Micro

He had been monitoring all the major intracompany data feeds, waiting, and hoping, for news of his brother and the other graduate students. He had felt pretty sure that Drake had dumped them somewhere, maybe at the arboretum, though he couldn’t be certain. He had gone there in the truck and walked into the valley through the tunnel, and had listened with the equipment but heard nothing. Nevertheless, he had hoped that Peter would turn up sooner or later. He had had faith in Peter’s resourcefulness. He had waited, hoping he could rescue Peter and the others.

He had made a terrible mistake. He should have gone to the police immediately, even if it had guaranteed his own death.

The call had come in almost an hour ago. Damn! He had taken his sweet time getting that food! Eric swore and dragged open the drawer, scooped up the laptop and a radio headset, and ran down the stairs. In the driveway, the two guys were sitting beside the parked truck. Eric didn’t have a car. He had worked out a deal with one of the guys to rent the truck, paying fifty bucks every time he used it. Now, he handed the guy fifty dollars and got in, placing the equipment on the seat next to him.

“When you be back?”

“Don’t know.” He started it.

“You okay, man?”

“There’s been a death in my family.”

“Oh, sorry, man.”

He swung onto Kalakaua Avenue and immediately realized he’d made a mistake. Kalakaua was the main drag of Waikiki, and the crowds had flooded the avenue, people going on foot and in cars. He should have gone the other way to Diamond Head. But that probably would have been just as bad. As he inched his way through the stoplights, past the major hotels, he began to cry again, and this time he let it happen. It’s my fault, he told himself. My brother is dead and it’s my fault.

Drake had planned the killing with extra layers of security, different ways to make Eric die. Eric wasn’t sure exactly how Drake had done it, but Drake had made the boat stall in heavy surf, and he’d rigged something that had launched two Hellstorms at Eric. The killer bots flew out of the cuddy cabin after the boat stalled. At first Eric had thought they were flies or moths, but then he saw the propellers, and the munitions, too. After he jumped out of the boat with the killer bots flying after him, he had to keep himself under water, to avoid them. He had texted Peter just before he jumped, warning Peter to stay away, but there had been no time to explain things.

Eric was a strong swimmer and knew how to handle himself in surf. He had gone into the surf without a life jacket, diving deep whenever a breaker passed over him, in order to keep himself safe from the bots. He had considered the surf the safest place to be. Safer than anywhere else just then. He swam into a small cove, where there was a pocket beach known locally as the Secret Beach. The beach was tucked among the headlands. You couldn’t see it from most places. It could only be reached by a hiking trail.

He had come out of the water at the Secret Beach only after he was reasonably sure no one had seen him swim there. He had bagged a ride into Honolulu from some local guys, who asked no questions and could not have cared less where he came from. Going to the police had not been a good option. The police would never believe his story, that tiny flying robots armed with super-toxin weapons had been sent by the CEO of the company to kill him: they would think he was schizophrenic. And if he went to the police, Drake would learn he was alive, and would send more Hellstorms, and he’d be killed for sure and very fast. In Honolulu, he had not returned to his apartment: Drake might have set a trap for him there. Instead, he’d visited a pawnshop, and taken his Hublot chronograph watch off his wrist and pawned it for several thousand dollars. He needed to go into hiding, and figure out how to bring Drake to justice. He had put down cash for a seedy, low-profile rental.

As Nanigen’s vice president for technology, Eric Jansen knew a lot about the company’s communication network. A degree in physics helped. After a trip to Radio Shack, he had tweaked up a listening device. He had begun scanning the Nanigen intracorporate channels, and learned that his brother had shown up in Hawaii immediately, then had disappeared along with the other students. He suspected Drake had done something with the students. He had not believed Drake would murder them; that would be too obvious, and Drake was a clever man. So Eric had assumed that Drake had made them disappear in the micro-world temporarily, and that they would eventually reappear.

Eric had been waiting for the moment when his brother would come to the surface, for he had faith in Peter. He had thought that Peter would get through this, and come to light, somehow, and that he, Eric, would eventually rescue him. If the two of them could go to the police, there would be two corroborating witnesses to Drake’s crimes.

This was not to be.