Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm (19 page)

Chapter 31

Mission clock: 1:23 remaining

If the army of nanomachines hadn't been trying to destroy them, Devlin might have enjoyed the mad race through uncharted biological territory. He'd always liked to test his reflexes—often to Kelli's dismay. Despite the earlier need for repairs, he was totally confident in his ship, and the
Mote
performed beautifully, like an extension of him.

As he careened along the alien's bloodstream, dodging corpuscles and choosing branch paths, his reactions were pumped. Devlin couldn't remember having experienced any greater rush of excitement, short of experimental test-flight training for the Air Force.

Nobody else on board considered it fun, though.

“Three more, corning after us!” Freeth called, staring out the window.

Devlin jerked the rudders and lurched the ship to one side, avoiding the new trio of nanocritters that streaked out of a juncture of arteries. The
Mote
collided with a rubbery wall, ricocheted off, and smashed two of the fullerene-constructed devices into scrap.

Making snap decisions, he guided the ship down membrane-lined passageways, between tissue walls. He turned the micro-vessel sideways to slip between the smallest cracks of fibrous muscles. He left the remaining nanohunter far behind, but the microscopic device appeared to be transmitting signals, calling for reinforcements.

“More behind us,” Dr. Tyler called.

“And one up ahead. Fasten your seat belt.”

The nanocritters swarmed after them like pursuers from an old-fashioned Pac Man game. As a young cadet, he'd spent his share of hours playing videogames (strictly to develop strategy and hand-eye coordination, of course) … as well as too much time at home, when he could have been doing things with his wife. Now he hoped all those wasted hours would serve him well.

Without compunction now, Tomiko used her lasers to blast at the aggressive machines. Components of wrecked nanocritters lay strewn in the alien's tissue, a wake of metal parts, as if a squad of robot Humpty Dumptys had fallen there.

But the remaining microscopic hunters refused to break off the chase.

Devlin took the
Mote
on a frantic flight along a striated forest of muscle fibers. The long, smooth cells looked like a packed mat of seaweed hanging down, thick and soft and red. When he couldn't dodge fast enough, Devlin crashed straight through the organic macramé, leaving scattered cells behind. He followed grooves and contours of tissue, away from the converging fleet of artificial devices.

But the nanocritters kept coming.

The ship glided through a filmy layer between the muscle mass and subcutaneous fat. When he passed over a wide rip in the musculature, two nanomachines burst out from below, where they'd been lurking in the crimson shadows. One struck the Mote's bottom hull like a cannonball, but ricocheted off without finding purchase for its articulated arms.

Devlin swerved violently. A few loose instruments clattered to the deck of the main compartment. Tomiko fired her lasers, but missed as he spun through evasive maneuvers. “I can't believe this! They were waiting in ambush. How could they have known we were coming?”

The stunned nano-attacker reoriented itself and joined the second carbon-lattice machine as they streaked into the filmy fluid on an intercept course. The nanocritters used no caution now, did not extend sensors, did not try to probe or understand.

They meant to dismantle the
Mote
without further analysis.

The second machine rammed the starboard engine cone like a kamikaze, knocking the vessel into a spin. From his station at the window, Arnold Freeth tumbled on top of Dr. Tyler, both of them sprawling to the floor of the main cabin. Tyler scrambled away, glaring at Freeth.

Tomiko clenched sweaty hands around her firing controls. “Just get me close enough for a good shot, Marc.”

“Affirmative. As soon as I take a break from dodging.”

The first nanomachine recovered from its initial abortive impact, spun up, and intentionally collided with the side of the
Mote.
Its benzene-tipped mandibles and articulated carbon hands scratched the wide observation window as it ricocheted off.

“Is that close enough for you?” Devlin asked.

Tomiko fired a shot before she was ready, grazing the mechanical attacker but leaving a black streak of a few dead muscle cells deep beneath them. She swore while Devlin struggled to keep the
Mote
under control.

He applied thrust to pull away, and the impellers roared, but now both nanocritters managed to latch onto irregularities on the hull. With jittery movements they hauled themselves along the external plates, moving with microfiber pulleys and molecular pistons that slid through carbon-walled buckytubes.

Devlin flew in a dizzy corkscrew to throw them off. He could hear the horrendous shrieking of metal edges scraping across the outside of the ship, diamond-tipped apparatus chopping and pounding. Every scraping sound, every gash in the enameled hull surface felt like a wound to his own body.

“I'll get you a new paint job when this is all over. Promise.”

Tomiko swiveled the fore and aft laser cannons, targeting the first nanomachine in her crosshairs. “One thing I can't stand, it's rudeness.” Intersecting lances chopped the device to pieces, severing fullerene walls and bursting open the hydrogen and fluorine memory layers on the circuit wafer. “And you're not being at all polite.”

Melting globules sprayed from the severed nanocomponents like blood. Amputated claw arms flailed about in twitching death throes.

The remaining micro-attacker hurled itself against the Mote's hull. Tomiko's next shot drilled through its body core. As the device shuddered and fell away, it let out an electromagnetic shriek from the transceiver horn, a death cry … or an urgent call for assistance.

Arnold Freeth managed to get to his hands and knees. “We have to call for emergency extraction! We never counted on anything like this!” He blinked. “Did we?”

Cynthia Tyler disentangled herself from the UFO expert. “Don't underestimate Team Proteus, Freeth. We can handle this.”

Devlin set his jaw in a grim line. “Calling for emergency extraction is problematic right now, since I don't think we can get any signal past this interference—and I no longer have the slightest idea where we are.” He flew forward. “But don't worry yet. I am
not
going to be outsmarted by a machine with a brain half the size of a germ.”

Cynthia Tyler brushed her jumpsuit off. She offhandedly helped Freeth up, then ignored him again. Looking chagrined, he buckled himself back into his seat. “Sorry about that.”

Tyler didn't spare him a glance, focusing instead on Major Devlin. “Go inside that gap in the musculature. If you find a nerve corridor, we can follow the neurons.”

“Roger that.” Taking a nose dive, Devlin plunged between smooth cells, hoping he wouldn't encounter any nanocritters lying in wait. Bright spotlights slid across reddish-brown organic barricades, yellow streamers, and crimson lace until he found a dark opening where a neural pipeline threaded through the cellular forest.

“Where exactly will this take us, Doc?” Devlin asked. A flicker of lightning shot along the pathway, obscured by a translucent coating that surrounded the nerve strand like insulation on a wire.

Firmly wedged into a seat beside one of the mounted laptop computers, Tyler consulted her reference databases. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“Ah, honesty. I appreciate that.”

Devlin picked up speed when he found the ganglion path clear. He longed to suit up and go outside to check the damage to the
Mote,
but he could make few cosmetic repairs here on the miniaturized scale.

Tomiko glanced at the mission chronometer on the control panel. “One hour, fifteen minutes. You do have a plan as to how exactly we're going to get out of this mess, right, Marc?”

Now that their flight had become smooth again, Freeth unbuckled and came forward on unsteady legs. “Do you have some way to send a locator beacon, or an SOS? So they can find us?”

“Good idea, Mr. Freeth.” Devlin's fingers danced across the comm controls. Through selective filters he had already damped out most of the caterwauling nanomachine signals in the surrounding tissue, though no outside message had been able to penetrate for the past hour. Now, using the specific frequency and signal-embedding protocol he and Felix had agreed on, he added a signature beacon. “That should produce a recognizable pattern for the Proteus technicians to find us.”

A skitter of light flickered along the ganglion like a shooting star. Devlin followed the strand until it linked with an intersection of neurons, where sparkling pulses passed through like bullet trains on intersecting tracks, colliding with enough force that Devlin backed off, shielding his eyes.

“The neural signals are getting stronger,” Dr. Tyler said.

“Maybe the alien is waking up,” Freeth suggested.

“If he sits up and stretches, we may be in for a rough ride.” Devlin veered away from the electrical discharges in the nerve cluster and entered another passage that looked like a glandular opening. Without warning, the
Mote
plunged into a bubbly, foamy mass of tissue. Moss-green forms swirled up in shapeless tangles, like free-form sculptures shot through with coppery chips.

“You take me to the strangest places, Marc. What is
this?”
Tomiko said.

“Another organ of some kind, Doc? I'd love to have some inkling of where we are.” Devlin's voice had an edge of frustration. “A spleen or a kidney? The liver? Sweetbreads, gizzard, gallbladder? Maybe even the brain?”

Tyler could only shake her head helplessly. “I can't offer any suggestions, Major Devlin.” She scanned her databases for comparable tissue, but found nothing verifiable. She looked over at Arnold Freeth in defeat. “I confess I underestimated just how strange this creature would be.”

Without warning, the nanocritters struck again.

A new swarm of machines emerged from the convoluted walls of the strange organ. Wave after mechanical wave, they surged from openings in the spongy tissue, hundreds of devices with pincer arms and groping claws. They surrounded the
Mote
like a wolf pack scenting wounded prey.

“How did they know where to find us? Did they just happen to be in the neighborhood?” The nose of their ship crashed into a blockade of three machines, shattering one and crippling two others. “Don't be shy with your laser here, Tomiko.”

She was already blasting right and left. The hot beams sliced the attacking devices into components, lopping off segmented arms, exploding power cells. Devlin spun the
Mote
in a backward loop, throwing off Tomiko's accuracy. She rolled with the motion, adjusting her aim and targeting again. She left a graveyard of metallic and carbon debris behind them.

Devlin's single intention was to get his ship away from this new ambush. “Somehow, they tracked us to this place then set a trap. There's no other explanation for it.”

“Awfully goal-oriented critters,” Tomiko said.

He flew deeper into the organ's spongy mass. In their wake, dozens of micro-devices lay damaged or destroyed—while tiny reinforcements continued to emerge from the fleshy pockets.

Some nanodevices paused at the microscopic wreckage and began picking over the ruined carbon-lattice hulks, sorting components and raw materials. The miniature robots set up work crews and went about repairing minimally damaged machines, tearing others apart for scrap. They reassembled new devices from the fullerenes and buckytubes, producing even more hunters.

With a world of resources around them, the nanocritters could copy themselves far faster than Tomiko's quick shots could destroy them. Devlin knew that Team Proteus could never outfight or outrun all of the voracious machines. They had to find another way.

Their best hope was to get out of the extraterrestrial body and escape the trap.

Devlin descended through dark catacombs into a biological wilderness. He had no idea where he was going, and their time grew shorter every second. Now they had only an hour before they grew back to normal size.

The ever-multiplying nanomachines marshaled their forces and continued the hunt.

Chapter 32

Mission clock: 1:10 remaining

Seated a dozen light years away, as far as Team Proteus was concerned, Felix Hunter clasped his large hands around his knees, trying to maintain his composure. After the last fragmented message from Marc, he felt as if he were frozen inside, not knowing what was happening to his crew.

Nanomachines? Swarms? Trying to stay clear? The micro-explorers hadn't been able to get another signal out. The
Mote
could already be destroyed. He should never have sent his son-in-law on the mission.

Hunter loved being at the nexus of every necessary decision, being in charge. Perhaps he should have suited up and gone inside the containment chamber with the two doctors, just to touch the specimen with his own hands…

Vasili Garamov stood up on bony legs and removed a cigarette from his pack. He held it like a talisman in his long fingers, but did not light it. He let out a slow sigh, looking as if he longed for the Cold War days, when no important decision was made outside the confines of a smoke-filled room.

Congressman Durston took great delight in pointing out, “If you want to have a smoke, Mr. Garamov, you'll need to go outside and pass through all the security procedures again. That's probably forty-five minutes, minimum. Think of everything you'll miss.”

Garamov's pale face flushed slightly at Durston's taunt. “I can endure.”