Micro

Eric stood in the middle of the Omicron lab, holding the bot controller in his hand, looking around, listening. So far so good. He couldn’t see the bots but he knew they were there, clinging to the ceiling. He listened for a faint hum. He might just hear their turbines if they sensed him and started dropping off the ceiling, coming for him. If the bots hadn’t been disarmed, he’d only know when he started to bleed. But he heard nothing, saw nothing, and felt nothing. His controller still worked; he had disarmed the bots. He gave a sigh of relief.

“We’re good,” he said.

There were objects sitting on the lab benches, covered with black cloth. It was hard to see just what they were in the dim light.

“I’m going to show you,” Eric said on the squirt radio to Rick and Karen, “why Vin Drake wanted to kill me. And why he killed your friends.” Eric stopped in the middle of the room, and held out his arm sideways, bent at the elbow. “Land on my arm,” he said. “You can get a closer look that way.”

Rick and Karen landed their planes on his forearm. Moving carefully and shielding the planes with his hand so they wouldn’t be blown off by a stray gust of air, he approached the closest bench. He removed the cloth from one of the objects. It was an aircraft, small, sleek, vicious-looking. It did not have a cockpit.

“It’s a Hellstorm UAV,” Eric said. “An unmanned aerial vehicle.”

“A drone, you mean?” Rick asked.

“Exactly. A drone. No pilot.”

It had a wingspan of ten inches.

Eric brought his arm close to the drone, letting Rick and Karen have a good look.

“This is a giant prototype of a Hellstorm,” he said. “Once it’s flight-tested, it will be shrunk down to half an inch.”

Instead of landing gear, the Hellstorm had four jointed legs with what looked like sticky pads on the ends, just like the feet on the hexapod trucks. Under its wings it carried missiles: two glass tubes with long steel needles at their noses, fins, and what looked like a rocket motor in the tail.

“What does it do?” Rick asked.

“Indeed-what does it do?” Eric echoed. “It’s a military drone the size of a moth. It can be used for surveillance. It can also kill people. It can evade any security system in existence. It can fly under a door or through a crack around a window. It can cling to a person’s skin or clothing. It can also crawl, using those legs. It can fly along the electrical conduits inside a wall, then pop out and fly around inside a room. It can kill any person, anywhere, anytime. You see those rockets under its wings? Those are toxin micro-missiles. The missile is armed with super-toxins that Nanigen has discovered and extracted from life-forms in the micro-world-poison from worms, spiders, fungi, and bacteria. The missile has a flight range of ten meters. This means the drone has standoff-attack capability: it can fire toxin missiles from a distance. If one of those super-toxin missiles embeds in your skin, you’ll die fast. One micro-drone can kill two people, since it carries two missiles.”

“What are those scoops along the fuselage? Are they jet intakes?” Rick asked.

“No. Those are air samplers. They’re used for targeting.”

“How’s that?” Karen asked.

“The Hellstorm can smell you. Every person gives off a unique fingerprint of scent. Each one of us smells a little different from every other person. Our DNA is unique, so naturally the combination of pheromones given off by our body is unique, too. A micro-drone can be programmed to seek out the odor of a particular person. Even if you are at a rock concert, the drone can find you in the crowd and kill you.”

“This is a nightmare,” Karen King said.

“The nightmare has no end,” Eric Jansen said. “Think of a presidential inauguration. Think of a thousand Hellstorms released into the air, all of them programmed to seek out the president of the United States. If just one micro-drone gets through, the president dies. Micro-drones could take out the government of any nation-Japan, China, Britain, Germany-any nation could be cut down by a swarm of micro-drones.” He turned himself around slowly, while Rick and Karen took in the scene from his arm. “This room is Pandora’s box.”

“So Nanigen isn’t about medicine,” said Karen.

“Nanigen is about medicine. It’s just that Nanigen is working both sides of the street. Ways to save lives and…ways to end lives. This Hellstorm,” he touched it lightly, “is a drug-delivery system.”

“And you found out about it, so Drake had to kill you.”

“Not quite. I knew about the Omicron program all along. Nanigen has a contract with the Department of Defense to develop micro-drones. The research went much better than the DOD people got told. Vin started lying to the government. He started telling them the micro-drones were a failure.”

“Why?” Rick asked.