Micro - Michael Crichton [70]
Peter’s voice came on. “We’re okay. Everybody’s accounted for.”
They gathered under the fern, and placed Jenny on a leaf, using it like a bed. None of them had any medical experience. Karen opened the medical kit and found a syringe with morphine. She held it where Jenny could see it. “Do you want this?”
Jenny shook her head. “No. Too groggy.” She might need her wits, despite the pain. Instead, Jenny accepted a couple of Tylenol tablets, while Karen ripped up a piece of cloth and fashioned a sling. They helped her sit up. Jenny swayed, her face ashen, her lips pale. “I’ll be okay,” she said.
But she was not okay. Her arm was swelling dramatically, the skin darkening.
Internal bleeding.
Karen caught Peter’s eye, and she knew he was thinking the same thing she was. Remembering what Jarel Kinsky had said about the bends. You could bleed to death from a small cut. And this was not a small cut.
Peter looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. They’d slept for two hours.
The ground was scattered with debris. It was like a shipwreck. The duffel bags and the backpack lay in various places. Many other things had fallen out of the bunker when the knife had split it open. They found the machetes and the harpoon. Rick’s chinaberry rested on the ground nearby; it had fallen out of the tent. They had survival gear and supplies, at least, but where would they go? If Station Echo had been taken away, what had happened to the other stations? Had the man seen them? Did he work for Vin Drake?
They had to assume the worst.
They had been discovered. The stations had been taken away. Where to hide? Where to go? How to get back to Nanigen now?
As they stood pondering what to do, the sky grew darker. A gust of wind tugged at the leaves of a haiwale plant nearby, revealing the fuzzy undersides of the leaves. As Peter looked up, he saw the wind catching leaves overhead, flipping them over, tossing the leaves…
Then came a strange sound, a deep sploosh, and another sploosh. They watched in stunned surprise as a flattened sphere of water, of enormous size, fell on the ground next to them and exploded into a hundred smaller droplets flying everywhere. The afternoon rains had arrived.
“Get to high ground!” Peter shouted. “This way!” They began to run, heading upslope, grabbing whatever they could carry. Karen carried Jenny on her back, while raindrops exploded around them like bombs going off.
At Nanigen, Vin Drake turned away from his computer screen. He had been watching a weather-radar scan of the Ko‘olau Pali. Those trade winds were so dependable. As the winds ran up against the windward side of Oahu, they dropped their moisture on the mountains. The peaks of the Ko‘olau Pali were some of the wettest places on earth.
Don Makele knocked on the door. The security man entered and placed the pieces of Station Echo on Drake’s desk. “The beds are rumpled, toilet’s been used. And I saw a couple of them on the ground running. I ordered them to stop. I tried to stop ’em with my knife. They scattered like cockroaches.”
“That’s disturbing,” Drake said. “Very disturbing, Don. I told you to fix this.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?”
Vin Drake leaned back and tapped a gold mechanical pencil on his teeth. A portrait of him hung on the wall behind him, painted by an up-and-coming Brooklyn artist, in which Drake’s face seemed to fracture into bold colors; it was an image of power, and Drake liked it. “I want you to close off the security gate at the entrance to Manoa Valley. Stop the shuttle truck. The valley is to be sealed. And bring me your two best security men.”
“That would be Telius and Johnstone. I trained them in Kabul.”
“They have experience in the micro-world?”
“Plenty,” Makele answered. “What do you want them to do?”
“Rescue the students.”
“But you’re sealing off the valley—”
“Just do as I say, Don.”