“Leave me, Peter!” Karen King shouted. She backed away from the ants. Then she leaped into the air, soaring far higher than a normal human could ever jump, and landed catlike away from the ants. At the same time, she pulled from her belt the spray bottle of defensive chemicals that she’d planned to show to Vin Drake. Benzos. Ants didn’t like benzos, she was pretty sure of that. She sprayed the stuff toward an advancing ant. The ant stopped instantly, turned around…and ran away.

“Yeah!” she yelled. The spray worked. It made them run like rabbits.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the others running away from the ant nest. Good. Buying them time. She kept spraying, and the spray held the ants back, stopped their attacks. But the bottle had contained only a small amount of the liquid. And still more soldier ants were breaking out of the nest. The nest had gone into full alarm. An ant leaped up onto Karen, landing on her chest, tearing her shirt, and it began snapping at her neck.

“Hai!” she shouted and grabbed the ant behind its head, held it up in the air, and with her other hand slammed her knife into the ant’s head. The blade punched through the ant’s head, and a clear liquid squirted out-it was hemolymph, insect blood. Instantly she flung the ant away. It landed on the ground and went into convulsions, its brain destroyed. But the ants had no fear, no sense of self-preservation, and there seemed to be no end to their numbers. As the ants closed in on her, Karen jumped away, soaring head over heels backward like a circus tumbler, and again landed on her feet.

And then she ran.

Ahead of her, she saw the other humans running explosively fast, driven by fear, leaping over leaves and fern stems, dodging things, fleeing like gazelles. How can I run this fast? I’ve never run so fast in my life…Karen thought. Clearly their bodies were much stronger and faster in the micro-world. It gave Karen a feeling of superhuman power and exhilaration. She leaped over obstacles like a hurdle runner, clearing things in a series of incredible jumps. She realized she was sprinting at about fifty miles an hour, in the scale of the micro-world. I killed an ant. With a knife and my bare hands.

They soon got out of the visual range of the ants. Ahead, in the distance, stood the tent.

Worker ants continued to butcher Kinsky’s body. They bit off the arms and legs and cut the torso into chunks, making cracking sounds as they sheared through the ribs and spine, yanking out the man’s viscera. The ants drank the spilled blood, making sucking noises. A welter of torn clothing, blood, and intestines was strewn about, while the ants began transporting the meat underground.

Karen King stopped running for a moment to look back, and she saw the ants carry Kinsky’s head down the hole. The severed head stared back as it went down, pulled by workers. It seemed to hold a look of surprise.

Chapter 15

Nanigen Headquarters 29 October, 10:00 a.m.

It was a sunny day in central Oahu, and the view from Nanigen’s meeting room swept across half the island. The windows looked over sugar-cane fields to the Farrington Highway, then to Pearl Harbor, where Navy ships floated like gray ghosts, and to the white towers of Honolulu. Beyond the city, a ragged line of peaks extended along the horizon, painted in misty greens and blues. These were the Ko‘olau Mountains, the Pali of Oahu. Clouds had begun to build over the range.

“It will rain on the Pali today. It usually does,” Vincent Drake murmured to nobody in particular, while he thought, The rain will solve the problem. If the ants haven’t solved it already. Of course, if there were any survivors, they might find refuge in a supply station. He reminded himself not to overlook this detail.

Drake turned away from the window and sat down at a long table of polished wood, where a number of people were waiting for him. Seated across from him was Don Makele, the vice president for security. There was the Nanigen media officer, Linda Wellgroen, and her assistant, as well as various other people from different departments.

At the far end of the table, by himself, sat a slender man wearing rimless spectacles. Edward Catel, MD, PhD, was the chief liaison for the Davros Consortium, the group of pharmaceutical companies that had supplied capital to Nanigen. The Davros Consortium had invested a billion dollars in Nanigen; Edward Catel monitored events at Nanigen for the Davros investors.

Drake was saying, “…seven graduate students. We were recruiting them to do field work in the micro-world. They’ve disappeared. Our CFO Alyson Bender has also gone missing.”

Don Makele, the security chief, said, “Maybe they went to watch the surf on the North Shore.”

Drake looked at his watch. “They should have checked in with us by now.”

Don Makele said, “I should file a missing-persons report.”

“Good idea,” Drake said.

Drake wondered just when the police would discover the corporate car with Alyson’s body and the students’ clothing in it. The car had fallen into a tidal inlet. He did not think the police would be able to make much sense of the crash. The cops are locals, he thought. Hawaiian locals take life easy, they go for the simple explanation, since that makes the least amount of work for them. Even so, he didn’t want the police to get too interested, so he gave Don Makele and the media staff his orders: “Nanigen cannot afford any media attention right now. We are at a critical stage of our explosive growth. We need to work quietly while we smooth out the wrinkles in the tensor generator, especially the problem of the micro-bends.” He turned to Linda Wellgroen, the media officer. “Your job is to stop publicity over this incident.”

Wellgroen nodded. “Understood.”

“If you get media inquiries, be warm and helpful but don’t give out any information,” Drake went on. “Your job is to be boring.”

“It’s in my resume,” Wellgroen said with a smile. “ ‘Experienced at media-diffusive ambiguation in real-time crisis contexts.’ It means that when the crap is flying I can be as exciting to the media as an Episcopalian vicar discussing how to toast a crumpet.”

“Those kids didn’t get into the tensor generator, did they?” said Don Makele, the security chief.

Drake said firmly, “Of course not.”

Linda Wellgroen jotted something on a legal pad. “Any idea what happened to Ms. Bender?”

Drake looked concerned. “Frankly, we’ve been worried about Alyson in recent days. She was known to be deeply depressed, possibly distraught. She had been having an affair with Eric Jansen, and when Eric tragically drowned…well…let’s just say Alyson struggled with private demons.”

“You think Ms. Bender took her own life?” Linda Wellgroen said.

Drake shook his head. “I don’t know.” He turned to Don Makele. “Tell the police about Alyson’s state of mind.”

The meeting broke up. Linda Wellgroen tucked her legal pad under her arm and walked out of the room, accompanied by the others-but at the last minute, Vin Drake touched Don Makele’s elbow and said, “Wait.”

The security chief stayed while Drake closed the door. Now only Makele and Drake were left in the room, along with the Davros advisor, Dr. Edward Catel, who had remained seated at the end of the table. He hadn’t spoken a word during the meeting.

Drake and Catel had known each other for many years. They had made significant amounts of money working together on deals. Vin Drake thought that Ed Catel’s greatest strength was the fact that he displayed no emotions. The man had no discernible feelings of any kind. Catel was a medical doctor, but he had not treated a patient in many years. He was all about money, deals, and growth. Dr. Catel was as warm as slate in January.

Drake waited a moment. Then he said, “The situation is different from what I just told our media people. Those kids did go into the micro-world.”