Viktor Koman - The Microbotic Menace

“Call me Johnny, if you’d like, Mr. Anger.”

“All right.” Captain Anger smiled. “And you can call me Cap.” He looked back at Sun Ra and Tex. “Johnny, meet Jefferson Paine, Esquire, and Dr. Uriah West.”

“Call me Sun Ra,” rumbled the attorney’s pleasant, deep voice.

“And my handle’s Tex,” the doctor said with a wide grin, “as if ya couldn’t guess.”

Jonathan nodded at them, a little subdued by the strange assemblage of talent. He had seem some interesting types at his grandfather’s lab, but no one nearly as wild as this crew.

Cap said, “The patients are on a chartered commercial jet out of San Jose. I suspect they have implants controlling their gross motor functions. Your operating room’s ready and your surgical team awaits.” He turned to the other arrival. “Sun Ra, thanks for handling those weapons charges with the Los Gatos police. Where’s Glenn?”

Flash spoke up. “Glennis is in Antarctica with the greenhouse project. There’s no way she could have made it here by midnight.”

Cap shook his head. “World’s still too big,” he muttered. Looking down at the device Flash laid on his desk, Cap pulled the tiny disc out of his pocket. “Let’s see if you can get something out of this.” He tossed the disc to Flash, who peeled off the adhesive tape and cleaned it with alcohol.

Hunched over the compact disc reader, the blond man adjusted the laser tracking so that it would move closer to the center to read everything close to the tiny spindle hole of the diminutive platter. Connecting it up to the computer inside Cap’s deceptively antique desk, Flash switched on the reader.

The flat screen built into the desk glowed as text appeared. It said:

Project Lilliput Titan Drexler College of Nanotechnology Julius Madsen, Ph.D.

William Arthur Dandridge, Ph.D.

I. Goals and Objectives

II. Flowcharts, Circuit Diagrams, Photo-Masking

III. A History of Microbotics

IV.

The Future of Microbotics

V.

Specific Military Applications

VI. Prototypes and Testing

VII. References Which?__

Cap tapped in the Roman numeral V and watched the information pop up on the screen. The muscles in his jaw tightened as he read of the military uses imagined by Madsen and Dandridge for their invention. Whether smuggled in over land or dropped down by aircraft or missile, the microbots could lay waste to entire cities, reducing buildings and people to their constituent molecules.

Cap’s aides clustered around the desk screen, joined by Jonathan who stared in a disbelief at what he read.

“My grandfather wouldn’t suggest such things,” he said. “He’d never think up ways to kill people.”

Rock spoke as gently as his Slavic tones allowed. “Sometimes people have to say or print things they don’t believe in order to get funding. Sometimes scientists don’t realize what they consider interesting theories somebody else considers real and useable weapons. My own father built missiles for Soviet Union. He dreamt of travelling into space, but missiles he built military just used for atom bombs. He kept doing it, though. He had family to think of. Now rockets used for space travel, but my father is dead.” Rock shrugged. “Very little justice in world.”

Cap nodded. “Well, we’re going to provide a little in the case of Dr. Dandridge.” He keyed in the section concerning prototypes and testing. After scanning the pages scrolling past, he said, “Johnny, do you know what Pacific Test Site Three is?”

“It could be a pair of islands off Baja California called the Escollos Alijos. Dandridge has a research lab there.”

“Then we’ll go as soon as Tex removes those implants from the zombies. We may need to know what makes them tick.” Captain Anger stood and gazed at his five fellow adventurers. “We can’t stop the spread of technology just because it is sometimes misused. But we can stop those who seek to pervert science toward evil ends.”

He switched off the disk reader and called up a map of the Baja California coastline. In the Pacific Ocean roughly 250 miles west of the town of Santo Domingo lay Escollos Alijos.

He looked up at Flash. “Call Long Beach,” he said, “and have the Seamaster prepped for takeoff. Fully prepped.”

“What about me? Am I going?” Jonathan asked.

Captain Anger took a moment to address the eager young man. “My friends and I are used to danger—we choose it freely, even enjoy it a bit. I have no right to endanger you, though. Stay here with Flash. You’ll be in radio contact with us every step of the way.”

Jonathan’s expression faded to disappointment. “All right. Say—is there anyplace to eat around here?”

Cap smiled. “Second floor cafeteria. Help yourself.”

After the boy departed, Captain Anger gazed thoughtfully at his five companions. Rock, Leila, Flash, Sun Ra, and Tex quietly watched him with anticipation.

“Friends,” he said, “when my father founded the Anger Institute, he sought to bring together the finest minds to engage in creation and invention for the betterment of mankind. He crossed national lines to do so, ignored the power-plays of governments, and invested his entire fortune in this venture. He thought that science alone could save humanity. What he did not understand was the human capacity to choose evil over good.

“My small contribution to this effort was to seek out the sort of thinkers and creators who were also people of action. Men and women who understand that science has no morality—only people can choose how any tool is used. A hammer can just as easily be wielded to smash a skull as

build a house.

“Our common goal is to stop the skull-smashers before they can swing those hammers.”

Captain Anger paused a moment, then said, “We’ve united before in such efforts. We were successful then. And with your help, I trust we will be again.”

“If we don’t get killed,” Rock muttered to himself.

The jet engines of the Martin P6M Seamaster roared into life. Floating in the channel to the east of the domed shrine to its predecessor, the Hughes Hercules H-1 Spruce Goose, the flying boat lay low in the grey pre-dawn waters. The last of its kind, it had been rescued from an aircraft graveyard and completely rebuilt and restored by Captain Anger. In an age of utilitarian passenger airliners and specialized military aircraft, the Seamaster was a lovely anomaly: a large jet aircraft designed to take off and land on water. Graceful and sleek in design, its engines lay atop the wings, artfully hidden inside wide, thin air intakes. The tips of the high-mounted wings curved downward to touch the water and provide three-point stability between them and the streamlined hull.

The entire aircraft above the water line was painted a deep grey—a color that blended well with the sea and sky and clouds. The bottom of the buoyant hull had been painted a medium blue, with a smooth wave design at the waterline that served as camouflage while on the high seas.

Even though the design of the seagoing jet appeared archaic, the materials Cap used to restore the aircraft made it one of the most technologically advanced planes in the world. Instead of steel and aluminum, the plane’s fame and skin utilized plasma-hardened titanium—light, strong, and uncorrodible. And though the instrument panel and controls came from the original aircraft, much had been added in the way of avionics and electronic equipment. Instead of push-rods and cables, the controls consisted of fly-by-wire (more accurately, fly-by-optical fiber) connected to the sophisticated onboard computer (which in turn uplinked to Cyclops).