Makele left Drake’s office without saying a word. There was nothing to say.

As for Vin Drake, he felt reasonably good about what had happened to Telius and Johnstone. It meant he didn’t have to pay them bonuses in valuable stock. Nevertheless, he could not assume that all the students were dead. They had shown some survival skills, surprising tenacity, and so he would continue to try to flush them out, just in case some of them were still alive.

Chapter 30

The Pali 30 October, 4:00 p.m.

This thing would kick ass in Boston traffic,” Karen King remarked. She was driving the hexapod up a steep slope, guiding it across a jumble of rocks and grass stems. It lurched.

“Please! Watch my arm.” Danny was sitting in the passenger seat, gripping his left arm, which hung like a sausage in the sling. It had become badly swollen, filling the sleeve of his shirt. The hexapod moved along steadily, its legs whining, climbing through a vast, vertical world glowing with a million shades of green. In the cargo compartment, in back, Erika sat huddled, tied in with rope. Rick walked along beside the vehicle, holding the gas rifle and looking around, alert for predators, a bandolier of needle-bullets slung over his shoulder.

The terrain had gotten very steep. The soil had given way to crumbly lava pebbles and grit with protruding masses of lava rock, everything festooned with grasses and small ferns. Koa and guava trees twisted this way and that, mixed with thin, straight shafts of loulu palms. Many of the trees were draped with vines. Branches rattled in a steady wind that blew across the mountain face, and the breeze occasionally battered the truck and the humans. A wall of mist drifted through the vegetation-a cloud-followed by brilliant sunshine.

The deaths of Peter Jansen and Amar Singh weighed on the students. Their group had been winnowed from eight people stranded in the micro-world down to four survivors. Their number had been cut in half in just two days. Fifty percent fatalities. That was a horrible statistic, thought Rick Hutter. It was worse than the life expectancy of soldiers fighting on the beaches of Normandy. Rick could see more fatalities coming-unless by some miracle they were rescued. But they couldn’t reveal themselves to anyone at Nanigen now; for Vin Drake had mobilized his resources to try to find them and make them disappear. “Drake’s still looking for us,” Rick remarked. “I’m sure of it.”

“That’s enough,” Karen said to him. There was no point talking about Vin Drake, since all that did was to make them feel more helpless. “Peter wouldn’t give up,” Karen said to Rick, more calmly, as she worked the controls, guiding the truck straight up the face of a large rock. Rick jumped on board for the ride.

They had gotten into mountain vegetation. Occasional gaps in the canopy revealed a striking vista. Cliffs and blades of the Pali plunged all around, and a waterfall roared nearby. Somewhere above them, a curving stretch of ridge formed the lip of Tantalus Crater. As the machine marched along, its feet stirred up living things. Startled springtails bounced away, flipping through the air; worms wriggled and seethed; mites scuttled here and there, sometimes climbing up the legs of the hexapod. They had to keep brushing mites off the vehicle, or the creatures would crawl around inside it and all over the gear, dropping small blobs of mite dung and getting everything dirty. And in the air all around, insects by the thousands flew, humming past, spiraling around, glittering in the sunlight.

“I can’t stand all this life,” Danny complained. He hunched forward over his bad arm, looking utterly miserable.

“If the batteries last,” Rick was saying, “we might make Tantalus by nightfall.”

“What then?” Karen said, working the controls.

“We do reconnaissance. Watch the base, then decide our next move.”

“What if the base isn’t there? Torn out, just like the stations?”

“Do you have to be such a pessimist?”

“I’m just trying to stay realistic, Rick.”

“Fine, Karen. Tell me your plan.”

Karen didn’t have a plan, so she didn’t answer Rick. Just get to Tantalus and hope something turns up. It wasn’t a plan, it was a hail-Mary pass. As they moved along, Karen considered their situation. She was profoundly frightened, she had to admit it, but her fear also made her feel very alive. She wondered how much longer she had to live. Maybe a day, maybe hours. Better make the best of it, just in case your life turns out to be as short as an insect’s, she told herself.

She looked over at Rick Hutter. How did the guy do it? There he was, tramping along with the gun slung over his shoulder, swaggering a little, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world. For a moment, she envied him. Even though she disliked him.

She heard a moan. It was Erika, sitting in the back of the truck with her arms wrapped around her knees.

“Are you all right, Erika?” Karen asked her.

“All right.”

“Are you…scared?”

“Of course I am scared.”

“Try not to be too scared. It’ll be okay,” Karen said.

Erika didn’t reply. She didn’t seem able to handle the pressure of this journey. Karen felt sorry for Erika, and worried about her.

Don Makele paid a visit to the communications center at Nanigen, a small office equipped with encrypted radio gear and corporate wireless networking equipment. He spoke to a young woman who was monitoring all the corporate channels. “I want to try to get a ping from a piece of equipment we’ve lost in Manoa Valley,” he said to the young woman. He gave her the serial number of the piece.

“What kind of equipment is it?” she asked him.

“Experimental.” He wasn’t going to tell her it was an advanced hexapod from the Omicron Project.

Typing commands by remote, the young woman switched on a high-power seventy-two-gigahertz transmitter on the roof of the greenhouse in the Waipaka Arboretum. It was a line-of-sight transmitter. “Where should I point it?”

“Northwest. Toward Supply Station Echo.”

“Got it.” Tapping a keyboard, she oriented the transmitter.

“Now ping.”

The young woman entered a command and stared at the screen. “Nothing,” she said.

“Start pinging in a search pattern around that location.”

She worked the keys for a while. Still nothing happened.

“Now point the transmitter up the mountainside. Do sequential pings.”

After she worked some more, she brightened. “Got it. It pinged me back.”

“Where is the equipment?”

“Gosh. It’s on the cliffs. Halfway up Tantalus.” She called up an image of the terrain on her screen and pointed to a spot on the mountainside, far above the bottom of Manoa Valley. “How did the equipment get there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Makele answered.

Somebody had survived. They were now driving the hexapod straight up the mountain. Interesting.

Makele returned to Drake’s office. “Just for the hell of it, I pinged the hexapod. I got a ping back. Guess what. The hexapod is halfway up to Tantalus Crater.”

Drake’s eyes narrowed. What the hell. Somebody had survived the predator that had eaten Telius and Johnstone. “Can we find that hexapod, retrieve it?”

“Those cliffs are really steep. I don’t think we could reach the hexapod right now. Plus we can’t get a tight fix on it. We can get its approximate location on the cliffs. Only good to a hundred meters.”

A tiny smile formed at the corner of Drake’s mouth and grew wider, until it had become a grin. “I wonder…maybe they’re heading for Tantalus Base.”

“Yeah, could be.”

Drake broke into laughter. “Tantalus Base! Ha! I would like to see their faces when they see Tantalus. They’re in for an ugly surprise-if they get there.” He became serious. “You go up to the crater and make sure they get a surprise. I’ll keep track of their progress.”