Micro - Michael Crichton [140]
“Stupid moth! Watch where you’re going.” That had been close. “Absolutely no brain,” he muttered. A collision with a moth could drop him in the sea, and he could see breakers below him.
Then a peculiar noise reached his ears. Sort of an echoing whish-whing…He heard it again…whish-whing. Whoom…Whoooemm…eee…eee…What was that? Something was making freaky noises in the dark. Then a drumming noise started up: pom-pom-pompompom. He saw another moth, and the drumming sound came from the moth…and then the moth suddenly wasn’t there.
Something had swept the moth out of the sky.
“Oh, fuck,” Danny said.
Bats.
They were painting the moths with sonar. He had gotten himself into the middle of some kind of a bat situation. This was not good.
He advanced the throttle to EMERGENCY MAXIMUM.
He could hear the sonar pulses ringing in the darkness, left, right, above, below, nearby, far away…but he couldn’t see the bats. That was the worst thing. Above, below, on all sides, the predators were moving in three dimensions around him. It was like treading water at midnight surrounded by feeding sharks. He couldn’t see anything at all, but he could hear them snatching prey. Whoo…whoom…whooom…eee…eee…eee/ee/ee…that had been a kill.
And then he saw it. A bat killed a moth right in front of him. He got a glimpse of a spiky shape as it swept by, and the plane shuddered and jumped in the turbulence of the bat’s wake. Holy God. The bat had been far bigger than he thought it would be.
He had to get to ground. Just land, anywhere, even on top of a hotel. He pointed the plane into a dive, and went straight down, engines shirring at full power, aiming for the nearest hotel…but he was headed for the beach…oh, shit…too far away from the building, too close to the water…
The bat-sounds got louder. Then a sonar beam raked over him, and went away. There was a pause…then the beam hit him full-force, making his chest flutter—WHOOM…EEEP…EEEP…EEE-EEE-EEE…The bat was painting him with a beam of ultrasound. The pings shortened and became focused. A chaos of sound enveloped him.
“I’m not a moth!” he cried. He threw the stick hard over and pulled sideways in a screaming dive-turn. With his good hand he began pounding on the outside of the cockpit, trying to imitate the drumming of the moths, thumping his hand on the plane. Maybe it would jam the bat’s radar…
Too late he realized that by banging on his plane, he had told the bat exactly where he was.
He saw a flash of brown fur gleaming with silver-tipped guard hairs, a pair of wings flaring impossibly wide, blocking out the moon, and a wide-open mouth filled with a set of canines like chisels…
The micro-plane spiraled down, its wing broken, its cockpit empty, and landed in foam slick near the beach, where it vanished.
Chapter 44
Diamond Head Lighthouse
31 October, 11:45 p.m.
Rourke dozed for a while, but awoke when he became aware that Danny Minot had not returned from the privy. Time had passed; the fire had burned down. He got up and hurried down the tunnel toward the privy; Danny wasn’t there.
The Redoubt was a sprawling warren, with many unused tunnels; perhaps Danny had gotten lost in a tunnel. Rourke went into a side tunnel, and called, “Mr. Minot! You there?” Nothing. Another tunnel yielded silence. Then Rourke noticed air moving in the tunnel. The hangar…he ran to the hangar, and found the doors open, a plane gone.
He closed the doors, then woke Rick and Karen. “Your friend has gone. He took a plane.”
They weren’t sure what had gotten into Danny. Perhaps he had become frightened, gone into a panic, with his arm in such bad shape, and had decided to fly to Nanigen on his own. It showed more courage than Danny seemed capable of.
“Maybe we should fly out and try to find him,” Karen suggested.
Rourke forbade it. “He’s gone. The wind could take him anywhere over the island.” And he said it was too dangerous to fly after dark; the bats were out. “It’s almost suicidal.”
Danny might already be dead. And if he survived the flight, it wasn’t clear how he