From Marc: You need to turn on the television. Any channel. Now.

I rummage through the desk drawer for the remote control to the one screen in the room that connects to standard channels. I click it on. The sound is up too high and it startles Lin even with her headphones on. She pulls them off and looks over from her standing desk, first at the screen, then at me. I crank the volume down to a normal level.

“Is something going on?”

“Not sure,” I answer, but then I see the chyron crawling across the top of the screen above the news anchor. “Shit!”

“Shit!” Lin echoes, her eyes also locked on the screen.

“Pentagon officials have so far declined to comment on the events this morning,” the anchorwoman explains from behind the news desk. “But eyewitnesses at the scene claimed to have seen at least two armed men at the site of the attack. Other witnesses said that the attack was caused by an airstrike from an unidentified drone or aircraft. Again, we do not have any confirmed reports about exactly what the attack is or who is responsible.”

I’m much less interested in what she’s saying and much more interested in what I see in the video playing over her shoulder. Shaky video footage of a run-down street in what looks like a rough neighborhood leading to a giant, boiling, gray puddle. I drop the remote on the floor with a clatter. There’s only one thing on earth that causes that roiling, gray chaos.

“We’re joined now by our own Martin Waltz on the scene now,” the anchor continues as I pull out my phone and dial General Whitman. “Martin, what can you tell us about what you’re seeing?”

The phone rings. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up.

The scene cuts to the reporter just a few meters away from the gray goo. Idiot! Get out of there!

“Thanks, Erin,” the reporter begins. “We’re still not sure what we’re seeing, but the experts that we’ve talked to have speculated that this is some kind of chemical weapon attack. No organizations or governments have claimed responsibility, but three apartment buildings so far have collapsed and been dissolved by what appears to be a slowly growing pool of some kind of chemical agent.”

His breath is frosting as he speaks. Good, that means the swarm has already exhausted all the easy ambient heat to fuel its growth. Maybe we can get there in time. It won’t be long before someone recognizes this as looking a lot like the old footage from the Universal Robotics incident. The CPP is going to get exactly what they wanted.

But was this their plan in action? Or a failsafe from Jeff like in St. Louis? Did the CTTF find him and try to take him out on their own? I don’t have enough information to have any idea.

General Whitman’s phone is still ringing.

To All: Drop everything and get to the jet. Now.

I bolt out the door, heading to Alan’s office with Lin close behind me. I feel all the older classes scrambling towards the campus gate. Good, the drills paid off.

General Whitman’s phone finally picks up, but it’s his voice mail.

“Sir! I need to know what’s going on in New Orleans, and I need to know now! Call me back!”

I disconnect just as we hit Alan’s door. He almost gets a greeting out, but I cut him off.

“Get the plane ready! We need to be in New Orleans right now! Literal life and death!”

“On it, sir!”

“And call Maria Hall. Tell her I need her boss on the phone, like right now. Oh, also, call Antonio Campos. Tell him I need the contingency that we talked about.”

“Yes, sir. But what’s all this about?” I hear him say as we’re already running down the hallway.

“Turn on the news!” I shout over my shoulder. I hope he heard that. Doesn’t matter, as long as the plane is ready to fly and he makes those calls.

We make it to the outside doors just in time to see Andrea encase herself in shimmering purple. Dragonfly wings sprout from her back and she darts into the air in the direction of the airfield. I realize I hadn’t put an exception in my telepathy message for her to stay here and guard the campus. Probably better that way. We’re going to need everyone with a cloud. We’ll just get the younger kids out of here instead. I take one more quick stop at the bowling alley where I felt Grammy, Gramps, and Mrs. Hastings.

“Evacuate the campus,” I declare without preamble as I enter the big double doors. “Get some buses, get everyone out of here as fast as you can. Tell the kids it’s a vacation. Go to Disneyland or the beach or something. I don’t care where, just as long as it’s not here. And don’t tell anyone where you’re going to be. Use the emergency cash for all of it, nothing traceable back to the Institute. Take all the staff that live on campus too, and Max and baby Chad and his moms and anyone else I’m forgetting. Don’t leave anyone here.”

“What’s going—” Gramps starts.

“Major crisis in New Orleans. Alan can fill you in. For now, just get the kids and go.”

Lin’s already jetting down the road toward the airstrip on her disk. I suit up and catch up quickly. I encapsulate her in another suit and haul her along. I reach out and feel where everyone is. Good, almost everyone is ahead of us on their way to the plane. Fiona is the only straggler, still back on campus. I grab her too as she tries to pack a bag. I’ve never flightsuited someone struggling against it before. It’s a really weird feeling, like trying to hold a squirming bug.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

To Fiona: Just relax. We’ve got to hurry.

She calms down and lets me carry her. The rest of my siblings are boarding the plane as we zip down the road at full speed a couple of meters off of the ground. We won’t have enough seats on the plane. No, wait. I feel Evan, Louise, and Marc already working on it. Where are the flight crew and Cindy?

Duh. Of course they’re not there. It’s only been a few minutes since Alan started making calls and they all live in Las Vegas. Hopefully, they’re all on their way down and they’re driving fast.

“Hey, everyone,” I say once we’re in the plane. Fiona sails in through the boarding door and she lands on her feet as the flight suit evaporates. My phone rings.

“General Whitman,” I answer, ducking back towards the front of the plane.

“Noah,” he says.

“What the hell happened?” I explode. “Why am I seeing nanobots running wild on the news, and why did I not hear about it from you first?!”

“First of all,” he says in a voice that is much too calm for the situation we’re all in. “You will not take that tone with me. Is that understood?”

“Fine.” I don’t have time to argue. “With respect, sir, what happened in New Orleans that led to the world-ending event that’s going on there now?”

He pauses for way too long of a moment.

“We found your brother and were tracking his actions,” he finally answers.

“And you didn’t call us in?”

“Given the intel that we had, we deemed the risk of continuing to wait was unacceptable. Our tactical team had four snipers that all had clean shots on the target. When that failed, our air support deployed a Griffin precision air-to-surface missile that leveled the building he was occupying.”

I bite my tongue until it starts to bleed to keep myself from saying a whole slew of things that would end the conversation quickly. They found him and didn’t tell us? I’m so seething mad I just want to kill him.

WARNING! LOG TEXT INDICATES MURDEROUS INTENT! THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU KILL ANYONE!

Shut up, stupid electronic mind.

“What happened then?” I finally spit out.

“And then the mission succeeded. My team on the ground confirmed that he did not escape. He never left the building. We got him.”

And you didn’t think that he might have left a dead man’s switch!

I don’t say it.

I warned you about this! Is everyone but us complete morons?

I bite all of that back too.

“Congratulations on your successful operation,” I do say. “You may have noticed that New Orleans is dissolving. That was why I respectfully asked you to bring us in if you found him.”

“Acknowledged. Don’t worry about it, son. We have additional aircraft inbound now armed with enough firepower to blow these nanobugs back to the stone age. We’ll sort this all out shortly.”

“No!” I nearly shout, strangling myself to not curse him out. “You don’t understand. Even if you blanket the whole area in the most powerful ordnance the military owns, you won’t be able to eliminate all of them. Even a single surviving nanobot can repopulate the entire swarm. And more importantly, the limiting factor on an explosive nanobot growth like this is the ambient energy. If you drop anything that makes heat on it, you’ll just accelerate the growth.”

He goes silent for a moment.

“I’ll need to go back to the President to get authorization for a tactical nuclear strike then. We’ll solve this situation the right way this time.”

My index triggers at the mention of nuclear weapons and a conversation with my father pops into my view.

“General, that would be even worse. My father said that a nuclear weapon wouldn’t have worked even on the original bots from Universal Robotics.” Connections click. My brain is working right for once, even if it needs all the related pieces put right in front of it to get there. “You were there, back at the Universal Robotics site. You were the one that my father worked with, the one that would have had to make the call to get permission to drop the bombs back then?”

“Yes,” he acknowledges. “I was there. I was ready to make that call. I hesitated, and I’ve regretted it since. We should have gotten rid of this risk once and for all back then.”

“My father told me that if you’d dropped that nuke, the swarm would have survived and just fed off the radiation. If it wasn’t going to work then, it certainly won’t work now with almost three more decades of research and improvements on the nanobot hulls. In the very best case, you’d wreck the top layers of what’s going to be a lake of nanobots by the time you drop a nuke, but you’d feed everything underneath. It’ll dig down and out. We would never get it under control.”

The line goes quiet.

“How much did they pay you?” I ask.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The Center for Progress and Peace. How much are they giving you?”

“Even if I did know what you were talking about, it wouldn’t be about the money.”

That’s all the confession that I need to hear. A car just pulled up. Cindy and Bob pile out of it. They must have made record time getting here.

“One second,” I tell the General.

They rush up the stairs.

“Get us in the air now, please,” I tell them as they get through the boarding door. “Skip anything not absolutely essential. The world literally depends on us getting to New Orleans as fast as possible.”

Cindy pulls the door closed as Bob takes his seat in the cockpit.

“I heard that. You’d better not be planning to fly in there. If your jet so much as comes within radar range of the airspace down there, I’ve got a pair of fighting falcons that will—”

“General,” I interrupt. “Whatever your reasons, I’m going to bet that the CPP managed to drop some incentives in your direction. We’ve got the best forensics accountants on earth on our payroll and I’ve just given them orders to find out exactly what you got paid.” It’s a lie, but he won’t know that. With the historical extent of the Butler Institute’s legal and financial team, it’s not much of a stretch. “I don’t think bribery would look good on your record, especially a bribe that let the whole city of New Orleans get destroyed.”

He doesn’t answer, but I can hear his breathing on the other end of the line. I can only pray to Mom that this bluff works. I make a note to talk to Alan about how on earth we missed finding the CPP connection to the General earlier. I swear we dug into him as deep as we did anyone and didn’t find anything. Maybe he’s not lying and it wasn’t about the money for him. If it was small amounts, or gifts in kind rather than cash, our checks on him might not have turned anything up. Or maybe he really thinks the world would be better without our tech.

“When you see our family’s jet over the airspace there, you’re not going to shoot us down. I’m making arrangements now to make sure that if anything happens to us, the world will know that this whole thing is your fault. Or, you can be the hero that backed us up when we stopped it and saved the city and the world. We’re happy to share the credit. We’ll be there as soon as we can. Don’t blow up anything.”

The plane lurches forward as I disconnect the call. Good. Bob took me at my word. I head back to the main cabin and get buckled into one of the new, smaller seats that someone built. I’m still texting Alan with contingency plans for Whitman when the wheels leave the ground, just in case our jet gets shot down.