Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm by Kevin J. Anderson

the Mote better than he did—which was just the way he liked it.
    Devlin ducked around the landing struts and hunkered down to climb through the bottom hatch. Inside the craft, he inhaled the new-car smell of fabric, paint, and metal. He scanned the cockpit, making sure not a single paperclip was out of place.
    His black-leather pilot seat was fronted by the curved control board, a Christmas tree of lights and dials, some cryptically marked, some with grease-penciled annotations. Following tradition, he reached into his pocket and removed a snapshot of Kelli and himself (laughing and drenched after a water-balloon fight). He taped it just at the edge of the cockpit window, where he could easily see it. Beside the photo, he'd handwritten his new motto on an index card: think small.
    From the copilot's seat, Tomiko Braddock would control all the weaponry and defense mechanisms. During the ship's final modification phase, she had insisted on adding high-powered laser projectors (“cannons,” she called them) to use against obstacles in the uncharted microscopic terrain. “At our size, even a dust mite will look like Godzilla romping through Tokyo. Give me some firepower.”
    When miniaturized, the streamlined vessel would be surrounded by a containment field, a barely visible force that maintained their reduced size and dispersed quantum forces. Once they entered the hostile micro-universe, the team would be entirely on their own. Self-sufficient—or vulnerable, depending on how one looked at it—without the possibility of outside intervention.
    A vertical airlock cylinder ran through the center of the vessel like an apple core, with its hatch on the underbelly of the craft. When miniaturized, the crew would be able to explore outside in environmental suits. Devlin walked past the airlock to the back bulkhead and opened a hatch into the cramped engine compartment. Shining a handlight inside, he inspected the impeller cowlings, the turbines. Perfect.
    “You're beautiful,” he said to the ship. Compliments never hurt.
    He carried his “little black bag,” in which he kept every conceivable low-tech gadget to repair those engines, even rebuild them from scratch, if the sophisticated modular systems failed. Torque wrenches, needle-nosed pliers, screwdrivers… cotton swabs, toothpicks, chewing gum, Band-Aids, and the ubiquitous duct tape. All the essentials.
    While Devlin understood his tools and every system aboard the Mote, it bothered him no end that he could not fathom the scientific details of the miniaturization process itself. The two senior project physicists, Quentin and Cutter, were so absorbed in their esoteric work that it seemed they could barely dress themselves or eat their meals without assistance. Brilliant to the edge of being idiot savants, they never took furloughs, even to Fresno, unless the Director ordered them to. And then they had to be escorted.
    National treasures, Felix called them. Who was Devlin to argue?
    The physicists loved to explain their pet theories to anyone who had a security clearance and the possibility of comprehending what they were talking about. Someone like Devlin. Quentin and Cutter spoke of quantum effects, overlapping waveforms, the arbitrary space between the electron cloud and an atomic nucleus. It all made sense to them.
    In his post-grad engineering training at MIT, Devlin and his fellow classmates had engaged in a friendly rivalry with the head-in-the-clouds physicists. Trusty engineers knew how to make things work. They solved problems and made useful items based on pie-in-the-sky theories that physicists cooked up. But these two geniuses went farther beyond the mental fringe than anyone Devlin had ever met in his professional career.
    Cutter, whose wild hair looked as if it had been combed with a ceiling fan, cited holographic theory, explaining how a three-dimensional pattern could be stored in a hologram, which, when illuminated by intersecting laser beams, would