Greg Bear - Quantico

In the study lounge, chairs and couches had been pulled up in front of an old model plasma TV with lots of missing pixels. Some students were still studying. Others had firmly fixed their gazes on the spotty display.

William walked up behind Fouad, who was sitting straight up in one of the lounge’s well-cushioned chairs. ‘Where’s this?’ William asked him.

‘Washington state,’ Fouad said. ‘A farmhouse has been raided. The Patriarch, Robert Chambers, was killed in a shootout. Erwin Griffin, is he your father?’

William let out his breath. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Well, he is due to go into that barn and discover if there is a bomb. Everyone with bomb expertise is listening. It is very interesting, very frightening.’

William pressed his teeth together and sat on the arm of Fouad’s chair. Saturday night at the Griffin household. ‘Griff’s at it again,’ Mom would say, sitting at the dinner table with her son and an empty chair, a plate set out, on more than one occasion with tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I can feel it. Can’t you?’

Then he recognized his father, seen from behind-stocky and poised, of medium height, standing with two others in front of a big barn. A shiny bomb squad truck with Washington State Patrol painted on its sides stood a few yards away. He could barely make out some robots arranged on the ground around the truck.

William heard the subdued conversations from bombnet. All the heroes were chitchatting, trying to work out the deadly puzzle, to figure out how his father might die and try to prevent it from happening.

William could not just turn away. Family honor.

‘May I sit here?’ he asked Fouad.

‘I am proud to have you,’ Fouad said, and meant it. There was respect in his upturned eyes. ‘Your father shot the Patriarch. He is very brave.’

Washington State

Chippy found nothing in the two houses. Vogel took her back to the edge of the clearing with her tail between her legs, then tossed her a rubber ball for a few minutes before loading her back into her travel cage.

Watson, Rebecca, and Griff hunkered down behind blast shields about fifty yards from the barn-a trivial distance. At the edge of the clearing, more police and agents squatted behind their vehicles. They could all see Kaczynski’s-the bot’s-progress toward the door.

Griff tapped his gogs. The images from Kaczynski were sharp-better than bomb suit video. The bot paused at the opening, then turned around on its wheels, giving Griff a view of their own position-three black rectangles with heads bobbing behind tiny plastic windows.

Even from outside the barn, the bot’s minitrace was off the scale. There was no hint of plastique, Semtex, or any more recent explosives, but the barn’s air was redolent with a number of suspicious substances: diesel fuel, urea nitrate, particulate carbon that could have been from recent fires or explosions. There could be alternate explanations for most of these traces, however-it was after all a barn and fuel and fertilizer were to be expected. The particulate carbon could have come from a barbecue.

‘Are we ready?’ Andrews asked from the back of the bomb squad truck.

‘Do it,’ Griff said, then took a breath and held it, hardly aware he was doing so.

Rebecca moved from a crouch to a kneel behind the blast shield and braced her hands on the ground.

Kaczynski walked through the nine-inch opening, quieter than any mouse. At first, the bot’s cameras revealed little more than bouncing splotches and bars of sunlight. Processors adjusted the picture. Details emerged and contrast smoothed.

The barn was big, empty of animals, but most of the stalls and an overhead hayloft were stacked high with containers-bottled water, sacks of sugar and what looked like barrels of wheat, rice and other grains. The Patriarch had been wellprepared for the Endtime.

The three behind the bomb shields listened to the conversation inside the truck. ‘Can you make a bomb out of wheat?’ asked a younger tech, new to the division.

Andrews whuffed. ‘You ever work a grain elevator?’ As he guided the bot, Andrews reminisced about his younger days in Wyoming, when he had witnessed a mishandled load of wheat puff out a dusty fog. A spark from a pump motor had ignited the flour/air mixture and blown the silo cap two hundred feet into the air. Two loaders had been killed and the concrete building had split down its length. ‘Don’t underestimate the calories in a cup of flour, my friend,’ Andrews said.

Griff tapped his gogs again. After a while, he couldn’t see the displays clearly-the problem with aging eyes. With a glance at Rebecca, he whipped off the display glasses and stuck them in his pocket. ‘The hell with this.’ He rose from behind the shield-crouching was playing hell with his knees-and hustled across the short distance to the bomb squad truck. Watson followed.

Rebecca removed her own gogs and joined them. The back of the truck was crowded. Watson grudgingly moved aside for her. They stepped around bomb suits arranged in clear plastic packages on the floor.

‘Welcome to bot central,’ Andrews said. ‘Hope you’re not claustrophobic.’

Griff was, a little.

The small space stank of adrenaline-pumped fear.

‘Don’t you guys use deodorant?’ Watson asked. Griff knew well the sharp, stewy pong. He had become familiar with the smell of frightened men first in combat overseas and later in many tight stateside situations, and he hated it.

They had all learned to work at peak efficiency despite the fear and the smell.

‘Pardon me,’ Andrews said.

The young technician grinned and moved forward, sitting on a steel box.

Inside the Patriarch’s barn, the bot called Kaczynski had paused before what looked like an abstract sculpture-metal tubes welded in bristling clumps on a central steel ball. The bot’s cameras angled down. The whole arrangement was mounted on a wheeled platform. A tow bar stuck out from one end.

‘What in hell is that?’ Griff asked, his voice soft.

‘A calliope?’ Andrews guessed.

Watson pressed her lips together.

Gray cylinders of pressurized gas thrust up behind the wheeled platform. The bot’s camera played over them in up-and-down sweeps. Rebecca was looking for labels. ‘No colorcodes,’ she murmured. ‘Could be anything. We’re going to have to pull his welding license.’

The sensors were negative for acetylene as well as propane and methane. The lack of methane in itself-in a barn-showed that ruminants had not lived there for some time. The bot pulled itself around the abstract metal object and down an aisle between empty stalls. Griff was focused on the display when the image took a jerk. In the corner of their gogs, a red dot blinked.

‘What now?’ Griff asked.

Andrews said, ‘The bot’s located something moving.’ He turned up the sound: harsh breathing, frightened little gasps. Then the dot stopped blinking.

‘Bot’s decided it could be human,’ Andrews said.

The camera image stabilized long enough on the interior of a stall to show a flash of reddish blond hair, then a small, blurred figure. The figure dashed out of view.

‘Did you catch that?’ Griff asked.

‘Looked like a little girl,’ Watson said.

They saw quick blue flashes and heard three distant popping sounds in rapid succession. As they all cringed and hunkered, Kaczynski’s displays blanked.

It took a few seconds for them to relax. The barn had not taken flight.

Andrews fumbled at controls. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Bot’s down.’

‘What, did somebody shoot it?’ Watson asked.

Andrews shook his head. ‘I think we tripped a fryer. I’m getting nothing.’