“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve gone over everything they sent off, including Kimo’s e-mails to you, just to see if we missed anything. So far, we’ve come up blank.”
A flash of concern appeared on her face. “You looked over his e-mails to me?”
“We had to,” Kurt said. “On the chance he’d inadvertently sent you some vital piece of data.”
“Did you find anything?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t really expect to. But we can’t leave any stone unturned.”
She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “Maybe this is too big for us. Maybe we should leave it up to some international organization to investigate.”
“What happened to all that determination from a few hours ago?”
“I was angry. My adrenaline was pumping. Now I’m trying to be more rational. Maybe the UN or the Maldives National Defense Force can handle the investigation. Maybe we should just go home. Now that I’ve met you and your friends, I can’t bear the thought of anyone else being hurt.”
“That isn’t going to happen,” Kurt said. “We’re not leaving this to some agency that has no real interest at stake.”
She nodded her agreement as Kurt’s phone chirped.
He pulled it from a pocket and clicked answer.
It was Gamay.
“Making any progress?” he asked.
“Sort of,” she said.
“What do you have?”
“I’ve sent you a photo,” she said. “A snapshot from the microscope. Pull it up.”
Kurt switched into the message mode on his phone and pulled up Gamay’s photo. In black-and-white but crystal clear, a shape that looked both insectlike and strangely mechanical. The edges of the subject were sharp, the angles perfect.
Kurt squinted, studying the photo. It resembled a spider with six long arms extending forward and two legs at the rear that fanned out into flat paddles shaped like a whale’s tail. Each set of arms ended in different types of claws, while a ridge running down the center of the thing’s back was marked with various protrusions that looked less like spines or barbs and more like the printed wires of a microchip.
In fact, the whole thing looked positively machinelike.
“What is it?”
“It’s a micronic robot,” Gamay said.
“A what?”
“That thing you’re looking at is the size of a dust mite,” she said. “But it’s not organic, it’s a machine. A micromachine. And if the sample I took is any indication, these same machines are seared into the residue from the fire in great numbers.”
He looked at the photo, thinking about what Gamay had just said. He tilted the phone so Leilani could see. “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” he mumbled.
“Try four and twenty million,” Gamay said.
Kurt thought about their earlier conversation and the theory that the crew had set fire to the boat to rid themselves of something more dangerous.
“So these things got on the boat, and the crew tried to burn them off,” he said, thinking aloud. “But how’d they get aboard in the first place?”
“No idea,” Gamay said.
“What are they for?” he asked. “What do they do?”