until he felt as if he was floating in space, and dancing with the bot, and dancing with Karen King, the three of them whirling around and around in a mad waltz.
The tensor generator powered up, and the fields crossed and recrossed, and wound up in poloidal loops, and the hexagons raised up and met the floor. Rick Hutter, Karen King, and a gigantic, enlarged bot were left resting on the floor. The people were full-size. The bot had been expanded to the size of a refrigerator.
Eric was lying on the floor, bleeding heavily from a wound in his leg and from several bot cuts, but he was conscious, and he kept the gun trained on Drake, who had started to crawl across the floor toward Eric, an expression of fear working on his face.
“Get Eric,” Rick said to Karen. They scooped Eric up by the shoulders and feet and began dragging him out of the chamber. The gun slipped out of Eric’s hands and hit the floor. Drake got to his feet, and made a mistake. Instead of going for the door, he went for the gun.
In that split second, Rick and Karen got Eric Jansen out of the generator room, and they slammed the door shut. Karen saw that it had a simple deadbolt. She threw the bolt.
This left Drake locked inside the generator room, in the company of a hundred flying micro-bots and one giant bot. The big bot sat on the floor, its compound eyes turning left and right, its gooseneck waving, its turbofan blades shrieking, but it couldn’t lift off. It had become too heavy to fly.
Drake glanced at the big bot, then stood up, holding the gun. Rick and Karen watched from behind the bulletproof window as Drake picked up the bot controller: Eric had smashed it thoroughly. He tossed it away.
They saw Drake’s lips moving, and heard his voice faintly through the glass: “Let me out.”
Rick shook his head.
Drake fired at the window. The bullet starred the glass, but didn’t break it.
Drake walked up close to the window. “Please help me. I’m very sorry.” A bead of blood appeared, hanging at the tip of his nose. He backed up a few steps, and looked around wildly, and swatted at a bot circling his head. He cursed, and waved his gun around, the light beam crisscrossing the chamber. He caught a bot in the light, and fired the gun at the bot. Pointing the light around, he fired again. And again and again Drake fired at the bots, until the tensor room filled with a haze of cordite smoke.
Then he took his cell phone out of his pocket; it was ringing again. “Hello, lieutenant. Would you please come get me? I’ll tell you everything, of course. I’m in a bit of trouble in the generator room. The generator room. In the center of the building. Bots? There are no bots in here, Dan, it’s perfectly safe…” The phone slipped out of his bloody fingers and clattered to the floor. A nosebleed drenched the front of his shirt.
Drake coughed, spraying blood. He staggered forward and pressed himself against the window and stared at Rick and Karen. “I will have you killed! I swear it-!” His eyes went wide, and a bead of blood appeared in the corner of his right eye. A bot emerged through the white of his eye and began crawling across the surface of Drake’s eye, dragging blood along with it as it crawled. Drake seemed to be watching the bot as it crossed his cornea. “Get off me,” he whispered, and dug a finger into his eye, and stared at his bloody fingertip, and screamed.
Then he turned the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. He had emptied the clip shooting at the bots.
Behind Drake’s back, the giant bot had turned its eyes on Drake. It advanced upon him, dragging its arms. Its gooseneck lashed out and the blades thrust up through Drake’s body cavity from below and burst out his chest. The bot raised him up, shook him on its gooseneck, and shrugged, slinging the body across the room.
Rick and Karen had turned their attention to Eric Jansen. Rick tore off his shirt and wrapped it around Eric’s leg to make a compress. He took Eric under the shoulders and began half-carrying, half-dragging him through the Omicron lab. He was barely conscious, having lost a lot of blood.
Then they heard the humming sound of bots. Karen felt a stinging sensation on the back of her neck, and slapped at it. Her hand came away bloody.
“Room’s contaminated! Move it, Rick!” Without thinking, she grabbed Eric with one hand and tried to sling him over her shoulder, but she couldn’t do it. For a moment she thought, What’s wrong? Her superpowers had vanished.
They managed to drag Eric into the hallway, and there they were met with a team of police officers, running, guns drawn, wearing body armor. Just behind came a slightly potbellied plainclothes detective. He wore a tactical vest but clearly wasn’t a member of the SWAT team.
“Get back!” Rick shouted at them. “Bots!”
“I know,” the detective said calmly. He turned to the men. “Get them out, quick.” To Karen and Rick, he said, “Is there anybody else in the building?”
“Drake. He’s dead.”
“Everybody out,” the detective said.
The officers bundled Rick and Karen along, and they scout-carried Eric, who had lost consciousness.
The last man out of the building was the detective. He came out through the door into the light of dawn, a trail of blood streaming from his forehead. The bots had found Dan Watanabe.
“Where’s Dorothy?” he called out.
Dorothy Girt had arrived in her Toyota. She came forward.
“You brought your magnet?”
“Of course.” She held up the industrial horseshoe magnet. She had grabbed it out of the forensic lab on the way over.
“Everybody into decon, hostages and officers,” said Watanabe, as he took off his vest. “Dorothy will decontaminate you.” An EMT squad brought Eric into the tent first, then loaded him into a medevac helicopter. Last of all, after everybody else had taken their turn, Lieutenant Watanabe walked into the white tent to have Dorothy get the bots out of him.
Chapter 51
The Pit 1 November, 5:55 a.m.
In the tensor generator room, the only thing that moved was the gigantic bot. It explored the room, shoving aside Drake’s corpse, looking for a way out. It couldn’t find a way out, so its program went into the drilling sequence. It bent its neck to the floor, and, using its knives, it cut through the plastic floor. When it had opened a hole, it broke through, crashing down into the pit full of electronic gear. There the bot continued to cut and chop, doing what it knew best.
Groaning, rending, crackling sounds came from below the floor of the generator room, the sounds mixing with blue and yellow flashes of electrical sparks. Suddenly there was a boiling hiss, and a cloud of vapor burst up through the hole in the floor. It was the sound and fury of superconducting magnets failing. The building shook as the magnetic fields in the generator went chaotic and relaxed. As the magnets failed they heated up suddenly, and the heat boiled the super-cooled liquid helium that surrounded the magnets. Helium vapor began pouring out of the pit.
Abruptly the lights in the building went out-circuit breakers had tripped. Meanwhile the giant bot still churned through the guts of Drake’s machine.
There was still somebody alive in the Nanigen building. In the pit, while the big bot hacked at machinery, a slender man watched. He moved slowly, carefully, no jerky movements, nothing to attract the bot’s attention. He removed a hard drive from a rack, pulling the data feed tapes out of their snaps. He slipped the drive into his jacket and left the pit quickly, climbing up a ladder, and from there he entered the fire escape tunnel. Behind him, he heard a thump, then a roar: the bot had started a fire.
The escape tunnel, lined with corrugated metal, went horizontally and ended at a ladder. Dr. Edward Catel, the liaison man from the Davros Consortium, climbed the ladder. The hard drive in his pocket contained five terabytes of data-all of Dr. Ben Rourke’s designs for the tensor generator, along with priceless engineering data from test runs of the generator. When he had put two and two together and decided that Vin Drake had probably ordered murders of his own employees, he realized that Drake had become unstable and therefore could no longer serve effectively as a chief executive. He had gotten in touch with certain people, who for some time had
