“Cap!” Leila cried. “Get out now!”
Cap’s gaze darted around the ruined aircraft interior, lighting upon a set of Jeppesen air charts. He seized the binder and jumped back out of the copter just as the advancing microbotic sea engulfed the wreckage.
The force of his retreat threw him back against the curb. With grunt, he stood and watched the blob overrun the helicopter, coating it as if an invisible artist electroplated everything in sight with a silver patina. Its contours softened. Within less than a minute, the billions of microbots devoured the obstacle and reduced it to microscopic bits. The minuscule electro-mechanical creatures utilized some of the chemicals—the kerosene and oil in the turbine engines, the glucose and oxygen in the pilot’s flesh and blood—as fuel. Some—the silicon in the electronics, the steel and aluminum in the fuselage—they used to build more copies of themselves.
They moved westward with unstoppable vehemence.
Captain Anger eyed the colony of artificial life coolly, considering his options.
Rock managed to kick in a second story window, climb through, and rush down to join his compeer. He skidded to a halt beside Anger and gaped in renewed awe at the voracious slime, allowing to slip from his tongue on of the few pieces of English slang he’d bothered to incorporate into his vocabulary.
“Geez, Cap,” he said, “that stuff’s hungry!”
A truck skidded around the corner at the west end of the street. Cap eyed it with relief. “Here comes an appetite suppressant.”
A harried young man jumped out of the driver’s seat and bounded over to Dr. Bhotamo. Cap and Rock set to unloading the truckload of cryogenic material. Firemen and police joined in—nervously—and within minutes they had surrounded the moving lake with a perimeter of large dewars—insulated fifty-five-gallon drums.
At Captain Anger’s request, the driver from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory handed the cryogenic suits to Rock and Leila. The thick, layered suits—similar to the suit Cap wore, if less versatile—glittered with a reflective coating of silvered Mylar. The three, when fully suited, looked like living extensions of the mirror pool. They surrounded the westward-moving lake at equidistant points, each standing near a drum of liquid nitrogen and holding a cryogenic spray gun.
“Go,” was all Cap had to say.
The three opened the nozzles and doused the lake with the ultra-cold liquefied gas. As the streams hit the warm afternoon air, clouds of icy vapor erupted, filling the street with an eerie mist that imparted the smell of a snowy day to the block.
As soon as the flow of nitrogen touched the microbots, the forward motion ceased. The surface took on an unreflective grey cast. Minuscule cracks appeared all over the frozen zone, making a snapping, popping sound similar to the cracking of an icy pond in a spring thaw.
Whenever a dewar emptied out, they disconnected the nozzle and attached it to another. Working in a clockwise fashion, they soon had the entire sea of electro-mechanical scavengers frozen solid. Cap continued to pour the liquid nitrogen onto the crumbly puddle, its peripheral edges, and the ditch-like scar it left in its wake.
“Spray everything it might have touched,” Captain Anger said over the commlink. “If even one single unit survives, it could start dismantling the damaged ones and replicate all over again!”
“ Gospodi polimya,” Rock said in awe. He sprayed even more widely, dousing the unreflective grey mass with every last droplet of the nitrogen.
After a few more moments, Leila’s last drum of nitrogen drained to empty. Cap’s and Rock’s soon followed. Cap set his nozzle on the drum and turned his attention to the smaller puddle that had once been the paramedics and their van. It seemed quiescent at the moment, though Cap knew that a beehive of microbotic activity churned on a molecular level.
Weir and Kompantzeff wrangled a shiny, studded sphere out of the van. About the size of a soccer ball, it possessed the same hexagon/pentagon design on its surface. At the intersection of each silver pentagon, though, a knob protruded. From each knob dangled a cable shielded in wire mesh. The cables ran to a briefcase-sized control board hefted by an assistant of Dr. Bhotamo. The trio set the equipment down beside Captain Anger at the edge of the puddle.
Carefully, Cap—still wearing the cryonic insulation suit— knelt and dipped an acid-resistant probe into the mass. It welled up around the plastic scoop like mercury adhering to gold.
“This stick’s made of long-chain polymers,” Cap said to Dr. Bhotamo, who watched from a respectful distance. “I suspect it will take the microbots longer to break the molecules down than it would something simpler, such as a steel probe.”
With utmost care, Captain Anger lifted up a silvery blob the size of a pea and turned on his knee toward the metal soccer ball. Lei had opened it along its equator. Rock switched on the power and a humming sound registered just below the level of hearing. With utmost care, Cap held the probe over the center of the containment vessel’s lower half and with one controlled snap of his wrist shook the droplet off the end of the rod. The tiny gob fell an inch and then floated, suspended in the absolute center of the sphere. Cap swiftly tossed the probe into the small pool of microbots, its purpose served, and turned his attention back to the magnetic levitation device. He gingerly hinged the upper half of the sphere into position over the lower half, taking care not to jostle the half that
suspended the sample. Until the top was on and all the magnetic beams activated, the slightest motion could send the sample sliding off the magnetic fields and cause it to make contact with part of the machine. If it did that, the microbots would have a new source of raw materials.
The top in place, Cap engaged the locking bolts. “Activate the magnetic guns in sequence, Lei.”
Leila typed instructions to the computer controls and watched the screen that gave a virtual image of what was happening inside the ball.
The device hissed lightly.
“Chamber evacuated to pressure of eight torr. Field is on, all beams nominal,” she said. “Sample contained at center of sphere.”
Rock breathed a heavy Slavic sigh of relief. The microbots floated inside the unit suspended on magnetic beams, as sturdily contained as if they were packed in concrete, yet in contact with nothing but the energy fields that hit them from twenty directions. The microscopic creatures might be able to use the energy in some way, but without any materials to strip and convert into more microbots, they were as helpless as a demolition crew stranded in outer space.
Cap nodded. “All right.” He turned to Dr. Bhotamo. “With your permission, I’d like to take this over to Lawrence Livermore and analyze it further.”
“Please, Professor Anger. My lab is your lab.”
“Thank you. Leila—get this into the van. We’ll work on a defense against them in a moment.” He gazed up through his cold-suit visor toward the building through which the rogue helicopter had crashed. “After that, we’ll track down their source.”
He turned to Rock. “Let’s freeze that other pool.”
Chapter Nine
The Weapon Makers
Captain Anger gritted his teeth.
None but his friends and long-time companions Rock and Leila noticed, or even knew why. Only the hardening of his gaze, the tightening of the muscles along his strong jawline gave any clue to his emotion.
The three had entered a place of war.