NanoStrike (31 page)

Quinn traced the path of the cables, which drooped and peaked along a parade of poles that ran to the refinery two miles away.

By the time he turned back, the felled pole was half gone, transformed into a black-and-orange smear in the sand.

“Transmission lines are metal,” Abdul said. “The nanobots can’t process metal, and there must be at least three hundred feet between poles. They won’t be able to make the leap.”

“Sam. Hang on a sec’,” Quinn said. He checked his watch.

Sam eased back on the stick, and they hovered in place. Sam pivoted the cockpit so it faced the transmission lines. In the distance, a heat haze distorted the air above a long line of garbage trucks waiting to deposit feedstock at the refinery.

The next pole toppled.

Quinn checked his watch again. “Two minutes,” he said.

“Look.” Abdul pointed to a thin orange line in the sand connecting the two fallen poles, which marked the progress of the nanobots. “Maybe the wire has a plastic coating.”

The line pointed, like a directional mark on a map, directly at the refinery.

“Sam, fly along the power line. We have to count poles.” Sam tilted the machine forward, and Quinn counted aloud as they flew toward the plant—thirty.

Abdul pointed to the large building at the end of the transmission line. “At two minutes each, that’s sixty minutes till they reach that.”

“Joe, what’s in there?” Quinn asked.

“Generators, computer room, the admin offices where we clock in each day.”

“How many people?” Quinn said.

“Two hundred.”

The parking lot next to the building was crammed with vehicles. Quinn turned in his seat and faced Joseph. “And overall in the complex?”

“Maybe three hundred more.”

“Don’t forget those.” Adiba pointed to a line of trucks waiting to drop their loads. Quinn gazed past the trucks and traced the four-lane road Nazar had built. Two miles to their north, it connected to the I10 Interstate, part of the highway system that spread through every major population center in America.

“Oh. Shit!” Quinn considered having Joe call in the authorities, but unless he could order up an immediate missile strike to take out the power lines, more personnel arriving could only make matters worse. There wasn’t time to explain, and no one would believe the urgency anyway.

Looking back along the transmission lines, the prototype building was a pile of rubble. Another pylon crashed into the sand. He was staring at a long, slow-burning fuse, and they were hovering over the bomb.

He had to find a way to cut the power line before the nanobots reached the plant. Underground cables connected the power plant to every part of the complex. The complex connected to the road, and the road connected to the Interstate. If the ‘bots made it to the admin building, they would feast on the highway, and once they hit the freeway, there would be no stopping them.

“We have to warn those people. Joseph, what’s the protocol for an emergency requiring evacuation?” Quinn said.

“A system of sirens throughout the refinery, but only the head of security can trigger the alarm.”

“Call him. Now!”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” Quinn flipped around and knelt in his seat, leaning hard against the seatback, his finger pointed at Joe’s face.

“You shot him,” Joseph said.

“So
you
do it!”

“Only Mason had the code, and it’s changed daily.”

“That’s bad practice,” Quinn said. “Someone else must have the code.”

“Well—” Joseph said.

“What? Well what, Joe!” Quinn came over the back of his seat, between Abdul and Adiba, and got in Joseph’s face.

“The Professor had the code,” Joseph said. “He was our failsafe if Mason was compromised.”

“Quinn,” Sam said, his brow furrowed with worry.

“What now?” Quinn barked, his fists clenching and unclenching against the seatback.

“It’s . . . we can’t stay up here. I need the fuel to return to the airport.”

Quinn didn’t respond. Sam hadn’t been in that building. Sam hadn’t seen people melted in seconds into a pool of orange Kool-Aid. Flying back to Phoenix wasn’t in their immediate future.

Quinn flipped back into his seat. “Take us over there.” He pointed to the nearest conversion chamber, and Sam headed toward the silver-domed building.

Four dump trucks pulled away after dumping garbage on the concrete ribbon skirting the tank. Ten crude piles formed a rough semicircle in front of the loading chute. The scene repeated at each of the chamber’s eight loading bays.

A bulldozer, more than twice the truck’s height and double its length, moved toward the garbage. Its front blade, lowered flush to the ground, slammed into one pile, scraping and pushing the trash toward the chute that fed the containment vessel below.

“Okay, Sam. Put us down close to that monster.” Quinn turned to Joseph. “I’m getting off here. Sam will fly you to the admin building. Get whoever is responsible for the generators to turn off the power to the western building. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s good, because I don’t want anyone electrocuted, particularly me.”

Quinn passed his cell phone to Abdul. “When you get inside the building, call Scott on a landline, his number’s stored in here. Tell him to arrange the exchange at Phoenix airport, but don’t tell him anything else, especially don’t tell him where we are right now. There are enough people in danger already. Calling in the cavalry will make matters worse. Got it, Abdul?”

“Got it.” Abdul slapped Quinn in the shoulder. “Be careful out there, big man.”

“Sure.”

The pilot landed two hundred feet behind the bulldozer. Quinn underestimated the drop, and a sharp pain shot up his left ankle when it jarred on the hard ground. Baked by the desert sun, the concrete burned his bare feet, and he started hopping in place. Right now, he’d trade his life savings for a pair of sneakers.

The downdraft from the chopper almost flattened him as Sam pulled away. The air was fetid. Carrion birds circled and screeched overhead. Compared with the scale of the building and the machines, Quinn felt insignificant, vulnerable, and exposed.

The dozer was thirty feet long. The operator, in his enclosed cab, sat ten feet in the air, and he wore ear-protectors to block the deafening noise of revving engines, dumping, and scraping. Quinn ran toward the machine, but the ground was littered with scraps of garbage. Quinn’s feet were simultaneously burned and cut.

He picked up a large piece of white plastic and waved it over his head, trying to get the driver’s attention, but there was no reason for the man to look anywhere except in front. Standing still for a few seconds, he observed the machine to understand the driver’s operating pattern: Push trash forward. Reverse and curve counterclockwise toward Quinn before moving clockwise to push the next heap to the chute. Then repeat. The dozer was moving away from him. Sam had dropped him on the wrong side.

Instead of chasing the machine, Quinn set off toward the untouched garbage piles, cutting across the driving pattern. Reaching the driver was out of the question, climbing over the bulldozer’s metal tracks to access the cab, was impossible. Quinn need to get ahead of the driver and attract his attention.

Time was against him. He tried to run head-up, ignoring the pain in his feet. But he stumbled and slipped on the uneven mess, and his eyes were inexorably drawn downward. He gave in to human nature and focused on the ground, picked the least painful path, and glanced up occasionally to be sure he still headed toward the untouched piles.

Instead of completing a full, first pass of the large heaps, the driver doubled back to scrape the remaining trash in the quadrant Quinn had already crossed. With the noise and his focus mostly on the ground Quinn didn’t see or hear the dozer circle behind him until a pile of garbage, being pushed along by the dozer, knocked his legs away and flipped him on his back.

The trash shifted and moved below him like a living thing. He couldn’t stand, so he rolled onto hands and knees and scrambled over rotting food, plastic cartons, and soggy cardboard. Legs pumping like a running back, he traversed the pile until he reached the hot steel of the blade.

A large tire lay next to him. He straddled it on his knees. Quinn stretched up, but his fingertips fell three feet short of the blade’s lip. He judged the dozer’s position relative to the chute: two hundred feet from the drop. As the machine gathered more trash, the tire rode the garbage and lifted him closer to the lip, but not fast enough. He’d get one shot; if he missed the top edge and lost his footing he doubted he’d have time to try again before the dozer reached the chute.

Body facing the blade and head turned, eyes fixed on the fast-approaching loading chute, Quinn delayed as long as he dared. Forty feet from the edge, fear overcame logic. With bare feet positioned on either side of the tire, he slammed his knees ramrod straight. The metal blade was a foot thick. He spread his fingers over the width of the blade searching for a grip. Fingernails splintered as he dug into the unyielding, hot metal. Quinn screamed. The sound drowned like a pin drop in a thunderstorm.

He gripped the top edge and heaved himself off the tire. His head cleared the lip, and he wriggled his upper body until the blade lodged in his belly, head and chest on the driver’s side, hips and legs dangling over the trash.

Behind him, garbage tumbled and crashed as it cascaded into the chasm below. A strong updraft of hot, stinking air hit his legs as though he were flying. The blade cleared the concrete, and he hung in mid-air, draped over the blade like an old banana skin stubbornly stuck on the lip of a trash can.

The machine stopped. The sudden braking action almost shook him loose. His arms cramped and screamed with the effort of holding on. His legs flailed, useless, treading air on the business side of the blade. He braced himself, anticipating the machine’s rough reverse from the chute, but it remained stationary. He peered up. The driver had removed his earmuffs. He stared at Quinn with a look of incredulity.

“Back up slowly,” Quinn shouted.

The machine crawled back from the precipice. The engine shut down.

Between the stink and nerves and the strain of keeping his body bent at the stomach over the blade, Quinn wanted to throw up. He fought the urge, pouring his focus into maintaining balance. It was a long way down. With no garbage below him now, he might break a leg if he fell. The driver climbed from his cab, stood below Quinn and yelled.

“What the fuck you doin’?”

Quinn spoke in gasps. “Help . . . me . . . down.” Folded like a pretzel, his body weight squeezed his chest against the hard steel of the upper edge of the dozer’s blade. Quinn lost sight of the man, then he felt a tap on his ankle.

The driver shouted from below. “Okay, ease down. It’s about two feet to my shoulders. I’m right between your legs.”

Quinn edged and slipped his body back. His bare toes pointed, searching for solid contact. Until, at last, the driver grabbed his left foot, then his right, and guided Quinn’s feet to his shoulders. As he pushed off the blade, his cheek tore on the metal, and he slid down the driver’s back to land in a heap.

“Fuck, buddy, I never saw you. I coulda killed you. What you doin’ here?”

Quinn was holding on to consciousness by a thin thread. “Water.” It was all he could manage.

The driver gripped him under the arms and spun him around so the curve of the blade cradled his back. He returned a few seconds later with a canteen. The cool liquid helped. After a few deep gulps, the faintness passed.

Quinn signaled the man closer so he didn’t have to shout. “There’s been an accident at the Western plant. People are dead: Mason from security, Nazar Eudon, Professor Farjohn.”

The driver stared at him as if he were crazy.

“What’s your name?” Quinn asked.

“PJ. They call me PJ.”

“Okay, PJ, here’s the deal. If we don’t cut the transmission lines between the power plant and the Western facility, this refinery is going to blow, and everyone here, including you and me, will die.”

“Look, buddy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d better get you back to the medics, you’re in bad shape.” PJ stared at Quinn’s feet. “And where the fuck is your shoes?”

Quinn would have liked nothing more than a shot of morphine and a cute nurse to bathe his feet, but he’d already lost ten or fifteen minutes and the nanobots wouldn’t be taking a coffee break. He slipped a hand inside his jacket and pulled out his Glock.

“PJ, if you do what I say, I won’t hurt you . . . If you don’t, I’ll shoot you. Doesn’t matter to me, because if you don’t do what I say you’re gonna die anyway.”

The driver raised his hands, like in the movies, then he ran around the blade and out of sight.

Quinn tried to stand. First attempt didn’t work; his knees gave on him. Then the bulldozer’s engine started, and he scrambled on hands and knees away from the blade just before the bulldozer pushed forward toward the loading chute.

“Son of a bitch!” Quinn cleared the blade, glared up at the driver’s cab, and leveled the Glock at PJ’s chest. PJ saw him, but instead of stopping he turned the dozer, trying to crush Quinn under its twenty-foot-long metal tracks. The machine was big, but not agile.

Quinn put a slug into the side window of the cab, behind PJ’s head. The dozer stopped.

Quinn signaled with the Glock for the driver to get down. This time, he obeyed. Quinn kept the gun centered on the driver’s chest.

“PJ, I don’t want to hurt you,” Quinn said, “but I need you to drive this thing over—”

PJ turned and ran toward the admin building.

“Fuck!” Quinn stared at the filthy, serrated metal tracks he’d have to navigate to reach the driver’s cab. He winced in anticipation and started climbing.

Sitting in the cab was like perching atop a high building. The series of levers to his right baffled him, but a pedal on the floor gave him hope. He pushed and heard a reassuring hiss of compressed air when he released it—brake. Now he had to figure out the levers.

Because the machine had no steering wheel.