew to stay with his boat even in surf. He jumped into the surf for a reason. Why did he jump?”
Drake stood up, his face flushed. “I have no idea what you’re getting at. We’ve asked you to find our missing students. You haven’t found anybody. We’ve lost two key executives. You haven’t given us a damn bit of help there, either.”
Watanabe stood up. “Sir, we did find Ms. Bender. We’re still looking for Eric Jansen.” He took out his wallet and nudged out his business card.
Drake took the card and sighed as he looked at it, and an unpleasant expression flitted across his face. “To be frank, we are disappointed with the Honolulu police.” He let the card flutter down to his desk. “One wonders what you actually do.”
“Well, sir, the Honolulu Police Department is older than the New York Police Department-I didn’t know if you knew that. We’ll just keep working our cases like we always do, sir.”
“We’ve got five more of them.” Dorothy Girt laid the photographs out for Watanabe on her lab bench. They showed the same devices, each with a propeller inside a housing and a gooseneck with blades. “I found them in the Asian John Doe. A smelly job.”
“How did you find them, Dorothy? They’re really small.”
Dorothy Girt flashed him a cool smile of triumph, and opened a drawer, and held up a heavy object. It was an industrial horseshoe magnet. “I swiped it over the wounds. Darned thing is heavy.”
She put the magnet aside, then showed him a blowup photo of one of the robots. The bot had been split cleanly, in a perfect cutaway view. Incredibly small chips and circuitry were visible, and something that looked like a battery, a driveshaft, gears…
“This thing is cut perfectly in half! How did you do that, Dorothy?”
“It was simple. I mounted it in an epoxy block, just like a tissue sample. Then I sliced it with a microtome. Same thing you do with tissue samples.” Dorothy’s microtome, with an ultrasharp blade, had split the micro-bot right down the middle. “Note this feature, Dan.”
He bent over the photo and followed her finger to a boxlike object in the guts of the robot. A small lowercase n was printed on the box.
“So,” he said. “The CEO lied to me.” He wanted to slap Dorothy on the back, but stopped himself at the last moment. Dorothy Girt didn’t seem like a person who would welcome the gesture. Instead he offered her a slight nod of the head in the Japanese mode of respect-a family habit. “Excellent work, Dorothy.”
“Hmp,” she snorted. Her work was never anything but excellent.
Chapter 36
Tantalus Crater 31 October, 1:00 p.m.
Mother Fucking Nature,” Danny Minot muttered. “It’s nothing but monsters with insatiable appetites.” He was trudging along, dragging his grass-covered feet and holding his swollen arm protectively. His arm seemed to have gotten even bigger, to the point where his shirt sleeve was beginning to show small rips and tears. Rick Hutter and Karen King walked along next to Danny, Rick wearing the backpack, Karen holding a machete bared and ready for action. They were the last three survivors. They were stumbling across a vast, curving sweep of land, covered with sand and gravel. It was the lip of Tantalus Crater. The open land extended to a bushy line of bamboo in the distance, towering to an immense height. Through a gap in the bamboo, a boulder the size of a mountain lurked, moss-covered and furrowed with gullies. The boulder seemed to be miles distant, at least for people of their size.
The sun beat down on them. No rain had passed over Tantalus in many hours. They were getting very thirsty. Their small bodies lost moisture fast.
Karen felt exposed. They were targets. In motion across a wasteland, without cover. A bird passed overhead, and she cringed and clutched her machete. But it wasn’t a mynah, it was a hawk circling over Tantalus, and the humans were too small to make a decent meal for a hawk-or so she hoped.
“Are you okay, Karen?” Rick asked.
“Stop worrying about me.”
“But-”
“I’m fine. Check on Danny. He looks bad.”
Danny had sat down on a stone and seemed unable to keep going. He was fondling his bad arm, adjusting the sling, and his face had gone white.
“You okay, man?”
“What’s the meaning of that question?”
“How’s your arm?”
“There’s nothing wrong!” But now Danny was staring at his arm. A muscle in his arm spasmed, tensing against the cloth, relaxing, tensing again. It looked involuntary. Danny seemed to have lost control of the muscles.
“Why is it doing that?” Rick asked, as the spasms moved in corrugated waves along Danny’s arm. The arm seemed to have a life of its own.
“It’s not doing anything,” Danny insisted.
“But Danny, it’s jerking-”
“No!” Danny shouted, pushing him away, and he picked up his arm and moved it out of Rick’s reach, cradling it with his good hand and turning his back to Rick as if he were guarding a football. Rick began to suspect that Danny had lost all motor control of his arm.
“Are you able to move your arm?”
“I just did.”
Suddenly there was a tearing, splitting sound. Danny started moaning, “No…no…” His shirt sleeve was finally coming apart. As the sleeve split, it revealed a horrible sight. The skin had become translucent, like oiled parchment. Beneath the skin, fat white ovoids rested, twitching slightly. They had a contented look.
“The wasp laid eggs,” Rick said. “It was a parasite.”
“No!” Danny screamed.
The eggs had hatched. Into larvae. Grubs. They’d been feeding on the tissues in his arm. Danny stared at his arm, holding it and moaning. The popping sounds in his arm-those were the eggs hatching…the grubs were digging…chewing through his arm…he whimpered, and began screaming. “They’ll hatch!”
Rick tried to calm him. “We’ll get you medical help. We’re nearly at Tantalus…”
“I’m dying!”
“They won’t kill you. They’re parasites. They want to keep you alive.”
“Why?”
“So they can keep feeding-”
“Oh, God, oh, God…”
Karen picked him up. “Come on. You gotta keep moving.”
They resumed walking, but Danny was slowing them down. He kept stumbling and sitting down. He couldn’t take his eyes off his arm, as if the grubs had hypnotized him.
Halfway across the ground they came to a round tube made of blobs of clay stuck together. The tube emerged from the ground, like a bent chimney.
Karen said, “I wish Erika was here. She might have been able to tell us what made it.”
They had to assume the mud chimney held something dangerous, probably some kind of insect. They gave the chimney a wide berth, ready to dash for cover if anything moved. As they passed it, the Great Boulder drew
