Micro

A pickup truck, black and new, swung into the parking lot by the greenhouses at the Waipaka Arboretum. Don Makele, the security director of Nanigen, got out. He put on a knapsack and clipped a sheath knife to his belt. He knelt on the ground by a clump of white ginger plants growing along the edge of the parking lot, and drew the knife blade. The knife was a KA-BAR, a combat model with a black blade. Delicately, he pushed aside plant stems with the flat of the knife, until he found the little tent: Supply Station Alpha, hidden in the gloom of the ginger leaves. He leaned into the plants to get a better look, and, with the tip of his knife, pulled aside the tiny flap of the tent.

“Anybody home?” he said.

He knew he wouldn’t hear a response, even if a micro-human did answer. He didn’t see any micro-humans, anyway. Station Alpha had been tidied up and battened down a month ago, when it had been abandoned by the last field team to stay there.

He plunged the knife into the soil next to the station and cut a circle around the station, rocking the blade back and forth. Then he yanked the bunker out of the earth, the soil dropping off it, the tent fluttering and shaking on top of the structure. He stood up and banged the bunker on his shoe to knock off clots of dirt, and put the bunker into his knapsack.

Don Makele took out a map and studied it. Next stop, Station Bravo. He walked swiftly along a path that led into Fern Gully. After fifty feet, he plunged off the path into the forest, not reducing his speed, moving easily through the jungle environment. According to the map, Station Bravo was at the south side of a koa tree, and the tree’s trunk had been marked to make the station easy to find. A few minutes of tramping around brought him to the right tree: a reflective orange tag had been nailed to the trunk. He knelt at the spot, found the tent, and peered into it. Nobody. What about the bunker?

He straightened up and called, “Hey!” and stomped on the ground beside the tent. That would send them scurrying out if they were in the bunker. But he saw nothing, no movement, no tiny figures running. He knifed the soil and took out the bunker and put it in his pack with Station Alpha. He consulted the map again, and looked along the hillside, peering up the sloping land that rose to cliffs and eventually to the heights of Tantalus. It seemed like a waste of time to bring all the stations back to Nanigen. The micro-world had swallowed the students without a trace. Still, he had to follow Drake’s orders. It didn’t bother him to be removing the only hope of survival for the students, since the students were dead anyway, for sure. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, just cleaning up the stations.

As he hiked laterally along the hillside, he dug up Stations Foxtrot, Golf, and Hotel. He moved along quickly, at ease in the jungle. Higher on the mountainside, he located Station India and dug it up. Higher still, he found Juliet, and knocked the mud off it. But Station Kilo seemed to have disappeared. Kilo was supposed to be embedded in the ground at the base of a cliff, among a tangle of vines, by a small waterfall. Yet he simply could not find it; eventually, Don Makele decided that Kilo had probably been washed away in a rainstorm. This happened to stations occasionally. The weather was hard on them, because they were so small.

Then he doubled back, going straight downhill into the depths of Fern Gully. He was heading for Station Echo, which lay deep in Fern Gully amid a stand of albesia trees.

“H-E-Y!” The sound thundered through the bunker, waking up all the students. The room jounced, and boomed, and they were flung out of the bunks and tossed around the room, as if a major earthquake had just hit. The lights went out. Crashing sounds of chests and boxes and lab equipment filled the darkness, and the room shook. Peter Jansen understood what was happening. “Someone’s out there!” he shouted. “Get out! Go! Go!” He groped around for a headlamp by his bunk, found it, and switched it on.

The lights came on again. The batteries had been rattling on their contacts.

Rick Hutter grabbed his darts and started scrambling up the ladder, Karen King following him. The others frantically began to grab duffel bags, machetes, whatever they could carry.

Rick, leading the way, reached the top of the ladder. He put his hands on the hatch wheel, when suddenly the room felt like it was being yanked into the air, and he fell off the ladder, and everybody went sprawling. The room turned sideways, and a deafening noise, a hammering sound, made the bunker shake.

“-Ah-stupid-thing-” The words seemed to shake the bunker like artillery shells landing.