Micro

Rick saw a man get out of the truck. He circled through the branches, listening for bats, but he didn’t hear any sonar, and he flew closer to the man. The man walked to the Great Boulder and got down on his knees in the darkness. His face wasn’t visible. The man stood up from the boulder and walked away, crashing through the underbrush, a black silhouette. Rick followed him, dodging among branches and trunks.

The man arrived at the parked vehicle. It was a strange-looking truck with fat tires and a weird paint job. The man got in, and the dome light came on, revealing his face.

Rick had seen the man before. Where? He circled past the window as the truck started with a roar.

“Karen!” he called on the radio. “Who is this guy?”

She swooped past Rick and made a steep turn by the truck. She was getting the hang of flying; it was pretty easy. “It’s Peter’s brother!”

“I thought he was supposed to be dead. Is he in with Drake?”

“How would I know?” Karen answered testily.

The truck started and began rumbling off, moving along the dirt track.

Karen ran her engine up to EMERGENCY MAXIMUM. Running at full power, their planes could barely keep up with the truck, even though it bounced slowly along the dirt road. The moment the truck arrived at a paved road it would speed up and they would never catch it, and it would be gone. They had to get Eric’s attention soon.

He was driving with the windows rolled up. Karen flew alongside the window, close to the man’s face, and waggled her wings. No reaction. Then the truck sped up, leaving them behind in swirling dust.

“Get in the slipstream,” Rick said. There would be a zone of dead air behind the truck’s cab, he thought, so he dove for it, watching the back of the man’s head in the glass. His plane flipped over and tumbled: the air behind the cab had gone turbulent and chaotic, and he nearly crashed on the truck’s bed.

The truck came to a bad spot in the road, where rain had washed a gully. The man slowed, and rolled down his window and leaned out to get a better look.

Karen flew through the window into the cab. She circled once, and the man drew his head back in. She made a slow pass in front of his eyes, and rolled the plane, its lights winking.

He saw that. He jammed on the brakes. “Hey-!” His eyes followed her as she banked and turned and flew low over the dashboard. He held out his hand, palm upward, and she landed on his hand. She climbed out and stood on his hand, while he looked at her.

Rick flew in and landed on the dashboard.

“Which-ones-are-you?” he said, his voice rumbling. He held Karen delicately, and he tried not to breathe too much as he spoke. He didn’t want to blow her off his hand.

Karen held up her radio headset and pointed to it. She remembered that Jarel Kinsky had said the radios could be used to communicate with full-size people. Maybe it would be easier to talk by radio.

“You-bet.” He put her down on the dashboard, with her plane, and opened the glove box and took out a headset, and plugged it into a mess of electronic equipment sitting on the seat. “Go-to-seventy-one-point-two-five-gigahertz,” he said.

Rick and Karen put on their headsets and tuned their aircraft radios.

The man opened his mouth and spoke words that rolled out: “Can-you-understand-me-now?” An instant later the same words sounded on their headsets in Eric’s normal speaking voice: “Can you understand me now? This is a squirt radio. It collects my voice and speeds it up and squirts it at you. It also slows down your voices so I can understand you.”

They explained to Eric what had happened. “We need to get into the generator as soon as possible,” Karen said.

“First…about my brother.”

They told him. As Karen described Peter’s death, Eric’s palms hit the steering wheel, throwing the micro-humans and the planes into the air. They came down amid choking dust particles, and waited. They gave him time. When he opened his eyes, his face had become set and calm. “I’m taking you into Nanigen. Then I’m going to find Vincent Drake.”

Chapter 48

Chinatown, Honolulu 1 November, 2:30 a.m.

Dan Watanabe woke to the buzzing of his cell phone. He reached for it in the dark and knocked it off the bedside table, and heard it hitting the floor. He groped for the light, fearing bad family news: his seven-year-old daughter, living with his ex-wife; his mother…but the caller was the security chief of Nanigen: “Got a minute, lieutenant?”

Watanabe ran his tongue over a sticky mouth. “Yeah.”

“There was a fire on Tantalus tonight.”

Watanabe grunted. “What?”

“It was small, probably didn’t get reported. Some people died in it.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Those students-they were murdered.”

He sat up fast, instantly full awake. Take the man into custody, get a statement. “Where are you? I’ll have a car-”

“No. I just want to talk with you.”

“You know the Deluxe Plate?” It was open all night.