on a black light attached to his helmet. The particles lit up like fireflies as they swirled in the murky water washing slowly to Joe’s left.
At the limit of his vision, Joe saw them quicken and speed toward the surface headed for the breach in the dam. That was the death zone. When that high-speed current reached him, there would be no escape.
Joe moved across the wall, hopping side to side like a spaceman on the moon. He washed the dye up and back across the area where the tunnel’s entry point was suspected to be. It flowed oddly over the uneven surface of the boulders and stones.
Ten minutes and twenty swaths later, they were still without luck.
“We need to go deeper,” Joe said. “Pull us back away from the dam.”
“It’s either that or call it a day,” Joe said.
A second later Joe felt the steel cable lift him off the slope. From there he was dragged backward perhaps another thirty or forty feet and dropped down again.
As he landed, he could feel the sideways pull of the current tugging at his feet. He pulled the trigger on the fluorescent spray and saw it catch in the crosscurrent to the left. At first it looked no different than the other marking attempts, but this time Joe noticed an eddy swirling in the pattern.
“Ten feet left,” he said.
“Yes.”
Joe began to walk. High above, the dive boat moved with him. He pulled the trigger again, aiming the reflective stream of particles right at the center of the eddy.
The glowing particles swirled and the majority of the spray was sucked into a gap between two railroad tie– sized beams of concrete, vanishing in a blink like fish disappearing into coral at the sight of a predator. It happened so quick, Joe had to trigger a second burst of the spray just to be sure.
“I’ve found it,” he said. “The gap is between two concrete pylons in the riprap. I can feel the suction from it.”
As Joe got closer, he felt himself being pulled into the gap. He could see sand and gravel disappearing from around the edges of the beams. A crater was widening beneath them, he could see what looked like a twenty- inch-diameter hole.
He wedged a foot against one of the concrete beams to keep from getting sucked in. As much as he wanted to block the hole, he personally didn’t want to be the plug.
“I’m ready for the mud.”
“The Ultra-Set,” Joe clarified, awkwardly holding himself back.
Careful to maintain his balance, Joe managed to jam the front end of the hose into the opening. As the pressure came up, he pulled the trigger.
The Ultra-Set began flowing out at high pressure, some of it escaped into the water, looking like magenta- colored whipped cream as it expanded and hardened. Most of it funneled into the breach drawn down by the suction of the unwanted tunnel.
“How much does this stuff expand?” Joe asked.
Joe hoped it would. And if there were any microbots left in the core, trying to widen and expand the breach, he hoped they would be caught in it and frozen in place like insects in amber.
The current tugged him to the left and he heard the rumble of the falls over the motor of the boat and the pump above him.
“Anything?” Joe asked after about thirty seconds.
“How much of this stuff do we have?”
Joe hoped it would be enough. He held the nozzle and reset his feet to fight the crosscurrent.
The major came on the radio next.
Joe looked up through the window in the top of the huge helmet. He could see the lights on the underside of the boat and the swirling turbulence where the propeller was churning full speed.
“I’m not exactly taking a lunch break down here,” he said.
Joe shut the nozzle off for a moment, climbed up on the boulder field and, using the leverage of his feet, pushed a boulder down the slope and into the gap. It plugged somewhat, leaving a much smaller fissure.
Joe jammed the hose back into place and pulled the trigger again. “Go to full pressure on the hose,” he said. “We either fill it or we don’t.”
Joe held the trigger down and the Ultra-Set surged forward. As it did, he felt the current changing around him. The pull from the opening in front of him was lessening, but the side load dragging him toward the breach was picking up steam.
Joe’s left foot slipped out from under him as the side current intensified and suddenly he was surrounded by red foam. The tunnel was packed and the Ultra-Set was spewing out of the now blocked hole like a bottle of carbonated soda that had been shaken and then opened.
Joe caught himself and then stumbled again. He shut off the valve.
“Bring me up!” he shouted.
The steel cord yanked him off the slope and then dropped him back down again, but it wasn’t a vertical tug, it was a sideways one that almost tipped him off his feet. For a second Joe was confused. Why was he being pulled sideways?
A call from above straightened it out. “
CHAPTER 57
GAMAY TROUT STARED AT KURT AUSTIN ON THE DARK, COLD bridge of the helipad. Nothing in the air could have chilled her like the words he’d just spoken.
“You’re not staying here,” Gamay said.
“Those things are overloaded with twelve of you,” he said. “Another one hundred and ninety pounds will put one of them in the drink.”
Down below, the lights had begun to blow as the horde of metal sand crawled over them and covered them up. All of zero deck had gone dark, central park no doubt being stripped bare.
A strange sound, like concrete blocks being dragged over metal, seemed to resonate from all directions as trillions of the microbots slid across one another, filling the nooks and crannies of the island and beginning to climb vertically.
“But you’ll die here!” Leilani cried out.
“I’m not going to die,” Kurt insisted.
Gamay noticed he never took his eyes off Jinn. “He’s going to give us the code and shut these things down before they eat us alive.”
