He had made a terrible mistake. He should have gone to the police immediately, even if it had guaranteed his own death.

The call had come in almost an hour ago. Damn! He had taken his sweet time getting that food! Eric swore and dragged open the drawer, scooped up the laptop and a radio headset, and ran down the stairs. In the driveway, the two guys were sitting beside the parked truck. Eric didn’t have a car. He had worked out a deal with one of the guys to rent the truck, paying fifty bucks every time he used it. Now, he handed the guy fifty dollars and got in, placing the equipment on the seat next to him.

“When you be back?”

“Don’t know.” He started it.

“You okay, man?”

“There’s been a death in my family.”

“Oh, sorry, man.”

He swung onto Kalakaua Avenue and immediately realized he’d made a mistake. Kalakaua was the main drag of Waikiki, and the crowds had flooded the avenue, people going on foot and in cars. He should have gone the other way to Diamond Head. But that probably would have been just as bad. As he inched his way through the stoplights, past the major hotels, he began to cry again, and this time he let it happen. It’s my fault, he told himself. My brother is dead and it’s my fault.

Drake had planned the killing with extra layers of security, different ways to make Eric die. Eric wasn’t sure exactly how Drake had done it, but Drake had made the boat stall in heavy surf, and he’d rigged something that had launched two Hellstorms at Eric. The killer bots flew out of the cuddy cabin after the boat stalled. At first Eric had thought they were flies or moths, but then he saw the propellers, and the munitions, too. After he jumped out of the boat with the killer bots flying after him, he had to keep himself under water, to avoid them. He had texted Peter just before he jumped, warning Peter to stay away, but there had been no time to explain things.

Eric was a strong swimmer and knew how to handle himself in surf. He had gone into the surf without a life jacket, diving deep whenever a breaker passed over him, in order to keep himself safe from the bots. He had considered the surf the safest place to be. Safer than anywhere else just then. He swam into a small cove, where there was a pocket beach known locally as the Secret Beach. The beach was tucked among the headlands. You couldn’t see it from most places. It could only be reached by a hiking trail.

He had come out of the water at the Secret Beach only after he was reasonably sure no one had seen him swim there. He had bagged a ride into Honolulu from some local guys, who asked no questions and could not have cared less where he came from. Going to the police had not been a good option. The police would never believe his story, that tiny flying robots armed with super-toxin weapons had been sent by the CEO of the company to kill him: they would think he was schizophrenic. And if he went to the police, Drake would learn he was alive, and would send more Hellstorms, and he’d be killed for sure and very fast. In Honolulu, he had not returned to his apartment: Drake might have set a trap for him there. Instead, he’d visited a pawnshop, and taken his Hublot chronograph watch off his wrist and pawned it for several thousand dollars. He needed to go into hiding, and figure out how to bring Drake to justice. He had put down cash for a seedy, low-profile rental.

As Nanigen’s vice president for technology, Eric Jansen knew a lot about the company’s communication network. A degree in physics helped. After a trip to Radio Shack, he had tweaked up a listening device. He had begun scanning the Nanigen intracorporate channels, and learned that his brother had shown up in Hawaii immediately, then had disappeared along with the other students. He suspected Drake had done something with the students. He had not believed Drake would murder them; that would be too obvious, and Drake was a clever man. So Eric had assumed that Drake had made them disappear in the micro-world temporarily, and that they would eventually reappear.

Eric had been waiting for the moment when his brother would come to the surface, for he had faith in Peter. He had thought that Peter would get through this, and come to light, somehow, and that he, Eric, would eventually rescue him. If the two of them could go to the police, there would be two corroborating witnesses to Drake’s crimes.

This was not to be.

He had screwed up massively. He should have gone to the police right away. Even if the police didn’t believe him, even if it meant that Drake would kill him, because it just might have saved Peter’s life. The whole source of the problem was Omicron. Eric had been very careful not to tell Peter what he had discovered about Project Omicron. Eric had been trying to protect his younger brother. None of this had done any good.

He swung through Kapiolani Park, picking up speed and weaving around the cars, hoping he would get to the lighthouse in time.

Chapter 43

Ko‘olau Mountains 31 October, 11:10 p.m.

At an altitude of 2,200 feet, Danny Minot pointed the nose of his micro-plane upward, gaining height in order to be sure he would clear the sides of Tantalus Crater. The crater was lined with entrapping trees, black and menacing. He looked back, wondering if any micro-planes were following him. But he couldn’t see anything. He headed upward, gaining altitude.

This was easier than a video game; the micro-planes had been designed to be almost crash-proof. Did the plane have running lights? He found a switch, and the running lights came on, red and green on the wingtips, white pointing forward. He turned them off so that the others couldn’t follow him, but after a little while he switched the lights on again. It made him feel better, somehow, to see the familiar winking lights on the wings.

And he saw the city of Honolulu spread out below him. The hotels of Waikiki towered and seemed impossibly huge. Red-and-white lines of cars moved along the boulevards, and he saw a cruise ship docked in the harbor. The ocean was an inky expanse beyond the city. The moon floated over the ocean, casting a sparkling highway of light on the water. To the left of Waikiki Beach a dark mass spread out. It was Diamond Head, and he was looking down on it. Seen from above, Diamond Head was a crater, a ring. A few lights burned in the center of the crater. He could make out the shape of Diamond Head itself, a mountainous headland at the highest lip of the crater. But he did not see any blinking light. Just the dark shape of Diamond Head. Where was the lighthouse?

He increased the power and began to fly toward Diamond Head.

His plane suddenly flipped over and blew sideways, rolling over and over, and he yelled with fright. He had entered the trade wind as it burbled over the mountains. He swore and fought the stick while the plane tumbled in wind eddies. But then the plane stabilized, and began flying straight and steady in the wind, moving really fast. He had gotten into laminar flow. It was like getting into the main current of a river. He looked down. The forest was moving down there. Or rather he was moving over it. The altimeter showed he had gotten up to three thousand feet. In the moonlight he saw a magnificent view.

Behind him, upwind, the hollow of Tantalus Crater spread out. The crater was dark like a cave; no lights in the crater, no sign of Rourke’s Redoubt or Tantalus Base. Directly below him, roads snaked up the flanks of the ridge. Lights burned along the roads. Ahead of him the towers of the city were coming perceptibly closer, until they seemed to burn with energy and rise to impossible heights. For a moment he felt as if he was flying into the capital city of an alien galactic empire. But it was only Honolulu. He still couldn’t see Diamond Head Lighthouse.