Micro - Michael Crichton [152]
Just then Drake’s voice came on their radio headsets. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “I saw you fly into the generator room. However, you may wish to know that the bots in there can see you. Smell you, too.”
They saw Drake’s face staring in the window, now, his eyes moving, tracking them as they flew. Drake held up the bot controller where they could see it, and he pushed a series of buttons. “I changed the sensitivity. Now they can find you,” he said, and looked up at the ceiling of the generator room.
Karen followed Drake’s gaze. She saw them: glittery specks, scattered across the ceiling. The specks were moving. Dropping and falling like tiny raindrops. As they fell, they fanned out, flying under their own power. She saw one of them turn toward Rick, and it began tracking him, flying after him. As Rick went into a dive toward the floor, the bot dove as well. It was powered by a turboprop fan in a housing, and it had a snaky neck, with knives on the end of the neck. As it flashed past her, following Rick, she saw the eyes: the bot had a pair of compound eyes like an insect’s, but it was a machine vision system. A pair of eyes meant it had binocular vision, depth perception, she realized.
“Rick,” she shouted. “Behind you!”
He didn’t hear her. He was heading for the floor and the white circle. The bot closed in on him; she had to get that bot off his tail. Not sure what to do, she dove her plane, chasing the bot and Rick. Out of the corner of her eye she saw more objects flying, and she looked over her shoulder and saw dozens of bots, maybe more, flying behind her. They seemed to be converging on her and Rick. The bots shimmered as they flew, and some of them hovered, darting, seeking. “Rick, behind you!” she shouted.
He turned his head and saw the bot following him. He immediately pulled up and banked, getting out of the dive, twisting upward, trying to shake the bot off his tail. The bot flew at least as well as Rick did. It was closing in on him.
Karen accelerated and dove behind the bot that was chasing Rick. Maybe she could knock it out of the air by hitting it with the nose of her plane. Her propeller was in the tail of her plane, so the plane’s nose could be used as a blunt weapon. She aimed for the bot and pushed the throttle forward. Just before the strike, she hunched down in the cockpit and tucked her head, bracing for impact. Her plane slammed into the bot.
There was a pinging sound and her plane ricocheted one way and the bot went the other way, both corkscrewing through the air. The crash didn’t hurt the plane or the bot: they merely bounced off each other. The bot whirled around and stopped itself in midair, and hovered, and oriented itself, and then began to follow her plane. Karen regained control of her plane and peeled away, watching the bot. The bot accelerated toward her, putting on a burst of speed, and then, to Karen’s surprise, the bot unfolded two jointed arms.
It grabbed hold of the wing of Karen’s plane with the sticky pads on the ends of its arms. The bot clung to her plane as she flew. She tried to shake it off, slamming the stick around, banking left and right, but the bot had gotten a firm grip and wouldn’t let go. It began cutting into the wing with its blades.
It was breaking up her wing.
Rick turned back when he saw the bot attach itself to Karen’s plane. Karen was in trouble. He flew toward her, asking himself what he could possibly do to free her plane from the bot’s grip. His plane wasn’t armed. No guns, no fire control buttons, nothing. But wait—Rourke had armed the planes with machetes. There was one in here somewhere. He groped around and felt a handle, and swooped toward Karen’s plane, holding out the machete like a cavalry rider. “Ayah!” he shouted and hacked through the bot’s neck as he passed, severing it. The blades and neck spun off, squirming, and the beheaded bot released Karen’s plane and zigzagged away, seemingly disoriented. Karen regained control of her plane.
The bots were hovering—dozens of them.
Rick circled through them. A bot darted in and