“The police aren’t looking for a phone on the boat—”
“No?”
“No, you little bastard. Because they haven’t been to the boat yard all day.”
Peter’s mind was racing. “The police didn’t need to go to the boat yard,” he said, “because they can find the phone just by looking at the GPS tracking signal—”
“No they can’t!” Drake let go of his arm and punched him in the stomach, hard. Peter gasped and doubled over, and Drake grabbed his arm and bent it behind him, and got Peter in a neck lock, immobilizing him. “Don’t lie to me. They can’t, because I disabled the GPS before I ever put that phone on the boat.”
Alyson said nervously, “Vin…”
“Shut up.”
“So,” Peter said, “you disabled the GPS and rigged up the phone to clog my brother’s gas line?”
“No. To kill the fuel pump, you little asshole…I killed the radio, too…”
Alyson: “Vin, listen…”
“Alyson, keep out of this—”
“Why’d you do it?” Peter said, coughing, pulling at Drake’s fingers. Drake’s grip was strong on his throat. “Why?”
“Your brother was a fool. You know what he wanted? He wanted to sell this technology. Turns out there’s some legal issue about ownership, who really owned it. So Eric thought we should sell. Can you imagine: sell this technology. Eric betrayed Nanigen. He betrayed me personally.”
“Vin, for God’s sake—”
“Shut up—”
“Your mike!” Alyson pointed to the lavalier microphone on Drake’s lapel. “It’s on.”
“Ah, shit,” Vin Drake hissed. He punched Peter brutally hard in the solar plexus, and let him crumple to the floor on his knees, gasping. Very deliberately, Drake pulled back his jacket, revealing the transmitter clipped to his belt. He tapped a switch: the light was off. “I’m not stupid.”
Peter knelt on the floor and retched and coughed, unable to get a breath. He realized that the small clip microphone had come out of his pocket, and dangled on its cord. Drake might see it. Groping around, he tried to stuff it back in his pocket, and his hand hit the transmitter. He heard a loud popping noise coming over the loudspeakers in the conference room.
Drake looked toward the conference room. He had heard the sound. His eyes followed Peter’s hand, and he saw the little microphone. He took a step backward and lashed out with his boot, kicked Peter on the side of the head. Peter collapsed. Drake tore the lavalier’s cord out of Peter’s pocket, disconnecting the mike, and tossed it away. Peter rolled on the floor and groaned.
“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 skin were raised up. A synthesized voice said, “Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath…and hold it!” There was a loud clank!, unnerving and mechanical, and then that electronic hum returned. A brief wave of nausea. He sensed he had shifted somehow, within the apparatus.
“You may breathe normally. Stand by.”
He took a breath, let it out slowly.
“Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath, and hold it!”
Another clank! Another hum. A ripple of nausea, stronger than before.
He blinked his eyes.
Now he was sure things had changed. Before, he had been looking at stripes at about the midpoint of the jaws. But now he was looking at stripes much lower down. He was shrinking. The jaws buzzed and moved closer toward him. Of course they would do that, he thought, the magnetic field would be strongest at small distances. The