BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  “Indeed,” Burnofsky said. “And I appreciate the compliment.” He turned to Plath “Of course, I was building on your father’s work—”

  “His work wasn’t this,” Plath said. “He didn’t do research so he could destroy, he—”

  “He did it for the same reason we all do it. For ego. To say he’d done it. To not only play God but to be God!” Burnofsky shouted. “You spoiled little brat, you aren’t the pimple on her ass. If she was alive, she’d—” Suddenly he seemed unable to catch his breath.

  “Who? Who are you talking about?” Keats asked. “That daughter you murdered?”

  “Give me a fucking drink!” Burnofsky yelled, spittle flying.

  “Tell me how to turn off those nanobots,” Nijinsky shot back.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Burnofsky said. “I don’t think I’ll do that. And we call them hydras. Cute, isn’t it?”

  “It’s starting to hurt,” Billy said, almost like he didn’t want to interrupt. A thin trickle of blood ran down his cheek.

  “Stop them,” Nijinsky said. “You know what happens in this scenario. You can’t want that.”

  “Give me a drink, pretty boy,” Burnofsky said. “Hold it to my lips and pour.”

  Nijinksy froze, indecisive.

  “Jin, give him the drink,” Plath said.

  Wilkes snatched the bottle, stuck the entire neck of it in Burnofsky’s mouth, and upended it. Burnofsky gagged and swallowed and choked, but Wilkes kept the bottle elevated.

  Finally she pulled it away. “Now talk. How do we stop it?”

  Burnofsky coughed until the cough turned into a laugh. His voice was a harsh rasp. “I never said I’d tell you anything.”

  “You guys need to help me,” Billy said urgently.

  “Hah,” Burnofsky said. “They need to incinerate you, kid. That’s what they need to do.”

  “What?” Billy asked, his voice quavering. “What does that mean?” “Nothing,” Plath snapped.

  “You’re going to do this to a child?” Nijinsky demanded. “A child? A child, singular?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Keats said, shaking his head. “No matter how degenerate you are, no matter what you’ve done, you can’t sit here and watch it happen.”

  Burnofsky’s stare was from very far away. “Well, my little Limey friend, it won’t be the first, will it? The first time, I saw it very close and very personal. She looked at me…. She didn’t know …but she felt it, inside her …She felt death, you know, she felt it, even though she was young and what did she know about death? She looked at me and said, Daddy …And she never called me Daddy that way before. Not in a long time, not since she was a little girl . . .” He lost the thread for a minute, then recovered, lifted his chin up off his chest. “I’m doing it to them all, all the children. I’m doing it to the whole human race. All of life. I’m cleaning this filthy planet. All of you,” Burnofsky said. “All of everything. Welcome to the end of the world.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Give me that.” Keats took the nanobot controller from Billy. “We don’t have the code,” Nijinsky pointed out.

  “I’m not trying to stop the hydras, I’m going to kill them. I’m

  going to switch over and use the dozen nanobots Burnofsky planted on Plath. And I’m pulling my biots from Plath and Burnofsky.” Burnofsky snorted. “Try to run biots and nanobots simultaneously? I don’t think so.”

  “Wilkes?” Keats said as he slid on the twitcher glove. “If he argues, give him the brick again. Just don’t hit his right eye, I’m walking my biot out that way.”

  “This isn’t a fight against Bug Man,” Plath pointed out. “These hydras are on automatic, right? Uncontrolled? I’m getting in on this, too.”

  Burnofsky said, “Don’t be stupid. By now there will be too many for—”

  WHACK!

  Wilkes did not have to be prompted. The brick smacked Burnofsky’s head with enough force to stun him into silence.

  “You two are not playing hero by yourselves,” Wilkes said. “I’m in, too.”

  It was a strange battle muster. The forces were spread far and wide, and yet, in the macro they were all within a three-foot radius.

  Plath rallied all three of her biots, two fresh from their nutrient baths and functioning normally. Keats withdrew his first biot from Plath’s brain and his second from Burnofsky. He took chargeof the nanobots Burnofsky had planted on Plath—these, at least, were controllable.

  In Keats’s brain there was an explosion of awareness. He saw through K1 and K2, his two biots. One raced across Burnofsky’s eye. The other was racing to escape Plath’s brain. But at the same moment all twelve visual inputs from the nanobots appeared in his goggles.

  He was seeing fourteen distinct visuals, the nanobot inputs unfamiliar, crude seeming, compared to the direct mind-to-mind control of twitcher over biot.

  Fourteen creatures under his control, on Plath, on Burnofsky, all needing to be moved as quickly as possible to Billy’s cheek. It was somewhere between deadly serious and absurd.

  The problem was: it was impossible. Keats knew that, felt his heart sinking as he realized that no one, not Bug Man, no not even Vincent, could manage this army. He platooned the nanobots, but if he was going to hunt down and kill every last hydra he would need to control his nanobots individually.

  Impossible. He took a step back and must have seemed about to faint because Nijinsky caught him.

  “Billy, haul that pew over here,” Nijinsky said. “I’ll do the transfer. First, I’ll touch Plath’s cheek to get the nanobots.”

  “Yeah,” Keats said. Then, not meaning to say it out loud, “No way.”

  He could control the nanobots well enough to race toward the massive finger that lightly touched Plath’s face. He could send them scampering along the polish-tarred fingernail. And having done that, he could march one biot down Plath’s optic nerve and another from Burnofsky’s eye through the fringe of eyelash trees. But not all at once.

  The hydras would continue to replicate. Every passing second would mean more foes to be destroyed. And he would have to get them all, every last one. Leave even a single hydra alive to start the process all over again and Billy would be eaten alive.

  Fail, let even one hydra survive, and they would have no choice but to destroy Billy themselves—kill him and burn him to ashes.

  Suddenly, in one of his far-too-numerous visuals, he saw the first of Plath’s biots. It was hideous, a bug, an attenuated grasshopper, a mite, a tiny monster that loomed six feet tall in the nano subjective. Its face—an insect’s eyes joined by eyes that were an awful parody of Plath’s own eyes. The effect was disturbing and haunting, as if the face he loved had been skinned from her and then blowtorch-melted onto a spider’s face.

  “Is that you?” Plath asked him up in the world, but it felt somehow as if it was coming from the biot.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “You’re better at this than I am,” she said. “I’ll follow you.”

  “I’m coming in behind you two,” Wilkes said.

  Keats started to say that no one was better at this, because no one could possibly be good at this. But nevertheless he moved his two biots and dozen nanobots forward.

  Like cavalry and infantry, he thought. The nanobots would be the foot soldiers, the pawns, he could lose them. The biots were more precious. They were the king on this chessboard: to lose one was to lose all.

  A second Plath biot joined up, and a third, the new one. Keats wondered about its capabilities.

  “I may not be able to talk later,” Keats said. “I may …Anyway, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I love you, Sadie.”

  Burnofsky cleared his throat.

  “I still have the brick,” Wilkes warned him. “So shut up and leave Katniss and Peeta alone.”

  Plath should have told him she loved him, too, but those would have just been words. Instead she sent her biots racing forward after his, determined that she would not let hi
m lose this fight.

  They reached a rushing, tumbling avalanche of red disks—the blood flowing from the hole in Billy’s cheek. It was a surging flood of licked red cough drops, rolling by like a rocky whitewater river. In with the red disks were spongy white blood cells. And something Keats had never seen before, a kind of thick spiderweb that threw weak and inadequate ropes over the rushing platelets.

  “Clotting factor,” Plath said. She was beside him on the pew. He couldn’t see her with the goggles in place. He knew he could move his leg slightly and make physical contact with her, and wanted to, but he worried it might distract her.

  They raced along beside the red, red avalanche of blood toward the rim of the volcano that spewed this body-temperature lava.

  Keats slowed the pace of his biots and saw that Plath was following suit. The nanobots kept on at full speed.

  Ahead, a single blue hydra could be seen atop the crater’s rim, gobbling up passing platelets.

  “Mine,” he whispered to Plath.

  The front of his first platoon of nanobots hit the single hydra. Six nanobots tore into the hydra and ripped it apart. Hydra legs went flying through the air.

  Easy. An easy kill.

  “Come on,” Keats said and Plath heard him, of course, and followed him. Twelve nanobots and five biots powered over the crater rim. They were staring down into a witch’s cauldron, a stew of blood cells—red and white, plus clotting factor stretched like fishing nets out from the sides of the hole. The cells spilled steadily over the side, dragging clotting nets with them.

  Hydras—an uncountable mass of them—were pushing down through the blood cells, swallowing some, pushing others aside. You couldn’t call it swimming, it looked much more like giant bugs digging their way into soggy gravel.

  The main body of hydras was chewing through the deeper epidermal layers, tunneling sideways. They were tunneling beneath the dead outer layer, down through spongy pinkish-gray meat.

  Keats faced decision time sooner than he’d hoped. Two groups of hydras heading in different directions. No more platooning. He had to pursue in both directions. Six nanobots, one biot; to Plath, he said, “Stay up there on the rim, catch anything that comes back out. When Wilkes gets here, she comes in behind me.”

  “I do. Care,” Plath said.

  But Keats didn’t hear it. He let himself go and fell into the pictures in his head. The movements of his fingers would be sequential, one then another, then another, but there was no way, no way in hell to do it unless he lost himself.

  Fourteen microscopic creatures to move in two radically different environments.

  Don’t think.

  K1 and six nanobots dove after the hydras heading down into the blood.

  K2 and six nanobots raced after the ones tunneling into the subcutaneous fat of Billy’s face.

  Keats heard nothing. He lost awareness of the room he was in. Forgot Plath. Did not feel the hard pew under his thighs. Was not thirsty or hungry. His heart did not beat, he did not breathe, not so that he noticed, anyway.

  Once before, when he had been tested, all the way back in London, he had gone away like this, lost himself in the game, felt nothing, ceased to exist as a consciousness.

  Within the red gravel a hydra leg. One of Keats’s nanobots clawed it and reeled the hydra in. The others swarmed over the first and over the shredded hydra using both as a ladder, fighting the surge and pause, surge and pause of the red avalanche.

  Seven different views of platelets and lymphocytes and clotting fibers. Seven sets of arms and legs, all swarming, all searching, catching a second hydra, ripping it apart, another and stabbing it, and another and another, catching up to a massed body of the replicated hydras, weak, shambling disjointed creatures built with only one ability: to build more of themselves.

  The hydras did not fight, they were not controlled, they were as simple and mindless as mites, no one in charge; they were on automatic. They didn’t fight, they didn’t flee, they just gobbled up flesh and shit out carbon while the MightyMites did their sub-visible work, building more, ever more hydras.

  Not Keats’s concern. Just kill them.

  A millimeter and a world away K2 and six nanobots squeezed through fat cells like partly deflated beach balls made of wax, all white with clinging platelets and strands of unknown fibers. The hydras had stopped tunneling and now were digging and consuming, creating a sort of cavern in the skin as they entered a new replication cycle.

  They were everywhere in the cavern, top, bottom, sides, all busy and oblivious and Keats tore into them, slaughtering, dismembering. It was like work in a meatpacker’s plant, assembly-line chopping and hacking, killing as fast and efficiently as he could.

  The bodies of massacred hydras clogged the cavern until his nanobots were forced to dig through the debris of their bodies to find more to kill. Lymphocytes were oozing into the chamber, adding their slow-moving predation to the slaughter.

  And then, a very different creature. Also blue, also a hydra, but gleaming with sharp, distinct lines, with bristling weapons. But even this, a first-generation hydra, a factory-made hydra not a cheap replicant, was uncontrolled. Mindless. programmed.

  K1 yanked out two legs and left it crippled and helpless. The lymphocytes would finish the job.

  Heedless, a mad rush now, just rush, all fourteen visuals at once, and oh, God, it was good.

  It was blankness. Emptiness and fulfillment. A wild beast, fourteen wild beats, chasing and killing and chasing and killing.

  Plath, not wearing the goggles, able still to see in the macro, up in the world, saw an ecstatic smile on Keats’s face. She had never seen him smile like that, lips trembling, teeth bare. She felt her gaze drawn irresistibly to Burnofsky. She expected to see him gloating at the animal revealed in Keats. But he was not gloating. His mouth worked, and he chewed his lip. His washed-out eyes were hungry.

  He was jealous. He was a junkie watching another addict mainlining the ultimate drug.

  Plath felt sick. Her biots waited on the crater as Wilkes’s two biots came rushing by and swan dived into the blood. Clotting nets were slowing the flow now. Plath couldn’t see Keats’s nanobots or biots, just the tumbling platelets and, riding that red tide like driftwood, the nanobot legs, heads, and insides.

  A tear rolled down Burnofsky’s cheek.

  Keats’s blue, blue eyes had disappeared behind the bug-eyed goggles.

  Wilkes was laughing to herself. Heh-heh-heh.

  He’d said he loved her, and she had not answered. Now she wondered if she gave him everything he wanted, her body, even her love, would any of it matter as much to Keats as this terrible game?

  “What’s happening?” Billy asked her.

  “Madness,” Plath answered.

  Pia Valquist and Admiral Edward Domville rode through the storm aboard a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter. It was not the very best way to travel through high winds and lightning. The natural background noise of the helicopter itself was deafening, but when you added shrieking winds and sudden thunder like God tearing the sky open with his bare hands, you had a great deal of noise.

  And a great deal of movement as pockets of wind acted like surprise elevators, dropping the Sea King hundreds of feet, or shooting it suddenly upward, all the while buffeting it back and forth. There was something about the constant bobbing and weaving that made Pia think of a boxer in the ring, always keeping his head in motion.

  Admiral Domville was less inclined to be thinking of colorful descriptions. He was busy being sick into a plastic bucket.

  “Seasickness is nothing to be ashamed of!” Pia yelled at the top of her lungs.

  “Nelson was frequently seasick,” Domville yelled back during a brief moment of coherence.

  Then, quite suddenly, they were through the storm, and the massive piles of dark gray clouds gave way to scattered clouds lit by a fading sun. The noise was still ferocious, and the motion of the helicopter was still erratic, but it was nevertheless a relief.

&n
bsp; A crewman came back and motioned to the tiny window. Pia reluctantly disentangled herself from the jump seat and stutter stepped over to look out; she saw the Albion sailing serenely below them.

  She gave a thumbs-up signal.

  “We can land,” the crewman said. “We won’t have to use the winch.”

  “The what?” Pia asked. It was the first anyone had mentioned a winch. “Did you say ‘winch’?”

  The landing was fairly smooth. The reception was Royal Navy spit and polish. Domville played his role, but as soon as was decent he drew the Albion’s captain aside. Introductions were brief and to the point.

  “Captain, I’m going to ask for the loan of some of your marines.”

  “Certainly, sir,” the captain said, as though nothing could be more natural than an admiral dropping out of the sky in company with a Swedish spy and demanding to abscond with a platoon of his men.

  “We need to have a conversation with an LNG carrier that is rapidly approaching Hong Kong harbor.” He gave the course and position of the Doll Ship.

  “We’ll have to step smartly if we’re to intercept before they reach Chinese territorial waters,” the captain said.

  “Indeed.”

  “Just time for a cup of tea before you go,” the captain said briskly.

  Minako did not want to get her hopes up, not yet. Hope would just make her heart beat faster, and she could barely draw breath as it was. Were they really here to rescue her?

  “Only two ways off this ship,” Silver said. “We take a lifeboat, or we steal that helicopter. I can fly the chopper, but it’s been a good long while, and that’s a pretty good storm raging out there.”

  “It’s supposed to blow itself out,” KimKim said. “If they see us take a boat they’ll be on us in a heartbeat. It has to be the helicopter.”

  “Yep,” Silver said.

  Neither man looked happy about it.

  With his gun hand low and out of sight, KimKim cracked the steel door and peeked out.

  Minako noticed that only KimKim had a gun. Silver did not. Silver was a big man, but Minako did not believe in magic or in Jackie Chan. One man with big fists was nothing against the mad villagers of Benjaminia and Charlestown.