Viktor Koman - The Microbotic Menace

Dandridge didn’t stand a chance.

They trod quietly over to the operating room. Hazarding a glance through the observation glass, he saw that the UN Secretary General still lay on the operating table, Dandridge feverishly meddling with the man’s brain.

At Anger’s silent cue, Sun Ra burst through the doors. Dandridge grunted in shock as the flying tackle slammed him into a supply cabinet. The doors bent inward with the force of impact. From inside came the sound of breaking glass and clattering instruments. Disoriented, the doctor stared at Ra’s wicked smile just before an ebon fist slammed the side of his skull, ramming him into unconsciousness at the speed of dark.

Sun Ra let Dandridge slip to the floor, then turned to join his team. Cap had already donned a surgical gown and Latex gloves and peered inside the soft pink-grey recesses of the exposed brain before him. Tex slipped his long, slender fingers into surgical gloves and joined Cap in his effort to save the diplomat.

“He’s got a more powerful chip in there,” he muttered. Looking up at Rock, he said, “You and Sun Ra find Campbell. Tex”—he glanced at Dr. Uriah West—“we need to disconnect the axons of his brain from this chip and reconnect them to the correct dendrites before they grow into the iridium channels.”

Sun Ra and Rock sped from the room, grinning widely at the notion of payback time for Campbell.

Tex swung the microsurgery videocam into position and peered at the infinitesimal nerve strands attached to the equally minuscule squares wired to the microchip. He whistled.

“Cap, this chip is in the portion of the brain that controls deceptive behavior. It looks as if Dandridge wanted Mr. Arafshi to lie for him.”

Cap nodded. “What would a diplomat be without some ability to lie?” Suddenly he smiled a leprechaun’s smile, his red hair and green eyes ablaze with inspiration. “On the other hand, I wonder what the world would do with a diplomat who always told the straight truth?”

Dr. West grinned back, then moved out of the way as Richard Anger, holder of an M.D. among many other degrees, lowered his eyes to the microsurgical scope and deftly disconnected the chip from the brain cells, then reconnected the axons in a pattern slightly different from the norm.

“There,” he said, after a long while peering into the hole in Arafshi’s head. “Stitch up the dura, put his skull back in place, and zip him up.” With a snap of rubber, Cap peeled the gloves from his deft yet powerful hands and bent down to grab the unconscious criminal mastermind. Glancing back at Tex, he said, “I’m taking Dandridge. Get Arafshi to the beach if you can.”

“Sure Cap,” Tex said. With a quizzical tone in his voice, he shouted

toward the departing man, “Say, who-all’s running the UN while Arafshi’s here?”

“A surgically altered imposter,” Cap shouted back, throwing Dandridge over his shoulder and opening the door to peer cautiously through it. “Just like the Dr. Madsen impersonator who escaped and caused the mess up in Los Gatos.”

“You mean that wasn’t—?” Before he could finish his question, Cap slid through the doorway to race toward the sounds of battle.

William Arthur Dandridge awoke to slamming pain in his guts, not to mention a splitting headache. In an exhausted tone, he muttered, “Killing me won’t stop my plans, Anger.”

“Killing you isn’t my plan,” Cap said tersely, negotiating the metallic corridors, moving ever toward the commotion. “Stopping you is all I want. The internal clocks on the scavengers I reprogrammed will trigger them to dismantle this island and everything on it in about an hour. So I’d advise you to join me for our flight out of here.”

Dandridge, trying gently to feel his head bruise despite the bouncing around he received on Cap’s broad shoulder, said, “Campbell will kill you all and I’ll still have time to program a retaliatory microbot.”

“And what makes you think—?” The words caught in Cap’s throat as he raced through a hatchway leading outside the steely fortress. On the gleaming metal shore, he stared in wonder at the giant monstrosity that had cornered his men.

It looked like a cross between an enormous insect and a gargantuan crab. The setting sun drenched the creature in blood-red hues as it thundered across the wet, glittering shore. Thirty feet high and twice as long, the six-legged machine pounded toward Rock and Sun Ra firing tracer bullets that lit up the landscape like laser blasts. Inside its head sat Campbell, furiously working a pair of joysticks and peering down on his victims with an insane gleam in his eyes. He fired wildly, with no attempt

to aim. Cap’s powerful legs slammed into action to speed him toward the battle, Dandridge wrapped around his shoulders like a hunter’s prize. As he ran, he spoke into his earcomm.

“Leila! Take out that thing with a missile!”

“You’re all within the blast radius. I’ll use the rail gun.”

“Aim for the head.” Shrugging Dandridge off his back, Cap freed up his hands for the fight. From his many-pocketed shirt, he withdrew a sphere the size of a golf ball, colored white and dimpled the same as a golf ball. This object, however, had two red stripes slightly off axis from each other. With his powerful hands, he twisted the two hemispheres of the ball until the red lines met at the equator. Something inside chirped electronically. Planting his feet on the unyielding shoreline, he took aim and pitched the ball in a high arc toward the advancing macrobot. Bullets ricocheted around and behind him like electric raindrops.

Rock and Sun Ra saw the sphere rise upward toward its target.

“Duck!” Ra cried, turning his back to what he knew came next. Rock belly-flopped to shore, slipping across the wet Penrose tile pattern and nose-diving into the briny foam.

An ear-pounding explosion lit up the gloaming sky, briefly outlining the three men and the towering machine in its white, angry glare. The shock wave roiled across their flesh like waves on water.

Inside the head of the colossal creature, Campbell clapped hands over his ears and stared overhead in agony. Released from his grip, the joysticks fell dead and the machine halted in its tracks. In a burst of furious rage, the undeniably mad scientist seized the controls and fired the machine gun into the growing darkness, peppering the seaside with near misses.

Suddenly, from hundreds of yards over the water lanced an eerie white line of blinding light. The stream curved to shore and slammed into the spidery monster with the force of a god’s fist. The battle ended in less than five seconds. The trail of ionized air glowed for an instant or two after the rail gun ceased its deadly roar. In the fading glare, Captain Anger saw the dripping mass of slag that had seconds before been the head of the killing machine. The rest of the macrobot remained standing on its five of its six legs, the right front lifted up as if slain in mid-stride.

Sun Ra joined Cap’s side. Looking up at the damage wrought by the Seamaster’s mighty superweapon, he smiled and said. “I guess Campbell just lost his head.”

From behind them, they heard Tex shout “Need some help here!”

Turning around, Cap saw the doctor at the mouth of the artificial cavern, the secretary general—head wrapped with bandages as if turbaned—cradled in his long arms. Cap also saw that Dandridge had vanished.

“Rock! Help Tex. Sun Ra—find us a boat that can get us to the plane. Then round up the zombies and prisoners for evacuation. I’ll find Dandridge. Leila!”

“Here, boss.”

“Preflight the plane and prepare to take on passengers. We’ll need zipcuffs if any of them get violent.”