The prime numbers helped. But many more men with many more guns would help more.
“Down the hallway, take the stairway down two decks, out to the landing pad. We hole up in the flight tech’s quarters. If the pilot’s there, we convince him to help us.”
Silver nodded. “You’re the James Bond here, I’m just a grunt.”
“Minako. Stay close.” KimKim opened the door followed immediately by Silver and Minako.
One-two-three-four-five . . .
They clattered down and that’s when Minako saw her mother standing there, standing right there on the steps and she stopped and cried out and KimKim walked right through Minako’s mother and so did Silver.
Like she wasn’t there, no, impossible. And yet, she was.
Minako had counted the thirteenth step. And there was her mother.
She took another step, number fourteen, and her mother was gone. Like she had never been there. And of course, how could she have been?
Fifteen-sixteen-seventeen-and nothing, no mother, just the two scared but determined men glancing over their shoulders to make sure she was keeping up.
The first flight of steps counted nineteen, a prime. If the second flight was the same, that would be good.
One-two-three . . .
She counted to thirteen and—her mother, as real as anything she had ever seen, as real as real could be except that KimKim and Silver again stepped straight through her.
Minako froze.
The two men reached the bottom, noticed she wasn’t with them and Silver said, “What’s the matter, honey?”
“I . . .”
“Are you okay?” KimKim asked her in Japanese.
“I see my mother. I see her. Right there!” She pointed a finger at what was empty space to both men. “The thirteenth step. The same as the last time. The thirteenth step.”
Shaky, she took the fourteenth step and her mother disappeared. “There’s something …They did something to me. To my brain.”
KimKim took the steps two at a time to reach her. “That may be, Minako; that’s what they do. They do things inside your brain. You must ignore it. You must follow me and Sergeant Silver, and pay attention to nothing else.”
Minako sobbed. “I’m not good at that. I’m not …not good at ignoring things.”
“Yes, but you are a brave girl, and you will do it,” the spy said. He had taken her hands in his, an awkward embrace that pressed the chilly metal of his gun against her wrist.
The door at the bottom of the stairs opened. A crewman looked up, took it all in and looked shocked and confused. He saw Minako. He saw the pistol in KimKim’s hand. He saw Silver.
He hesitated.
“Keep your mouth shut and walk away,” Silver said. “Don’t volunteer for trouble.”
The crewman nodded once and pushed past them up the stairs.
“Will he tell on us?” Minako asked.
“Fifty-fifty,” Silver said. “Come on.”
They made it down the stairs and stepped out onto the helipad. The rain was coming down, but it was vertical, no longer horizontal. The swell was still heavy and the ship wallowed fore and aft, up and down.
“Not so much of a cross sea,” Silver commented. “And the wind is dying. Maybe an hour.”
KimKim led the way to the pilot/mechanic room, which was directly off the helipad and tucked beneath an exterior stairway. He stepped in without knocking.
The pilot was there, bent over a workbench, twisting something metal with two sets of pliers. He was a man in his thirties, with longish black hair falling back from a receding hairline.
“What do you want?” he demanded, and narrowed his eyes suspiciously when he saw Minako. Silver closed the door behind them and threw the lock.
“What the hell is going on?” the pilot demanded.
“What’s going on is that I have a gun,” KimKim said, helpfully showing the pistol. “So that means I talk and you listen.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Then that’s stupid, you should be scared.”
The pilot forced a laugh and set the pliers aside. “I am happy,” he said. “Deeply, sustainably happy. Fear has no place in happiness.”
“He’s one of them,” Silver said contemptuously.
“Yes,” KimKim said with a sigh.
Silver took one quick step and snapped a hard left into the pilot’s face. His second blow was an uppercut that turned the pilot’s legs to jelly. Silver bound the man’s hands and ankles with wire.
“So it’s up to you to fly us out of here,” KimKim said to Silver. “Do you think—”
The door opened. A man was framed in the doorway. An officer. KimKim leapt but the man was too quick. The door slammed back in KimKim’s face.
KimKim threw open the door, but it was too late. There was no one in sight.
“We have about ten seconds to figure something out,” Silver said.
“Get that helicopter in the air!” KimKim yelled.
The three of them bolted for the helicopter. The cockpit was not locked, but the craft itself was tied down to the deck, lashed with padded chains.
“Cast us off!” Silver yelled, and climbed up into the pilot’s seat. Minako hauled herself into the surprisingly spacious and oddly configured backseat, and sat there drenched, teeth chattering. Onetwo-three . . .
When she got the thirteen, her mother was standing outside in the rain. The illusion was perfect. Her mother’s hair was blowing. Her police uniform was turning a darker shade of blue as the rain stained it. The only thing missing was any kind of real reaction to Minako or to her environment. It was as if her mother was a very limited computer program, like the illusion knew how to be affected by the environment, but not how to respond to it.
Fourteen.
And her mother was gone.
“You down there, back away from the helicopter.” It was a voice magnified by a megaphone; even then it was half snatched away by the wind.
Minako leaned forward to look up and out. There. Two ship’s officers in yellow slickers.
KimKim continued throwing off the straps. Silver was flipping switches in the cockpit. Minako pulled the harness belts tight around her but they weren’t made for anyone her shape. She realized, suddenly, that the seat was built for Charles and Benjamin.
The officers were motioning. Men were rushing from aft, from behind Minako’s line of sight.
KimKim aimed fast and fired. A man went down, clutching his leg. That reversed the charge of crewmen.
Minako heard an electrical sound, a sort of whine. A gust made the helicopter tremble.
KimKim was fighting the last tie-down strap, but it was jammed.
The rotor above began to move. Slow… slow… gaining a little speed . . .
How many revolutions per minute? Minako wondered. Was there a set number? Was it a good number?
Suddenly a riot of people, all rushing toward the helicopter. These were not cautious crew, these were residents of Benjaminia and Charlestown.
“No!” Minako cried.
KimKim threw back the last strap. He stood, facing the wave of bodies. He fired the pistol into the air.
No one stopped.
“Oh no, no, no,” Minako pleaded.
KimKim lowered the pistol, took aim, and fired.
A red flower appeared in the exact center of a man’s chest. The man fell backward.
This, finally, sent the mob into retreat. They didn’t run far, but they had stopped charging. They might still escape, if only they could get the helicopter into the air.
The rotor was moving, but so slow, so slow!
“People! Our people! We are under attack!” Benjamin shouted. He saw the one KimKim had shot. Dead. One of his people. He had once spoken to the man. Or maybe it was some other man like him—it didn’t matter, all of the people of Benjaminia were his.
Benjamin said, “Captain, open the spheres. Let all of the people out on deck, every one of them. We’ll soon deal with the
se scum. Every one of them! We’ll swarm them with sheer numbers.”
The spheres began to split open like sliced oranges. From their spot on the bridge the Twins could see down into the nearest sphere, down into the structure of catwalks and braces. They saw faces suddenly turned skyward, suddenly seeing the sky for the first time in weeks or months or years.
“Rise up!” Benjamin cried, his voice ecstatic. “All of you, out onto the deck and destroy the traitors. Don’t fear, attack!”
Out into the wind and rain and light they came, stumbling over unfamiliar territory, climbing over each other like ants. The people of Benjaminia, the people of Charlestown, hundreds of them, scraping their shins on sharp metal, banging into bulkheads, mad with excitement.
“Get them!” Benjamin cried. “Kill the men and save the girl!”
A woman tripped and fell into the gears of the sphere; she fell and screamed and was drawn slowly down and out of sight, like meat going into a sausage grinder.
But the sustainably happy did not hesitate. They had their orders. They had their targets in sight.
The dolls of the Doll Ship had come to vicious life.
And then one of the officers on the bridge yelled, “Captain! Captain! We have targets incoming!”
Every eye on the bridge swiveled to follow the direction in which he was pointing. Two Sea King helicopters, moving as fast as race cars and so low and close to the heaving waves that no radar could see them, flew, relentless, toward the Doll Ship.
Binoculars were snatched and sighted. “Royal Navy!”
“Shoot them down! You said you had missiles!” Charles whinnied in terror.
“They’re too close, they’d hit us and blow the ship,” Captain Gepfner said. “And those are Royal Marines.”
“We’re only half a mile from Chinese waters,” the first officer reported.
But it was irrelevant information for the moment, because the nearest Sea King banked sharply, roared overhead like the wrath of God, seeming barely to miss the bridge, so close that Charles could see the faces of the men inside the Sea King’s open door.
With startling speed the helicopter came to hover over the melee in a well-practiced maneuver. The second Sea King floated a hundred feet away. A swivel-mounted machine gun pointed its muzzle directly at the bridge.
Charles felt his heart stop. There was no way the deadly calm Marine behind that gun would miss.
“Stop them!” Benjamin demanded.
“If we’re taken it’s prison for the lot of us,” Gepfner said, ignoring Benjamin and speaking to his officers. “If they take us in Chinese waters it may be a firing squad.” He glanced around sharply and saw the consensus form. “Life or death now, gentlemen. Break out the RPGs and issue them to the mob.”
“No, sir,” a junior officer said. “I am not firing on Royal Marines, sir.”
Gepfner drew a pistol and without warning shot the officer in the chest. As the explosion echoed in the metal box of the bridge, he said, “I’m not ending my career in a Chinese prison waiting for a bullet at sunrise.”
“This is a fight for all we love,” Benjamin shouted into the loudspeaker. “Die if you must. Die for me!”
TWENTY-THREE
For the second time in a very few days Bug Man was shaking. He had run from the club, run straight out the door, raced down the street through crowds of young professionals who now, when they looked at him, did not see a very lucky guy with an amazingly hot girlfriend, but saw instead a scruffy-looking kid who was most likely running from cops.
He forced himself to stop running. Forced himself to walk, but he could not force himself to stop scraping his hand over his head again and again, as if he was trying to scrub something out of his hair.
Jesus, they would kill him for sure this time. They would kill him. But that was only Fact Number Two turning endlessly, endlessly around in his brain. Fact Number One was that she had betrayed him. The bitch! The skank! After all he had done for her, after all he had given her. Gifts and …He was sure he’d given her gifts. A necklace! That’s right, he had given her a necklace once.
And he had given her himself. Had he ever hurt her? No. Had he ever raised a hand to her? No. Without a backward glance, without a second thought, she had just dumped him. Dumped him. Him! The bitch! Had none of it been real? After all they’d done together, the minute he unwired her she turned on him? The minute!
The outrage built in him, feeding on itself, growing ornate and detailed, and was almost enough to force the thought of what would happen next from his mind.
The bitch. She was going to get him killed. He had shown her the president. He had taken her to the office. What the hell? And now she was with some kind of cop? What were the odds of that happening?
Where was Burnofsky? That was the question, where the hell was he? It was his fault. If Burnofsky had shown up none of this would have happened.
He had to call him. He wasn’t supposed to, it was a security breach, but damn, what wasn’t a security breach now? Jessica was with some kind of cop, and she knew. She knew!
He moved away from the drinking crowd and onto a quieter street. Bug Man ran the conversation in his head. Burnofsky, Jessica has gone rogue. She lost it and ran up to some cop or coplike person.
Burnofsky would ask how the hell that happened. And Bug Man would lie. He’d say nothing about unwiring her, and he definitely wouldn’t talk about the way she’d looked at him suddenly as if he was some kind of lousy insect. Like he was nothing!
And for sure nothing about letting her see the nanobot feed from the president. Why had he done that? Because he thought she cared, that’s why, because he wanted her to see that …Never mind, why wasn’t the question.
Yeah, it was just one of those weird things, Burnofsky. Sometimes, you know, there’s a failure rate with wiring, right?
If you have to kill her, Burnofsky, no problem, man, because she represents a threat. So, do what you gotta do, Burnofsky. The thing is, it wasn’t my fault.
You want to know why was I out in the world? Why was I in some club? Because …because she had run off and I was trying to get her back, that’s why.
Yes, that would all work. Maybe he wouldn’t die. Maybe.
He reached for his phone. He kept it in the back pocket of his pants, but it wasn’t there, nor was it in the front pockets, or the other back pocket, and he checked each again, because maybe he missed it.
She had it. That was it. The bitch had his phone! Or else it fell out in the cab when he was reaching for his wallet, damn, yes, he had accidentally pulled it out and set it on his knee while he was …and now what? Now what? Call from a pay phone? There were no damned pay phones!
The hotel. He had to get a cab and get back to the hotel right now and call Burnofsky. To hell with security, this was an emergency.
He hailed a cab, which drove on by. So did the next three.
Wait, it wasn’t far to the office. He could walk there.
It was a five-minute walk, time that he divided between fearing for his own safety, wishing death and hellfire on Jessica, and feeling terribly alone.
Some new area of consciousness had opened up for Keats. He’d been lost, consumed by the game, and any self-awareness would have fatally distracted him. But this was different. This was an awareness as unreal as the state of the rest of his mind, a new feeling, a new type of consciousness.
He wasn’t Noah Cotton looking at Noah Cotton, he was … someone. Some nameless observer. Some attenuated, thin-stretched, overheated mind watching his own brain from far away.
Look at him go, this new awareness thought. Look at the moves! Hah! Now that’s game.
He remembered the testing he’d undergone what seemed like a long, long time ago under Dr Pound. A chainsaw, the real thing, had been sawing toward his leg. Electrical shock. And yet he had stayed in the game, lost himself in the game.
What he was seeing himself do now was so far beyond that. This wasn’t juggling two balls in the air, playi
ng two games at once, it was a mind-altering expansion of the limits of his brain’s function. It was an acid trip. It was nirvana.
He heard a phone ring. His new distant self was aware of Nijinsky getting up to find the phone and say, “It’s Burnofsky’s phone.”
The hydra targets were fewer now. He was no longer killing in dozens, he was chasing down single individuals, crawling after them as they plunged into fat and blood, ripping through capillaries, plowing through a pustule of tight-packed football-size bacteria.
He killed his last one there, in the base of a pimple, having to shove seething bacteria aside while ripping the hydra apart.
The ringing stopped, Nijinsky did not answer. “Googling the number.”
Each of the fourteen visual inputs now showed no hydras in sight. None in the blood, none in the fat. The new awareness began to fade, slow as a sunset. His normal consciousness began to return. He began to feel his own heart. He knew the goggles were rimmed in sweat. His skin was cold but seemed to vibrate, like his body was plugged into a massager. His ears were ringing.
Nijinsky said, “The number is an office building in the city, looks like a main switchboard number—it ends in double zero. Not far from here, maybe eight, ten blocks.”
“Bug Man?”
The phone rang again, same number.
“Did you get them all?” Billy asked him.
Keats was silent. He tried to answer but he couldn’t. Words wouldn’t come yet, like that part of his brain–body connection was numb and needed to get circulation back.
“Did you get them all?” Billy asked again. Keats was pulling out. Nanobots crawled back through the rush of platelets, easier coming back out with the current, though the current had slowed now as the clotting factor webs adhered and began to twine together. Nanobots and biots cut their way back through the fat cells that had sagged to fill in the tunnel. It was like digging out after a mine cave-in. He felt an edge of claustrophobia he hadn’t experienced earlier in the mindlessness of battle. He was conscious of Wilkes’s biots joining him.
BZRK Reloaded Page 24
