"Captain Anger Adventure #1 The Microbotic Menace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koman Victor)

Chapter Thirteen Flight of the Seamaster

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).

Racing across the harbor waters, the sun not yet risen in the blood-red morning sky behind them, Captain Anger piloted the Seamaster with a skill seen nowhere else in the world, except perhaps among his allies. Leila sat to his right in the co-pilot’s seat, arguably the next-best pilot of the bunch. And Rock frequently argued the point in defense of his own flying skills.

The sea thumped against the hull of the flying boat. Water sprayed noisily about outside the cockpit, drenching the windshields to create a blurred view of a world consisting of grey water, white foam, and coral sky. Cap stared straight ahead, left hand on the wheel, right hand on the throttles. Occasionally he glanced at the airspeed indicator.

Suddenly, the roughness smoothed as the jet lifted to a higher position on the water.

“On the top,” Leila said with excitement. Breaking free from earthly bonds thrilled her with its primal delight.

Cap fed full power to the engines. With a deceptively quiet roar they accelerated to liftoff speed. After an instant when the hiss of rushing water against the hull threatened to drown out all else, just as suddenly the noise disappeared, left behind and below as the jet climbed out over Los Angeles Harbor. Beneath them drifted the man-made islands named for three American astronauts who had died in the race for the Moon-Island Grissom, Island Chaffee, Island White. Cap banked the plane when it passed through 1000 feet and headed south along a flight path that skirted the California coastline.

Cap flew more by instinct than by instruments. It was that instinct, that feel for how an airplane flies that led him to consult the instruments.

“Knock the elevator trim up a notch,” he said to his co-pilot. “We’re dragging our tail.”

“It matches our weight-and-balance sheet,” she said, a little mystified.

“Shto tebye!” the Russian shouted. “Hey, Cap-smotri! Kid is stowaway!”

Rock climbed forward with an indignant but unstruggling body tucked under his arm. He set the boy down behind the pilot’s seat.

Jonathan Madsen thumbed his stray blond hair behind his ears and stared defiantly at Cap.

“I’m not sorry,” the young man said. “I have a right to justice.”

“Really?” Cap said with a hint of a smile. “What right?”

“Revenge.” The stern look in Madsen’s eyes belied his age. “Dandridge killed my grandfather. I have a right to get even.”

Cap sighed, turning his attention away from the controls to let Leila take over for a moment.

“Johnny, vengeance is not justice. If killing Dandridge could bring your grandfather back, I’d be the first to pull the trigger. But the universe doesn’t work that way. A second killing won’t even the score, it will only drag it downward another point. We’re heading out to stop Dandridge from any further killing-”

“And you’d kill him if you had to, right?”

Cap put a strong hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “Yes, but only if there were no other way. Justice means making things right, and that’s the responsibility of the one who first caused the harm. If Dandridge dies, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to repair the harm he’s already done.”

“His staying alive won’t bring Julie back either.”

“True,” Cap said. “There are others, though, that could benefit from his talents if he chose to turn back toward good. That’s the only way he could make any sort of restitution.” He shifted his attention back to flying the jet, adding, “Reparation is preferable to revenge. It can actually improve the world. And it leaves the streets less bloody.”

The stowaway said nothing.

•

Uriah West, M.D., slouched in one of the seats that folded out of the fuselage wall and tried to doze. All the while, he mentally reviewed the operations he had performed during the last seven hours. All told, he and Cap-with Leila, Rock, Sun Ra, and several additional surgeons assisting-had spent those hours between their midnight meeting and this dawn flight performing brain surgery on one of the four zombie-like gunmen.

With the aid of the Institute’s computerized axial tomography equipment-basically a 3-dimensional X-ray machine-Tex had located the source of the problem in the patient: specialized microbots had attached themselves to nerves in the brain, cutting them with their microscopic scalpels and slipping a tiny silicon chip between the severed ends. Each chip, Cap discovered, possessed thousands of tiny holes, each ringed with an unbelievably small iridium electrode. The nerves had grown back through these holes, allowing the microbots not only to monitor nerve impulses, but to send their own signals to the gunmen’s brains. In this way, Dandridge could order them to do anything he wanted them to do-including shooting at Captain Anger until they had exhausted all their ammo.

Dandridge-in his rush to escape-had left them on the equivalent of automatic pilot; they could make no decision for themselves and simply kept firing, following the programmed commands of the microbots even after the knockout gas robbed them of their consciousness.

Tex marveled at how Cap had removed one of the microbots from the first man’s brain and, with Flash, had analyzed it in the atomic force microscope, tracing its compact, three-dimensional circuits. With the aid of the supercomputer Cyclops, they developed in a few hours a different logic circuit and etched it onto a replacement microbot’s gallium-arsenide structure.

The new microbot would travel through the bloodstream in the brain, seeking out the other microbots and delicately sundering the connections between the machines and the patients’ nerves. The silicon chips would remain in the nerves- there was no quick way to remove them without causing massive brain damage-but the microbots would no longer be in control. Gradually, as the repair robot moved through the men’s brains, the effect of Dandridge’s mind control would be undone.

While Tex injected into a repair microbot the fourth and final patient, Sun Ra reported signs of voluntary motion in the first, recuperating patient.

Tex pondered the evil genius behind the microbot and the other genius that swiftly found a way to undo the evil. A chill ran through him as he recalled Cap’s first words after studying the device removed from the first man’s brain: “It seems Dr. Dandridge is not concerned with simply dismantling matter- he’s interested in dominating souls. That makes him more dangerously mad than I’d first thought.”

Tex saw the masseter muscles along Captain Anger’s jawline tighten up-a sure sign that he was formulating a plan to rid the world of Dr. William Arthur Dandridge.

A sudden, stomach-lurching drop interrupted Dr. West’s drowsy reverie as the Seamaster encountered an air pocket. When he opened his eyes, Tex stared at a Cinerama view Pyotr Kompantzeff’s khaki-clad rump.

“I could do without the sight of your back forty,” Tex drawled, then added, “Make that yer back eighty, ya’ damn’ Roosski.”

“Sookihn sihn,” Rock said with a wide, sarcastic grin. “Your family tree has your entire maternal branch still living in it eating bananas, and your horse-thief paternal ancestors were hanged from it.”

To say that Rock and Tex enjoyed baiting each other was to understate the case. West, a tenth generation American whose ancestors helped settle Texas, found the immigrant Kompantzeff to be an endless source of amusement, especially his thick Russian accent and foreign pattern of speech. For his part, Rock drew vast entertainment from observing the equally thickaccented Texan, in whom he saw astounding provinciality in his love of the Lone Star State and his small-town view of the world.

And it went without saying that the strong bond of friendship that held all of Captain Anger’s crew together belied the sometimes harsh and earthy banter between the two.

“Hell, boy,” Tex rumbled, “if your rear end were covered with grass, I could send a herd of twenty longhorns there on a winter graze.”

“And if your brains were petrol,” Rock growled, “you could not fill cigarette lighter.”

“Overpaid plumber!”

“Unindicted quack!”

They both grinned at Johnny, who had stumbled upon their exchange on the way to the back of the plane. He stared at the two warily, fully expecting for them to come to blows. Rock waved his thick hand dismissively.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Cowboy is too much afraid to call me out to showdown. Knows I would beat him to draw.”

The young man nodded, unsure about the burly rocket scientist’s degree of seriousness. “Captain Anger asked me to tell you that we’re about to descend toward Escollos Alijos.”

Rock and Tex exchanged glances. Both knew that they were about to face mortal danger. Both grinned.

Tex rolled one spur against the aircraft deck. “Well, pardner, let’s get ready to whump Dandridge’s donkey!”

Jonathan Madsen wondered what he was getting himself into.

•

Escollos Alijos comprised two small islands separated by a few miles of water. At least, that’s what they looked like on the Seamaster’s computerized map. From the air, though, something appeared terribly different.

In the glittering Pacific waters, the northern island revealed the summer colors of golden brown and dark green. The southern island, though, looked nothing like an ordinary island. It shimmered in the sunlight with the silvery glow of lifeless metal. Cap steered clear of the island, so they could not get close enough for a good view.

Cap brought the plane down in placid water off the shore of the northern island. The Seamaster gently approached the ocean as he reduced power to idle, lowered the flaps, and bled off airspeed until the smooth hull lightly skimmed the surface. Quickly the aircraft slowed, descending into the warm waters. The graceful wingtips touched simultaneously and the airplane coasted swiftly to a standstill. Only the rise and fall of the sea gave any motion to the jet now.

Rock immediately opened the side cargo door and wrangled a large black bundle out into the water. On contact, it inflated with a loud thwump, turning into an arrowhead-shaped boat.

Cap went through the water-landing shutdown routine for the Seamaster, then climbed to the cargo area, leaving Weir in charge of the airplane. He opened cabinets and secreted a few items in the hidden recesses of his vest and added a largish cylinder to his left cargo pocket. Strapping on his autopistol and several waterproof ammo pouches, he nodded to Rock, Sun Ra, and Tex. Rock and Sun Ra toted similar arms, though they wore khaki jumpsuits similar to Cap’s black one. Rock’s broad chest bore a crisscrossed pair of nylon-web straps, bandoliers securing a dozen handball-sized spheres. The hexagonal and pentagonal shapes on their surfaces made them look like miniature soccer balls. The traditional pin-and-spoon grenade fuses, however, made their function perfectly clear.

Tex removed his spurs in preparation for jumping into the inflatable raft. He tightened the straps on the camouflaged backpack he wore. It contained his medical kit, along with electronic equipment Cap had requested him to bring. Instead of a jumpsuit, he wore beige jeans and cavalry shirt made of the same bullet-resistant cloth as the rest of their wardrobe.

Sun Ra patted a walnut-hued hand on his own piece of equipment-a portable missile launcher designed by Rock to deliver a one-pound warhead packed with the most powerful chemical explosive he could devise. Only a nuclear warhead could provide more punch per pound.

The four jumped into the boat. Tex attached the jet motor and fired it up.

“What about me?” Jonathan shouted.

“Guard the plane,” Cap answered over the roar of the engine. “Leila will show you how the rail gun works.”

The reply failed to satisfy Madsen, who feared that he would miss not only all of the action, but also his chance to avenge his grandfather’s death.