Watanabe got an answer to his phone call. “Marty?” he said, putting the phone back to his ear. “We’ve got a problem at Nanigen.”
Eric Jansen swung the fat-tire truck into the entrance of the Kalikimaki Industrial Park, and cruised past the Nanigen building. Apart from a sodium light splashing the entrance door, the place seemed lightless and dead, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Karen King and Rick Hutter stood on the dashboard of the truck next to their aircraft. Near them a plastic hula girl bobbled, stuck to the dashboard and swinging in a grass skirt. The hula girl loomed over Karen and Rick.
Eric drove the truck inside an unfinished building, just the frame of a warehouse and some concrete block walls, which sat next to Nanigen. He parked behind a wall, out of sight. He shut off the engine and got out, and listened for a few moments, and looked around. Time to move on Nanigen.
He put on the squirt radio headset, and spoke into the voice pickup. “Launch your planes and follow me.”
Karen and Rick climbed into their planes and took off. Eric could hear the props whining near his ears as he crossed the lot, heading for Nanigen. He realized they were flying directly behind his head, to keep out of the wind.
“You okay?” he said on the radio.
“Fine,” Karen answered. She didn’t feel fine, she felt terrible, like a bad case of flu coming on. Every joint in her body ached. Rick probably felt worse, she thought, since he’d had loads of toxins in his bloodstream. That would accelerate the bends in him, probably.
The front door was locked. Eric opened it with a key. He held it open for a moment to let Karen and Rick fly through. Then he closed the door behind him.
He moved along the main corridor at a slow walk, hearing the mosquito-like buzzing behind his head. He glanced back and saw the two micro-planes, their propellers whirring, floating along under the ceiling tiles, bobbing in air currents generated by the building’s air-handling system. His head created turbulence, and they bounced around in his wake as he walked. “Don’t get sucked into a vent,” he warned them.
“Couldn’t we land on your shoulder? You could carry us-” Karen said to Eric.
“You’re better off in the air. You might need to get away fast-if I run into…trouble.” Eric glanced back at the planes, to make sure they were still behind him, and stopped at a corner, and peered around it. He was looking down a long corridor past windows covered with black shades. There was nobody in sight. He crossed this corridor and continued down a side hallway to a door, and opened it, and went in, the planes following him. “My office,” he said on the squirt.
Eric’s office had been ransacked. Papers were strewn about, and his computer was gone. Eric pulled open a drawer in his desk, rummaged through it, and said, “Whew. It’s still here.” He took out a device that resembled a game controller. “It’s my bot controller. It should disarm the bots,” he explained to Rick and Karen.
Then he led them back to the main corridor, and they flew along behind him past the darkened windows. Eric stopped before the door marked TENSOR CORE. He pushed the door.
It wouldn’t open. There was no security pad, just a plain lock, he explained. “Shit,” he said. “This door has been locked from the inside. That means…”
“Somebody’s in there?” Rick asked.
“Could be. But there’s another way into the generator room. We can get in there through the Omicron zone.”
The bots in the Omicron zone might be programmed to kill an intruder. There was no way to know without entering the zone and seeing what the bots did. Eric just hoped his bot controller would work. He led the flyers around a corner, turned right, and stopped by a nondescript door. The door had on it only a small, unfamiliar symbol, with a single word: MICROHAZARD.
Rick flew past the symbol, a few inches from it, and said on the squirt radio, “What does this mean?”
“It means there are bots on the other side of the door that are capable of causing death or serious injury-if they’re programmed that way. It could be nasty in there.” Eric held up the controller where the flyers could see it clearly. “Let’s hope this controls them.” Then Eric tried the doorknob; it wasn’t locked. But he didn’t open it. Instead, he punched in a series of digits on the controller’s keypad. “You see, Drake thinks I’m dead,” he said on the squirt radio to the flyers. “I’m assuming Drake didn’t bother to delete my PIN number from my bot controller, since he figured I’d never be using it again.” He shrugged. “We’ll see.” He paused for a moment, pondering the danger on the other side of the door, and then thrust open the door and walked in. He stopped, holding the door open so that the micro-planes could follow him through.
They had entered the main lab room of the Omicron Project. The lights in the room were turned low, and the room was mostly dark. It was not a large space; it could have been a normal engineering lab. It contained some desks, some workstations, some lab benches with magnifying lenses mounted on them. Steel shelves held a myriad of small parts. A window made of thick glass looked into the tensor core; a door stood next to the window, an entry door that led straight from Project Omicron into the core.
Eric stood in the middle of the Omicron lab, holding the bot controller in his hand, looking around, listening. So far so good. He couldn’t see the bots but he knew they were there, clinging to the ceiling. He listened for a faint hum. He might just hear their turbines if they sensed him and started dropping off the ceiling, coming for him. If the bots hadn’t been disarmed, he’d only know when he started to bleed. But he heard nothing, saw nothing, and felt nothing. His controller still worked; he had disarmed the bots. He gave a sigh of relief.
“We’re good,” he said.
There were objects sitting on the lab benches, covered with black cloth. It was hard to see just what they were in the dim light.
“I’m going to show you,” Eric said on the squirt radio to Rick and Karen, “why Vin Drake wanted to kill me. And why he killed your friends.” Eric stopped in the middle of the room, and held out his arm sideways, bent at the elbow. “Land on my arm,” he said. “You can get a closer look that way.”
Rick and Karen landed their planes on his forearm. Moving carefully and shielding the planes with his hand so they wouldn’t be blown off by a stray gust of air, he approached the closest bench. He removed the cloth from one of the objects. It was an aircraft, small, sleek, vicious-looking. It did not have a cockpit.
“It’s a Hellstorm UAV,” Eric said. “An unmanned aerial vehicle.”
“A drone, you mean?” Rick asked.
“Exactly. A drone. No pilot.”
It had a wingspan of ten inches.
Eric brought his arm close to the drone, letting Rick and Karen have a good look.
“This is a giant prototype of a Hellstorm,” he said. “Once it’s flight-tested, it will be shrunk down to half an inch.”
Instead of landing gear, the Hellstorm had four jointed legs with what looked like sticky pads on the ends, just like the feet on the hexapod trucks. Under its wings it carried missiles: two glass tubes with long steel needles at their noses, fins, and what looked like a rocket motor in the tail.
“What does it do?” Rick asked.
“Indeed-what does it do?” Eric echoed. “It’s a military drone the size of a moth. It can be used for surveillance. It can also kill people. It can evade any security system in existence. It can fly under a door or through a crack around a window. It can cling to a person’s skin or clothing. It can also crawl, using those legs. It can fly along the electrical conduits inside a wall, then pop out and fly around inside a room. It can kill any person, anywhere, anytime. You see those rockets under its wings? Those are toxin micro-missiles. The missile is armed with super-toxins that Nanigen has discovered and extracted from life-forms in the micro-world-poison from worms, spiders, fungi, and bacteria. The missile has a flight range of ten meters. This means the drone has standoff-attack capability: it can fire toxin missiles from a distance. If one of those super-toxin missiles embeds in your skin, you’ll die fast. One micro-drone can kill two people, since it carries two missiles.”
“What are those scoops along the fuselage? Are they jet intakes?” Rick asked.
“No. Those are air samplers. They’re used for targeting.”
“How’s that?” Karen asked.
“The Hellstorm can smell you. Every person gives off a unique fingerprint of scent. Each one of us smells a little different from every other person. Our DNA is unique, so naturally the combination of pheromones given off by our body is unique, too. A micro-drone can be programmed to seek out the odor of a particular person. Even if
