Micro - Michael Crichton [34]
“What do we do now?” Alyson said to him. “They’ve heard it—”
“Shut up!” He paced. “God damn it. None of them have cell phones, right?”
“Right, they left them at the front…”
“Okay then.”
“What are you going to do?” she said, trembling.
“Just stay out of my way.”
He flipped open a security panel, and hit a red SECURITY button. A loud, rising and falling alarm began to sound. He hauled Peter up under the armpits and dragged him to his feet, where he swayed, unsteady and in pain, groggy from his beating. “Suck it up, sport,” Drake said. “Time to clean up your mess.”
Drake unlocked the door and burst into the conference room, supporting Peter. He had to shout over the alarm. “We’ve had a security breach,” he said. “Peter has been injured. The security robots have been released. These bots are extremely dangerous. Come quickly this way, all of you. We need to get to the safety room.” He led them out into the hallway, holding on to Peter while Alyson Bender took Peter’s other arm.
In the hallway, a few researchers were running toward the entrance. “Get outside!” somebody shouted, running past, heading for the building’s main exit. Most employees had gone home for the day.
Drake, however, turned and led the students deeper into the complex.
“Where the hell are you taking us?” Rick Hutter said to Drake.
“It’s too late to get outdoors. We need to get to the safety room.”
The students were in a state of confusion. What safety room? What did that mean?
“What are you doing?” Alyson said to Drake.
Drake didn’t answer.
They came to a heavy door marked TENSOR CORE. Drake punched a keypad and the door swung open. “This way, come on now…”
The students entered a large space with hexagonal tiles on the floor. The floor was almost transparent; they could see machinery below, complex machinery, going deep into the ground. “All right, everyone,” Drake said, “I want you all to stand in the center of one of the hexagons. Each hexagon is a safety spot. It’s robot-proof. Do it now, that’s it—hurry, hurry—we don’t have much time.” Drake touched a security pad and they heard bolts slamming home. They were locked inside the room.
Erika Moll had gotten extremely frightened. She uttered a cry, and made a run for the exit door.
“Don’t!” Danny Minot screamed after her.
The exit door was locked, and Erika couldn’t get out.
Drake had shut himself in a control room, where he looked in on the students through a window. An instant later, he went out of sight. The control room door opened, and a man, a stranger, was flung into the big room; he was a Nanigen employee. “Get in there and help them!” Drake’s voice roared after the man.
The man followed Drake’s order. Looking shocked, he stood in the center of a hexagon among the students.
The students were all positioning themselves; Erika had come back. Peter Jansen toppled and fell to his knees; Rick Hutter grabbed him and tried to support him but Peter stayed on his knees. Karen King noticed a row of backpacks hanging along the wall, and she ran and grabbed one and slung it over her shoulder. Meanwhile Drake had become visible in the window again, and they saw him punching buttons in a rapid sequence. Alyson was by his side.
“Vin, for God’s sake,” Alyson said, standing beside him.
“No choice,” Vin Drake said, and he hit the final button.
For Peter Jansen, groggy from his beating, everything happened fast. The hexagonal floor sank beneath him, and he descended some ten feet into the multiple jaws of some huge electronic apparatus that was all around him, and very close, almost touching his skin. The jaws were actually wired armatures, painted at intervals with red and white stripes. The air smelled strongly of ozone and there was a loud electronic hum. The hairs on his