They had entered the main lab room of the Omicron Project. The lights in the room were turned low, and the room was mostly dark. It was not a large space; it could have been a normal engineering lab. It contained some desks, some workstations, some lab benches with magnifying lenses mounted on them. Steel shelves held a myriad of small parts. A window made of thick glass looked into the tensor core; a door stood next to the window, an entry door that led straight from Project Omicron into the core.

Eric stood in the middle of the Omicron lab, holding the bot controller in his hand, looking around, listening. So far so good. He couldn’t see the bots but he knew they were there, clinging to the ceiling. He listened for a faint hum. He might just hear their turbines if they sensed him and started dropping off the ceiling, coming for him. If the bots hadn’t been disarmed, he’d only know when he started to bleed. But he heard nothing, saw nothing, and felt nothing. His controller still worked; he had disarmed the bots. He gave a sigh of relief.

“We’re good,” he said.

There were objects sitting on the lab benches, covered with black cloth. It was hard to see just what they were in the dim light.

“I’m going to show you,” Eric said on the squirt radio to Rick and Karen, “why Vin Drake wanted to kill me. And why he killed your friends.” Eric stopped in the middle of the room, and held out his arm sideways, bent at the elbow. “Land on my arm,” he said. “You can get a closer look that way.”

Rick and Karen landed their planes on his forearm. Moving carefully and shielding the planes with his hand so they wouldn’t be blown off by a stray gust of air, he approached the closest bench. He removed the cloth from one of the objects. It was an aircraft, small, sleek, vicious-looking. It did not have a cockpit.

“It’s a Hellstorm UAV,” Eric said. “An unmanned aerial vehicle.”

“A drone, you mean?” Rick asked.

“Exactly. A drone. No pilot.”

It had a wingspan of ten inches.

Eric brought his arm close to the drone, letting Rick and Karen have a good look.

“This is a giant prototype of a Hellstorm,” he said. “Once it’s flight-tested, it will be shrunk down to half an inch.”

Instead of landing gear, the Hellstorm had four jointed legs with what looked like sticky pads on the ends, just like the feet on the hexapod trucks. Under its wings it carried missiles: two glass tubes with long steel needles at their noses, fins, and what looked like a rocket motor in the tail.

“What does it do?” Rick asked.

“Indeed-what does it do?” Eric echoed. “It’s a military drone the size of a moth. It can be used for surveillance. It can also kill people. It can evade any security system in existence. It can fly under a door or through a crack around a window. It can cling to a person’s skin or clothing. It can also crawl, using those legs. It can fly along the electrical conduits inside a wall, then pop out and fly around inside a room. It can kill any person, anywhere, anytime. You see those rockets under its wings? Those are toxin micro-missiles. The missile is armed with super-toxins that Nanigen has discovered and extracted from life-forms in the micro-world-poison from worms, spiders, fungi, and bacteria. The missile has a flight range of ten meters. This means the drone has standoff-attack capability: it can fire toxin missiles from a distance. If one of those super-toxin missiles embeds in your skin, you’ll die fast. One micro-drone can kill two people, since it carries two missiles.”

“What are those scoops along the fuselage? Are they jet intakes?” Rick asked.

“No. Those are air samplers. They’re used for targeting.”

“How’s that?” Karen asked.

“The Hellstorm can smell you. Every person gives off a unique fingerprint of scent. Each one of us smells a little different from every other person. Our DNA is unique, so naturally the combination of pheromones given off by our body is unique, too. A micro-drone can be programmed to seek out the odor of a particular person. Even if you are at a rock concert, the drone can find you in the crowd and kill you.”

“This is a nightmare,” Karen King said.

“The nightmare has no end,” Eric Jansen said. “Think of a presidential inauguration. Think of a thousand Hellstorms released into the air, all of them programmed to seek out the president of the United States. If just one micro-drone gets through, the president dies. Micro-drones could take out the government of any nation-Japan, China, Britain, Germany-any nation could be cut down by a swarm of micro-drones.” He turned himself around slowly, while Rick and Karen took in the scene from his arm. “This room is Pandora’s box.”

“So Nanigen isn’t about medicine,” said Karen.

“Nanigen is about medicine. It’s just that Nanigen is working both sides of the street. Ways to save lives and…ways to end lives. This Hellstorm,” he touched it lightly, “is a drug-delivery system.”

“And you found out about it, so Drake had to kill you.”

“Not quite. I knew about the Omicron program all along. Nanigen has a contract with the Department of Defense to develop micro-drones. The research went much better than the DOD people got told. Vin started lying to the government. He started telling them the micro-drones were a failure.”

“Why?” Rick asked.

“Because Drake had his own plans for micro-drones. We had a problem with our patents on the micro-drone system. There’s a company in Silicon Valley called Rexatack that actually invented and patented some of this technology. Vin Drake is an investor in Rexatack. He ripped off the patents and used them to build the Hellstorm drone. Then he decided he needed to sell the technology fast, because Rexatack was getting ready to sue Nanigen and get its patents enforced. What got me into trouble with Vin was when I discovered he was trying to sell the micro-drone technology to the highest bidder.”

“Not to the U.S. government?” Karen said.

“No. Vin was looking for fast money, and there’s more money overseas. Look-there are governments out there with money to burn-and it’s dollars. Countries whose economies are growing faster than ours. They will pay anything for the micro-drone technology. Anything. I’m not saying that the U.S. government would necessarily do nice things with micro-drones. I’m just saying there are governments out there that would commit horrors with them. Some of those governments hate the United States, they have nothing but contempt for Europe, they fear their closest neighbors, and they hate and fear their own people, too. Those governments wouldn’t hesitate to use micro-drones as a means to their ends. And then there are the international terror groups-they’d love to have micro-drones. I learned that Drake had gone to Dubai where he was talking with officials of several different governments about selling them the Nanigen Hellstorm technology. I protested to Drake. I said it was a violation of U.S. law. I said it was dangerous for the whole world. But I hesitated.”

“Why?” Rick asked.

Eric sighed. “Drake had given me stock in Nanigen worth millions. If I went to the authorities, I knew Nanigen would crash and burn. My stock would be worth nothing. So I hesitated. Out of greed. I had gone into physics for the pure love of it, and I never thought, you see, that physics would make me a millionaire. Now millions would slip through my fingers if I blew the whistle on Drake, and it was my fatal weakness. Then Drake decided to kill me. I was in my new boat doing sea trials, and I’d told Alyson Bender I’d meet her in Kaneohe for lunch-it’s on the windward side of the island. Alyson, or Drake, seeded my boat with Hellstorms. Prototypes, but they were loaded to kill me. My engines failed, and that’s when I saw one of those damned things fly out of the front cabin. At first I thought it was just a bug. Then I saw it had propellers and needle missiles, and I knew it was a Hellstorm. Then I spotted another Hellstorm flying out of the cabin. So I texted my brother and dove overboard. The surf protected me. The micro-drones couldn’t smell me, couldn’t launch missiles at me because I was swimming under the waves. I made it to Honolulu and went into hiding. If I had surfaced and gone to the police, Drake would have hunted me down with more micro-drones. Vin Drake is drunk on the power of his bots.” Eric sighed, and paused, and in the silence another voice spoke: