Micro

Peter Jansen had run forward, waving a spear, shouting at the ants, trying to drive them off Kinsky, but it was too late. Peter stopped and stood his ground before the mass of struggling soldiers, holding the spear and watching the horror. He could buy time for the others to get away, he thought, and he started advancing toward the ants. Then he noticed that Karen King stood beside him, holding her knife. “Get out of here,” Peter said to her.

“No,” she said to him. She crouched, facing the ants, holding her knife in front of her. She could delay the ants, maybe, give the others time to escape. Meanwhile, more soldiers poured out of the nest. They began hunting around, seeking enemies. A soldier raced toward Peter and Karen, its mandibles wide.

Peter thrust his spear at the ant. The ant dodged it and went for him, moving extremely fast.

“Leave me, Peter!” Karen King shouted. She backed away from the ants. Then she leaped into the air, soaring far higher than a normal human could ever jump, and landed catlike away from the ants. At the same time, she pulled from her belt the spray bottle of defensive chemicals that she’d planned to show to Vin Drake. Benzos. Ants didn’t like benzos, she was pretty sure of that. She sprayed the stuff toward an advancing ant. The ant stopped instantly, turned around…and ran away.

“Yeah!” she yelled. The spray worked. It made them run like rabbits.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the others running away from the ant nest. Good. Buying them time. She kept spraying, and the spray held the ants back, stopped their attacks. But the bottle had contained only a small amount of the liquid. And still more soldier ants were breaking out of the nest. The nest had gone into full alarm. An ant leaped up onto Karen, landing on her chest, tearing her shirt, and it began snapping at her neck.

“Hai!” she shouted and grabbed the ant behind its head, held it up in the air, and with her other hand slammed her knife into the ant’s head. The blade punched through the ant’s head, and a clear liquid squirted out-it was hemolymph, insect blood. Instantly she flung the ant away. It landed on the ground and went into convulsions, its brain destroyed. But the ants had no fear, no sense of self-preservation, and there seemed to be no end to their numbers. As the ants closed in on her, Karen jumped away, soaring head over heels backward like a circus tumbler, and again landed on her feet.

And then she ran.

Ahead of her, she saw the other humans running explosively fast, driven by fear, leaping over leaves and fern stems, dodging things, fleeing like gazelles. How can I run this fast? I’ve never run so fast in my life…Karen thought. Clearly their bodies were much stronger and faster in the micro-world. It gave Karen a feeling of superhuman power and exhilaration. She leaped over obstacles like a hurdle runner, clearing things in a series of incredible jumps. She realized she was sprinting at about fifty miles an hour, in the scale of the micro-world. I killed an ant. With a knife and my bare hands.

They soon got out of the visual range of the ants. Ahead, in the distance, stood the tent.

Worker ants continued to butcher Kinsky’s body. They bit off the arms and legs and cut the torso into chunks, making cracking sounds as they sheared through the ribs and spine, yanking out the man’s viscera. The ants drank the spilled blood, making sucking noises. A welter of torn clothing, blood, and intestines was strewn about, while the ants began transporting the meat underground.

Karen King stopped running for a moment to look back, and she saw the ants carry Kinsky’s head down the hole. The severed head stared back as it went down, pulled by workers. It seemed to hold a look of surprise.

Chapter 15

Nanigen Headquarters 29 October, 10:00 a.m.

It was a sunny day in central Oahu, and the view from Nanigen’s meeting room swept across half the island. The windows looked over sugar-cane fields to the Farrington Highway, then to Pearl Harbor, where Navy ships floated like gray ghosts, and to the white towers of Honolulu. Beyond the city, a ragged line of peaks extended along the horizon, painted in misty greens and blues. These were the Ko‘olau Mountains, the Pali of Oahu. Clouds had begun to build over the range.

“It will rain on the Pali today. It usually does,” Vincent Drake murmured to nobody in particular, while he thought, The rain will solve the problem. If the ants haven’t solved it already. Of course, if there were any survivors, they might find refuge in a supply station. He reminded himself not to overlook this detail.

Drake turned away from the window and sat down at a long table of polished wood, where a number of people were waiting for him. Seated across from him was Don Makele, the vice president for security. There was the Nanigen media officer, Linda Wellgroen, and her assistant, as well as various other people from different departments.