“Go,” was all Cap had to say.

The three opened the nozzles and doused the lake with the ultra-cold liquefied gas. As the streams hit the warm afternoon air, clouds of icy vapor erupted, filling the street with an eerie mist that imparted the smell of a snowy day to the block.

As soon as the flow of nitrogen touched the microbots, the forward motion ceased. The surface took on an unreflective grey cast. Minuscule cracks appeared all over the frozen zone, making a snapping, popping sound similar to the cracking of an icy pond in a spring thaw.

Whenever a dewar emptied out, they disconnected the nozzle and attached it to another. Working in a clockwise fashion, they soon had the entire sea of electro-mechanical scavengers frozen solid. Cap continued to pour the liquid nitrogen onto the crumbly puddle, its peripheral edges, and the ditch-like scar it left in its wake.

“Spray everything it might have touched,” Captain Anger said over the commlink. “If even one single unit survives, it could start dismantling the damaged ones and replicate all over again!”

“Gospodi polimya,” Rock said in awe. He sprayed even more widely, dousing the unreflective grey mass with every last droplet of the nitrogen.

After a few more moments, Leila’s last drum of nitrogen drained to empty. Cap’s and Rock’s soon followed. Cap set his nozzle on the drum and turned his attention to the smaller puddle that had once been the paramedics and their van. It seemed quiescent at the moment, though Cap knew that a beehive of microbotic activity churned on a molecular level.

Weir and Kompantzeff wrangled a shiny, studded sphere out of the van. About the size of a soccer ball, it possessed the same hexagon/pentagon design on its surface. At the intersection of each silver pentagon, though, a knob protruded. From each knob dangled a cable shielded in wire mesh. The cables ran to a briefcase-sized control board hefted by an assistant of Dr. Bhotamo. The trio set the equipment down beside Captain Anger at the edge of the puddle.

Carefully, Cap-still wearing the cryonic insulation suit- knelt and dipped an acid-resistant probe into the mass. It welled up around the plastic scoop like mercury adhering to gold.

“This stick’s made of long-chain polymers,” Cap said to Dr. Bhotamo, who watched from a respectful distance. “I suspect it will take the microbots longer to break the molecules down than it would something simpler, such as a steel probe.”

With utmost care, Captain Anger lifted up a silvery blob the size of a pea and turned on his knee toward the metal soccer ball. Lei had opened it along its equator. Rock switched on the power and a humming sound registered just below the level of hearing. With utmost care, Cap held the probe over the center of the containment vessel’s lower half and with one controlled snap of his wrist shook the droplet off the end of the rod. The tiny gob fell an inch and then floated, suspended in the absolute center of the sphere. Cap swiftly tossed the probe into the small pool of microbots, its purpose served, and turned his attention back to the magnetic levitation device. He gingerly hinged the upper half of the sphere into position over the lower half, taking care not to jostle the half that suspended the sample. Until the top was on and all the magnetic beams activated, the slightest motion could send the sample sliding off the magnetic fields and cause it to make contact with part of the machine. If it did that, the microbots would have a new source of raw materials.

The top in place, Cap engaged the locking bolts. “Activate the magnetic guns in sequence, Lei.”

Leila typed instructions to the computer controls and watched the screen that gave a virtual image of what was happening inside the ball. The device hissed lightly.

“Chamber evacuated to pressure of eight torr. Field is on, all beams nominal,” she said. “Sample contained at center of sphere.”

Rock breathed a heavy Slavic sigh of relief. The microbots floated inside the unit suspended on magnetic beams, as sturdily contained as if they were packed in concrete, yet in contact with nothing but the energy fields that hit them from twenty directions. The microscopic creatures might be able to use the energy in some way, but without any materials to strip and convert into more microbots, they were as helpless as a demolition crew stranded in outer space.

Cap nodded. “All right.” He turned to Dr. Bhotamo. “With your permission, I’d like to take this over to Lawrence Livermore and analyze it further.”

“Please, Professor Anger. My lab is your lab.”

“Thank you. Leila-get this into the van. We’ll work on a defense against them in a moment.” He gazed up through his cold-suit visor toward the building through which the rogue helicopter had crashed. “After that, we’ll track down their source.”

He turned to Rock. “Let’s freeze that other pool.”

Captain Anger gritted his teeth.

None but his friends and long-time companions Rock and Leila noticed, or even knew why. Only the hardening of his gaze, the tightening of the muscles along his strong jawline gave any clue to his emotion.

The three had entered a place of war.

Lawrence Livermore was a scientific research laboratory very similar to the Anger Institute. In low-lying buildings amid footpaths lined with trees, scientists spent their days in contemplation of fascinating and obscure aspects of the laws of nature. With unbridled enthusiasm, they tinkered with mighty machines and miniature wonders, pushing the limits of physics and engineering to astounding extremes.

But where the Anger Institute dedicated its efforts solely and exclusively toward the betterment of mankind, Lawrence Livermore had another, darker duty. Under contract to the federal government, scientists there daily researched new and more powerful ways to kill.

They did not view their jobs in such a light. In their own minds, these powerful thinkers considered their tasks to be nothing less than the dispassionate inquiry into the workings of nature. They pondered sub-atomic particles and found ways to break them into the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. What the politicians did with such information, they thought, lay beyond their realm of expertise. They were scientists, not philosophers.

Captain Anger knew better. As a merchant marine in his younger days, he had stumbled upon many wars fought with weapons of far less sophistication than those designed by his fellow scientists at Lawrence. Even the crudest devices brought misery and devastation wherever they fell.

Cap could not quite bring himself to hate these scientists who toiled in ignorance of the consequences of their actions, but to him the place spoke of death.

He followed Dr. Bhotamo down the cool, robin’s egg blue corridor. Willowy Leila and the ursine Russian brought up the rear, wheeling the magnetic suspension unit on a lab cart.

“I have commandeered a lab for you,” Dr. Bhotamo said, “and I give you my personal guarantee that you won’t be disturbed by members of the press or any others.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Bhotamo ran his ID card through a slot in a set of double doors, which parted at the priority security clearance. Inside was everything Cap would need.

“What exactly are you planning?” Dr. Bhotamo asked.

Cap smiled with a wry expression. “I’m planning to develop a microbotic vaccine.”

•

For hours Captain Anger sat in front of the atomic force microscope. It gave him a superb view of one of the microbot’s infinitesimal control circuits. With the computer-enhanced image uplinked to Flash via satellite, Cap was able-between the two of them-to divine the exact workings of the tiny terror’s gallium-arsenide brain.