Nanowhere | Page 7

rolling around in zigzags and sudden rotates like a marble in a wobbling bowl. That's how he did his thinking.
She put everything away and stood, stretching her arms as she rolled forward. The sun hadn't yet set, but was at that dim undecided point where it tried to linger at the door, fingers clutching at the frame, before night shoved it into the hall and locked it outside until morning.
Kaffia glanced at the sky through the trees and smiled to herself at the thought that Alex wouldn't call this night yet.
She braked hard at the bowl's rim and spun her head around. She heard the dull tap of wheels on pavement and someone chuckling. Kaffia and Alex weren't alone anymore, and although the newcomers were smiling, there was nothing friendly about them.

2
Doctor Death

LIKE A HARE on a quick trip to a predator's nest, Dr. Ernest Straff felt one of his captors' fingers digging talon-like into his shoulder, shifting every few minutes to regrip, pinning him to his seat. Straff fought back the urge to wrench up his lunch.
They'd caught him so easily, went through his property defenses like a cutting rain sheered the load-bearing threads of a spider's web. Caught on his way to the kitchen for a cup of decaf.
"Damnation!" The word burst from his lips like overpressure from a release valve, puffing out the black bag covering his head. So so easily.
"Prepared fora�|" He gasped something unintelligible. His head jerked forward. His voice sputtered into silence.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the heated gasses from his lungs swirling around the bag's insides, eddying over his cheeks, against his teeth.
"Against everythinga�|"
He couldn't hear his own voice over the noise from the engines, just the breath passing his teeth, his tongue ticking against the top of his mouth as he formed the words.
"Ground forces with artillerya�|self-organizing aerosol networks with toxic payloads." Intuition had always guided him toward the infinitesimally small, some sort of nanodevice, his own creations used against him.
Before they'd dragged the hood over his head, he had glimpsed four geared-up troopers in black and gray, masked and bristling communication and sense facilities. They'd dropped through his forest canopy defense as if they could see through it, which shouldn't have been possible.
He squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. The rough bag scraped his cheeks.
"Where were Walter and Wesley," he snapped in a hot disappointed whisper. "When thesea�|when these animals ripped off the front door of my house?"
He twisted his lips in, puckering and chewing in fury. Can't blame them. They'd gone off to the north end to inspect an intrusion. I told them it's just kids on roller skates who'd worked their way around to the back of the property, having been stung a few times trying the front road.
And then four soldiers stormed his house and mashed him into the floor of his own dining room. The north end intruders were a diversion. They'd known how to get him without much trouble. And then he was in the air and out of state.
He had thought the airspace over his property sufficiently protected by a clever bit of mimicry he'd developed to throw off high-res satellite imagery. Apparently not.
On the other hand, this was not that far from how he'd expected to be caught. Straff's eyes shot open and swung around the black bag. He sucked his fury inside to simmer, and after a few hundred more seconds, his face relaxed. There had always been the hope for more time, and perhaps a well-deserved but dramatic end to his life, like something out of an old Frankenstein movie, besieged by a mob of locals with pitchforks, scythes, torches and Kalashnikov's--when they discovered who'd been hiding out in their town all this time.
He wasn't terribly shocked that a team of highly equipped illegitimates had discovered him. These weren't soldiers from the restored rightful government. They wouldn't have sent soldiers. He'd have received some sort of court summons and it would have been from guys in gray suits with briefcases instead of black and gray camo and assault-o-matics.
He tilted his head a little to catch a faint conversation, but he couldn't make out the words over the noise.
These were Dr. Greenleigh's people, or some mid-level ex-SAC Board commander who still had access to the old deathsquads and mobile military hardware. Zoerner was gone, dead for three years. But even after a tyrant is removed from power, it takes a long time to uproot all the evil planted during his reign.
Dr. Straff continued counting absently while his thoughts played with escape scenarios. One in particular. He had anticipated something, even if it wasn't exactly this, and he hada�|sort of planned for it, but it would take a week to play out, a week before he'd know