Micro - Michael Crichton [157]
“Drake. He’s dead.”
“Everybody out,” the detective said.
The officers bundled Rick and Karen along, and they scout-carried Eric, who had lost consciousness.
The last man out of the building was the detective. He came out through the door into the light of dawn, a trail of blood streaming from his forehead. The bots had found Dan Watanabe.
“Where’s Dorothy?” he called out.
Dorothy Girt had arrived in her Toyota. She came forward.
“You brought your magnet?”
“Of course.” She held up the industrial horseshoe magnet. She had grabbed it out of the forensic lab on the way over.
“Everybody into decon, hostages and officers,” said Watanabe, as he took off his vest. “Dorothy will decontaminate you.” An EMT squad brought Eric into the tent first, then loaded him into a medevac helicopter. Last of all, after everybody else had taken their turn, Lieutenant Watanabe walked into the white tent to have Dorothy get the bots out of him.
Chapter 51
The Pit
1 November, 5:55 a.m.
In the tensor generator room, the only thing that moved was the gigantic bot. It explored the room, shoving aside Drake’s corpse, looking for a way out. It couldn’t find a way out, so its program went into the drilling sequence. It bent its neck to the floor, and, using its knives, it cut through the plastic floor. When it had opened a hole, it broke through, crashing down into the pit full of electronic gear. There the bot continued to cut and chop, doing what it knew best.
Groaning, rending, crackling sounds came from below the floor of the generator room, the sounds mixing with blue and yellow flashes of electrical sparks. Suddenly there was a boiling hiss, and a cloud of vapor burst up through the hole in the floor. It was the sound and fury of superconducting magnets failing. The building shook as the magnetic fields in the generator went chaotic and relaxed. As the magnets failed they heated up suddenly, and the heat boiled the super-cooled liquid helium that surrounded the magnets. Helium vapor began pouring out of the pit.
Abruptly the lights in the building went out—circuit breakers had tripped. Meanwhile the giant bot still churned through the guts of Drake’s machine.
There was still somebody alive in the Nanigen building. In the pit, while the big bot hacked at machinery, a slender man watched. He moved slowly, carefully, no jerky movements, nothing to attract the bot’s attention. He removed a hard drive from a rack, pulling the data feed tapes out of their snaps. He slipped the drive into his jacket and left the pit quickly, climbing up a ladder, and from there he entered the fire escape tunnel. Behind him, he heard a thump, then a roar: the bot had started a fire.
The escape tunnel, lined with corrugated metal, went horizontally and ended at a ladder. Dr. Edward Catel, the liaison man from the Davros Consortium, climbed the ladder. The hard drive in his pocket contained five terabytes of data—all of Dr. Ben Rourke’s designs for the tensor generator, along with priceless engineering data from test runs of the generator. When he had put two and two together and decided that Vin Drake had probably ordered murders of his own employees, he realized that Drake had become unstable and therefore could no longer serve effectively as a chief executive. He had gotten in touch with certain people, who for some time had been trying to discover what Nanigen was doing, and had told them that for a certain price he could get them designs of the generator. He had gone into the building that night. He hadn’t realized Drake was in there, too.
Now, he stopped at the top of the ladder, below a hatch, and listened. What was going on above? He heard sirens, a helicopter thudding. Maybe he should wait here for a few hours. Give things a chance to settle down.
He felt something wet run down his cheek, drip on his collar. He reached up to his face. Yes, a bot had gotten into his cheek. The escape tunnel had become contaminated. He could feel the bot burrowing through the tissues of