Get the controller.

Eric had his left hand on the door handle, behind him, and he pressed it. The door opened, and Eric fell backward into the generator room, with Drake landing on top of him. He reached out with his right hand and felt his fingers close over the controller, and he ripped it out of Drake’s hand as he fell backward.

Drake swore and staggered, sprawling past Eric into the generator room, and he fired the gun. Eric felt the impact in his leg, the bullet passing through his thigh, but oddly he didn’t feel any pain. He was in shock. But he had the controller now, and that was the main thing. He knew what to do with it. He slammed the controller against the floor again and again, smashing it, feeling it break into pieces beneath his hand.

Now nobody could control the bots.

And then, to his surprise, he saw the gun lying on the floor right in front of him, while Drake was getting to his feet. Drake had dropped the gun. Drake and Eric lunged for it simultaneously.

On the floor, Karen and Rick saw the door open, and two gargantuan human figures fell into the room. The gun went off, and the shockwave of the blast rolled over the micro-humans. Moments later the two men fell with a floor-shaking impact, which hurled Rick and Karen into the air. A droplet of blood splashed, exploding into secondary droplets. They picked themselves up and continued to run toward the white circle.

One of the men rolled over on his back. He held the bot controller, and smashed it repeatedly on the floor. It broke apart, and pieces of electronic boards flew past Karen, knocking her to the ground. She saw the gun skidding across the floor toward her, and felt sure it would crush her. She dove away while the two men collided over the gun. A moment later Eric was holding the gun, pointing it at Drake, who was lying on his back.

Eric lay on the floor near Drake. He rolled over and propped himself up, blood running from his leg, and pointed the gun at Drake’s face. “You move…I’ll shoot you in the head.”

Drake said, “Wait, Eric. We can get out. Alive. Together.”

“Not going to happen. You killed my kid brother.” Eric steadied his finger on the trigger.

“But Eric…you’re completely wrong…I did everything to save him.”

“You’re insane.”

Rick and Karen reached the circle. They could hear a deep thrumming sound-the pulse of robot propellers around them. They had lost track of what the big humans were doing. In the center of the circle there was a hatch like a manhole cover, with a sunken handle. Karen and Rick reached the hatch at the same time.

Rick got down on his knees and tugged on the handle.

Nothing happened.

The hatch seemed to be stuck. By now, several bots had converged on them and were hovering aggressively. A bot flew in and jabbed at Karen with its knives. She swung her blade, and, with a clang, knocked the bot away. It fell back.

Karen held up her machete. “Back to back!” she shouted.

Rick Hutter straightened up, and stood with his back to Karen King, his machete drawn. The bots surrounded them, and began darting in, flying and hovering, steel blades snicking. Rick slung a roundhouse blow with his machete and blinded a bot, shearing off its compound eyes. The bot hit the ground, its neck writhing, and it took wing, flying off erratically.

They continued to hack at the bots, but the bots had no fear, no sense of self-preservation. Whirling her machete, Karen said, “Open it. I’ll cover you.”

Rick bent over and tugged on the hatch again, while Karen straddled him, facing the bots, fending them off. But the hatch wouldn’t come up. He began prying at it with the tip of his machete, then tried hacking at it. If he couldn’t open it, he could cut through it. But the blade bounced off the plastic. “I can’t get it open!”

“Listen Rick-ow!” She cried out in pain. A bot had slashed her. She swung her machete over her head. “Try again! Hurry!” She yelled.

That did it. He threw himself on the door, and wrenched it open. Inside was a single red button. He jumped on the button with both feet.

The floor shook. The hexagon began to descend into the floor, until they were swallowed in a hexagonal chamber.

A bot had gotten inside the hexagon with them. It seemed confused. Rick fended it off, banging at it with his machete as it bounced against the chamber walls.

The lights changed color, followed by a humming sound, and then a dreamy feeling came over Rick Hutter until he felt as if he was floating in space, and dancing with the bot, and dancing with Karen King, the three of them whirling around and around in a mad waltz.

The tensor generator powered up, and the fields crossed and recrossed, and wound up in poloidal loops, and the hexagons raised up and met the floor. Rick Hutter, Karen King, and a gigantic, enlarged bot were left resting on the floor. The people were full-size. The bot had been expanded to the size of a refrigerator.

Eric was lying on the floor, bleeding heavily from a wound in his leg and from several bot cuts, but he was conscious, and he kept the gun trained on Drake, who had started to crawl across the floor toward Eric, an expression of fear working on his face.

“Get Eric,” Rick said to Karen. They scooped Eric up by the shoulders and feet and began dragging him out of the chamber. The gun slipped out of Eric’s hands and hit the floor. Drake got to his feet, and made a mistake. Instead of going for the door, he went for the gun.

In that split second, Rick and Karen got Eric Jansen out of the generator room, and they slammed the door shut. Karen saw that it had a simple deadbolt. She threw the bolt.

This left Drake locked inside the generator room, in the company of a hundred flying micro-bots and one giant bot. The big bot sat on the floor, its compound eyes turning left and right, its gooseneck waving, its turbofan blades shrieking, but it couldn’t lift off. It had become too heavy to fly.

Drake glanced at the big bot, then stood up, holding the gun. Rick and Karen watched from behind the bulletproof window as Drake picked up the bot controller: Eric had smashed it thoroughly. He tossed it away.

They saw Drake’s lips moving, and heard his voice faintly through the glass: “Let me out.”

Rick shook his head.

Drake fired at the window. The bullet starred the glass, but didn’t break it.

Drake walked up close to the window. “Please help me. I’m very sorry.” A bead of blood appeared, hanging at the tip of his nose. He backed up a few steps, and looked around wildly, and swatted at a bot circling his head. He cursed, and waved his gun around, the light beam crisscrossing the chamber. He caught a bot in the light, and fired the gun at the bot. Pointing the light around, he fired again. And again and again Drake fired at the bots, until the tensor room filled with a haze of cordite smoke.

Then he took his cell phone out of his pocket; it was ringing again. “Hello, lieutenant. Would you please come get me? I’ll tell you everything, of course. I’m in a bit of trouble in the generator room. The generator room. In the center of the building. Bots? There are no bots in here, Dan, it’s perfectly safe…” The phone slipped out of his bloody fingers and clattered to the floor. A nosebleed drenched the front of his shirt.

Drake coughed, spraying blood. He staggered forward and pressed himself against the window and stared at Rick and Karen. “I will have you killed! I swear it-!” His eyes went wide, and a bead of blood appeared in the corner of his right eye. A bot emerged through the white of his eye and began crawling across the surface of Drake’s eye, dragging blood along with it as it crawled. Drake seemed to be watching the bot as it crossed his cornea. “Get off me,” he whispered, and dug a finger into his eye, and stared at his bloody fingertip, and screamed.

Then he turned the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.