Micro

“It’s a very long shot.” He explained that the top speed of a micro-plane was seven miles an hour. “The trade winds average fifteen miles an hour across Oahu. If you try to fly into the wind, you’ll go backward. If you get the wind at your back, you might get across Pearl Harbor. Or maybe not. It also depends on whether I decide to let you have my planes. These are solo-seaters, they carry only one person. There’s three of you and there’s three planes. That doesn’t leave an airplane for me, now, does it?”

“Dr. Rourke, I would pay you a very large sum of money for one of your planes,” Danny said. “I inherited a trust fund. It would be yours.”

“I have no need for money, Mr. Minot.”

“Well, what would work for you?”

“To see you bring down Vincent Drake. If you can do that, you can have my planes.”

“Absolutely, we’ll get Mr. Drake,” Danny said.

Karen remained silent. Rick glanced at her. What was going on with her? Then he asked Rourke how Rourke would survive if he didn’t have a plane.

“I’ll build another one,” Rourke said, shrugging off the question. “I collected a lot of spare parts.” Then Rourke took charge. He had them sit in the cockpits, and he explained the controls. “It’s very simple. Everything’s computer-controlled. This is the stick. If you make a mistake, the computer corrects your action. There’s a radio-here’s the headset.” They could talk to each other once they had gotten aloft. But there was no radar or navigation instrumentation.

How would they find Nanigen?

“Kalikimaki Industrial Park should be obvious from the air-it’s a group of warehouses on the Farrington Highway.” He gave them a course heading.

“Okay,” Rick said. “So we manage to get into Nanigen, then what?”

“There will be security bots guarding the tensor core.”

“Security bots?”

“Flying micro-bots. However, I don’t think you’ll have a problem. You’re too small to register on the bots’ sensors. They won’t see you. You can fly past the bots without waking them up. There’s a way to operate the generator from the micro side, if you’re very small. I designed the control myself. The control is located in the floor of the room underneath a hatch. The hatch is in the center of Hexagon Three. It’s marked with a white circle. You should see the white circle from the air.”

“Is the control complicated?”

“No. Just throw open the hatch and hit the red emergency button. You’ll get supersized-” He stopped talking and was staring at Rick. At his arm.

Rick had been leaning against a plane, his sleeve rolled up. Rourke stared at the bruises, lengthening up Rick’s arm. “You’re starting to crash,” he said.

“Crash?” Rick thought he meant the plane.

“Once the bleeding starts, you’re finished. Let’s get you into the magnet,” Rourke said to him sharply. “You’re hours from a crash.”

Karen looked at her arms. They weren’t in such great shape either. It was going to be a race against time. Wait for dawn, and hope nobody’s started bleeding by then.

Ben Rourke advised them to sleep inside the magnet. He couldn’t guarantee anything, but the magnetic field might delay the onset of symptoms. The magnet room had a fireplace in it, too, and Rourke hauled in pieces of candlenut, and started a fire. Karen and Rick climbed into the hole in the doughnut of the magnet, wrapped in blankets, and tried to settle down for the night. Neither of them felt terribly relaxed. Yet they were so incredibly tired. Time ran more swiftly in the micro-world, and a day’s rest could not come too soon.

Danny Minot refused to sleep in the magnet. He said he would prefer to sleep in the main hall, where he settled into one of Rourke’s chairs and wrapped himself in a blanket.

Rourke threw another piece of nut on the fire, and stood up. “I’m going to the hangar to get the planes ready. You will need to launch at first light.” Rourke went off down the tunnels into the hangar. He would service the micro-planes, test the instruments, and top off their electric charges, readying them for takeoff the moment daylight glimmered.

Danny Minot found himself alone in the hall, curled up in the chair. He couldn’t possibly sleep. He drank the last of the Jack Daniels, and tossed the bottle away. His arm was stirring, moving on its own, the skin bulging and making crackling noises. He lifted the blanket and looked, and he could see the grubs twitching. He couldn’t stand it. He began to cry. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe the terrible state of his arm, maybe it was his general situation, but he lost it. He wept, and looked down the hall where Rourke had gone. How long would Rourke be gone?

And that was when his arm came apart.

There was a cracking sound, a sound like paper tearing. He didn’t feel anything, but he looked down at the noise. And saw the head of a grub pushing out through a widening split in the skin of his arm. It had a glistening head. It was huge, and it was squirming, waving its head around, lengthening as it struggled out.

“Oh, God! It’s hatching!” he whispered.