BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  “Kill his nanobots, Vincent,” Plath said. “Then lay some scrambling wire until we can get more biots in his brain.”

  “Thank you,” Vincent whispered.

  His three biots looked up at the clinging nanobots. And just then, all dozen nanobots stirred.

  Bug Man sat wet and naked and freshly shaved from wrist to face and shakily donned his gear. He keyed the visuals for the nanobots guarding his nasal passage. They were fine and functional. Same with those in each ear.

  Left eye, okay.

  No contact with the other eye.

  He switched visuals to the chiasm, an eye entry usually led here. Twelve screens opened in a snap. Hanging above/below his nanobots stood two identical biots and a third, similar but slightly longer.

  Bug Man enlarged the visuals, not quite able to accept what he was seeing. It was hard telling one biot from the next, it was almost more instinct than recognition, but as the disturbing insect/human faces came into wavy focus he knew.

  Vincent.

  A thrill of fear went through Bug Man.

  Back from madness? Vincent was back?

  Twelve nanobots against three of Vincent’s biots. Four-to-one odds. Against most twitchers that would be more than enough. Vincent was not most twitchers. The last time he’d faced Vincent the odds were heavily in Bug Man’s favor and he’d barely come out on top.

  He felt defeat coming. He was exhausted. He was frightened. He was eaten up inside with the loss of Jessica.

  Bug Man had one small hope: he had to focus on killing one biot, ignore the rest, all it would take is that single kill and Vincent would be out of it again, this time, he fervently hoped, forever.

  He platooned all twelve nanobots together. They would move as one.

  One punch, that’s all he would get.

  The twelve nanobots released their hold and pushed off into the cerebrospinal fluid, descending on Vincent like a mailed fist.

  Halfway there Bug Man saw the two original biots move aside. They each crouched down and folded their legs, a clear sign that they were out of this battle.

  Vincent would fight using only a single biot.

  Bug Man’s mouth was dry. The water in his hair and on his body was making him shiver with cold. What would they do to him if he lost?

  Twelve nanobots met the single biotin midair, except of course there was no air.

  With unbelievable speed Vincent’s biot snatched the first two nanobots by their retracted wheels, paddled back with its remaining four legs and smashed the captives into the second row of advancing nanobots. In half a heartbeat four broken nanobots were sent drifting, and the odds had gone from twelve-to-one to eight-to-one.

  Bug Man laughed in disbelief. This was some new kind of biot. It was stronger and faster and he was so going to get his ass kicked.

  But hey: never say die.

  Bug Man instantly split his eight remaining nanobots into two smaller platoons of four so that they could veer left and right, but Vincent had seen this coming, too, and used the split force against Bug Man.

  Vincent’s biot reached the chiasmic wall, grabbed a single handhold and curled its body out so that the powerful hind legs were in position, claws stretched as the first two nanobots struck.

  Vincent missed!

  “Yeah! Yeah!”

  Instantly Bug Man was back from the dead, hah!

  Two of his nanobots hit the biot’s midsection, stabbed, penetrated deep, hah-hah-hah!

  But they couldn’t stab again. Vincent’s biot wrapped them in its legs, tangling them hopelessly, and began ripping the machines apart.

  The detached four turned awkwardly, racing back to attack from behind, but the slow circulation of fluid was against them and they were just …a little …too slow.

  It was like some ancient World War I aerial dogfight with Bug Man’s four planes caught in a crosswind.

  Anchored securely in place, Vincent had only to reach out and stab each one as it came helplessly within reach.

  “Fuck!” Bug Man yelled.

  What did he have left? A dozen other nanobots on board, but spread all around his head. He could bring them all against Vincent, but it would take minutes, and a second dozen wouldn’t do any better than the first dozen.

  With sick dread Bug Man realized that his brain, his own self and soul, was wide open, unprotected, vulnerable to the only twitcher on Earth who might actually be his equal.

  “What’s the move?” he asked himself. “What’s the move?”

  The only real forces he had left were not on board in his brain. They were a mile away in the White House.

  The Twins would take him out if he screwed things up with the POTUS. On the other hand, hell, they’d probably already come after him. And if he didn’t do something fast he’d be a wired-up little bitch, just like Jessica.

  What a fool he’d been to trust her. What a fool he’d been to believe there was anything real there. He had made her, and then unmade her, and been shattered when she betrayed him. He was a fool.

  “Okay, Vincent,” he said. “You got me good, dude, you got me good. But the game isn’t over yet.”

  “Those are bacteria,” Nijinsky said to Billy. “They’re moving!”

  “Of course they are, they’re alive.”

  They sat close together, both just a few feet from Burnofsky, who tried to snort and sneeze and somehow dislodge their creatures from his nose. But a pretend sneeze is nothing like as powerful as the real thing, and they had moved from the nostrils, where air was compressed into the vast sinus cavity.

  The sinus cavity was bigger in the m-sub than a domed football stadium. The sides of the sinus were covered by a fragile tissue stretched across a network of capillaries so dense that in places it seemed the membrane was little more than a sheet of waxed paper drawn tight over a nest of red worms, each pulsing with platelets and white blood cells that brought their heat to warm the passing air on its trip to the lungs.

  In other places the surface was covered by cilia, little clumps made up of soft, slow-waving, overcooked noodles whose job it was to push along the smears and clumps and balls of gray mucus, like some bizarre volleyball game.

  The walls of the sinuses were mountain ridges, three of them, with deep canyons between.

  For a space filled with air it made Billy think, incongruously, of video he’d seen of the ocean floor, filled with waving anemones and distorted geography. Everywhere were strange, brightly colored shapes, some almost half the size of his nanobots, others no bigger than cupcakes.

  Pollen, Nijinsky had explained. The sinus was full of pollen, some like starfish, others like blowfish, others like random bits of coral. And of course there were the smaller, more sinister bacteria, some scattered singly, some in slow-squirming clots.

  “We’re going up there,” Nijinsky said and, with one biot’s arm, pointed. It was dark, of course, they were far from external light and the tiny lights of the biots and nanobots did not reach all the way to the “roof.”

  They climbed, though of course with very little sense of gravity it soon ceased to seem as if they were climbing and became a horizontal—if hilly—walk.

  They reached the “roof” and there was a long field of what looked at first like cilia. But on closer view they were more like yams, some of which were long enough to look a bit like handless arms.

  “The olfactory cells,” Nijinsky explained up in the world. “The sense of smell. They go up into the olfactory bulb, which is how we get into his brain.”

  “I don’t like this,” Billy said.

  “It’s scary at first,” Nijinsky allowed. “Disturbing.”

  “Yeah, but …I thought we were going to fight some nanobots.”

  “Not on this trip,” Nijinsky said.

  “I don’t like this,” Billy said again.

  “He doesn’t want to mind-rape a helpless old man—imagine that,” Burnofsky said. “What’s the matter, boy? Don’t you know you’re saving the world?”

 
“It’s tight getting through,” Nijinsky said. “We’ll have to cut some bone.”

  “Why not pick up some of those bacteria and bring them with you?” Burnofsky said. “Surely there’s some strep and some staph and a few other lovelies close to hand. I doubt my immune system is very strong.”

  “We don’t do that,” Nijinsky said dully.

  Burnofsky laughed. “See, Billy? He’s the good guy. You can tell because he’ll wire me, he’ll use me, but he won’t kill me.”

  “I . . .” Billy began.

  Nijinsky didn’t slow down and Billy’s nanobots kept pace, following the monstrous biots into the dense forest of olfactory cells.

  “You ever study World War II in school” Nijinsky asked.

  “Study?”

  “Toward the end of the war we—the Americans, the British, our allies—we started bombing cities. Cities full of people, most of them not soldiers. We dropped firebombsand we even dropped atomic bombs. It was pretty terrible.”

  “Ah, here it comes,” Burnofsky snarled.

  “It was very bad, burning cities full of people. But we had to. And even though it was bad, it was necessary.”

  “Don’t you have a flag to wave, Nijinsky?” Burnofsky said.

  “You know why it was okay to do those terrible things?” Nijinsky asked.

  Billy shook his head.

  Nijinsky leaned close to Burnofsky, no longer really speaking to Billy. He put his face right up close to Burnofsky and looked into his eyes. “I’ll tell you why it was okay. Because they started it. Because some madman decided he had to take over the world. And weak, pitiful, depraved people like Mr Burnofsky here, helped those madmen. Evil men and the weak men who help them sometimes leave us no choice.”

  Burnofsky spit in his face.

  Nijinsky didn’t flinch.

  “Just like the men who attacked the safe house you were in left you no choice, Billy. You didn’t shoot them because you wanted to. You did it because you had to. That’s one of the reasons we hate people like that, because they make us …Because they turn us into them.”

  Then Nijinsky leaned closer still, put his lips a millimeter from Burnofsky’s ear. His next words were barely voiced, a whisper Billy did not hear. “Enjoy what’s coming. You deserve it.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Minako could not stop shaking. She had never in her entire life been near violence of any sort. In the last hour she’d seen savagery and death.

  A cultured British voice was speaking over the loudspeaker. It was saying to abandon ship. It was saying to simply jump off the side.

  “Where is KimKim?” Minako asked, forcing herself to open her eyes and look outside the plexiglass bubble. “Where is KimKim?”

  Silver shook his head. “They got him. You don’t want to see, honey.”

  Minako shrank back. She hadn’t really known KimKim, of course. At first he’d terrified her. Then he had rescued her. But it still seemed impossible that he could actually be dead.

  Silver slumped in the front seat. There came the flat crump of another grenade going off. The battle was still going on.

  “Can you swim, kid?” Silver asked her.

  The question made no sense to her. He might as well have asked whether she could dance. “Yes, I swim.”

  “Well, this time of year, here in the harbor the water shouldn’t be too cold. We’re not far from land, should be able to reach the wharf or at least one of these little islands if no boat picks us up right away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Silver turned to face her. “That loud bang and all of a sudden the boat starts turning? Well, it hasn’t stopped turning. And the engines are still going full blast—you can feel it. That’s why they’re calling to abandon ship.”

  “You think we’re going to crash?”

  “I’d say there’s probably no way to stop it,” he said, looking very serious. “And this chopper, well, kid, I don’t think we have time. The skids are still chained.”

  “Jump in the water?”

  “Or I could throw you, but one way or the other, I didn’t go through all this to let you die. So come on. Now!”

  Minako said, “I’ll do it. But we’ll have to count to …to seven. That’s my best number.”

  Silver looked nonplussed but said, “Seven it is.”

  They climbed from the helicopter. Minako felt something sticky under her shoes. Blood. There was no way not to look at KimKim, he lay like a rag doll, arms and legs twisted in impossible ways.

  She followed Silver, moving at a fast trot now, to the railing. She could hear cries and gunshots from the split-open sphere that had been her prison. The battle still raged. The Sea Kings hovered helplessly, staying out of range of RPGs.

  They went to the side, climbed over pipes and up a shallow steel ladder that brought them at last to where they could gaze down at swiftly rushing green water.

  Suddenly Minako felt a terrible rage inside her. She was no longer afraid, she was no longer overwhelmed, she was feeling her fists clench. “I don’t want to run away, I want to kill them.”

  Silver did not smile or laugh. He nodded and said, “Yeah. You and me both, kid. But for now, let’s just get off this floating nightmare.”

  Minako counted. “One.” The first prime. “Two.” The second. “Three. Four,” a bad number to be swiftly passed by, to reach, “five.”

  “Shove off as hard as you can and swim away from the ship.”

  “Six,” a very bad number.

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Seven,” she said, and jumped.

  As she fell she twisted in the air and saw a sharp-prowed gray ship, much smaller than the Doll Ship. A blossom of smoke erupted on the smaller ship’s deck.

  Minako hit the water before the sound of the cannon reached her.

  She was still plunging down, down into chilly, nearly opaque water when she heard the loud explosion of the shell hitting the Doll Ship just at the waterline. The shock wave was strong but not deadly.

  She kicked and crawled her way up toward light. It seemed to take forever for her to find the surface, and when she did at last the Doll Ship was nearly past.

  Minako sucked in air and trod water as the Chinese vessel fired a second round followed by a second explosion.

  Silver surfaced fifty feet away, looked frantically around, and when she yelled, “I’m here!,” began to swim to her.

  A third round, a third explosion, but now the Chinese ship was in danger of being crushed between the Doll Ship and the shore. It reduced speed, and the Doll Ship, damaged but still plowing ahead at full speed, crushed a vintage sailing yacht to splinters.

  A wall of skyscrapers was directly ahead

  More people were jumping now, falling into the water.

  From the too-near shoreline Minako heard alarms going off. There was a cruise ship docked almost dead ahead and looming up over it the row of forty-story buildings, built right to the water’s edge.

  “It’s going to run right into those buildings!” Minako cried.

  “Yes it is,” Silver said. “That’s Harbor City. A huge mall, office buildings, hotels …God save them.”

  The Chinese police vessels had now swung in behind the Doll Ship. The harbor was lit up by frantic machine-gun fire, by the sudden explosions of the cannon and the eruption of flaming steel from the LNG carrier’s stern.

  The Doll Ship was riding lower and slower, but it was less than a quarter of a mile from impact, still moving at ten knots, and nothing was going to stop it.

  Helen Falkenhym Morales had been to National Cathedral only once before, for the funeral of a supreme court justice. That had been two years ago, and at that time she hadn’t paid much attention to the location and the look of the place. It was north on Wisconsin Avenue, out past the Naval Observatory in a surprisingly green setting for so urban a location.

  The cathedral itself might have been transplanted straight from medieval Europe. It was a pointy object seen from th
e outside, a bit like a hedgehog, if a hedgehog could be Gothic.

  They were running late, so there was no sequestering in a secure side room, the Secret Service after some debate allowed her to walk in the front door like a regular person. Everyone in the cathedral— and it was jam-packed—had of course been checked out, and in any case these were congressmen, senators, White House staff, major donors, foreign prime ministers, first ladies and first gentlemen, and other well-behaved folks. It was a sea of black suits and black dresses and somber looks.

  The president’s pew was at the front. It felt like a very long walk between those massive columns, beneath that distant vault of a ceiling, past the eyes that followed her, that were always on the president. And of course the cameras, discreetly mounted on brackets, one aimed at the altar, one remotely controlled following her, and a third panning the room picking out this or that celebrity.

  But there was no doubt that at this moment Morales was on just about every TV screen in America.

  A rector preceded her, Gastrell and two Secret Service agents followed behind, but the president walked alone, arms at her sides, head high, eyes front. She walked at a steady pace, a reassuring pace, sending the message, that’s right, world, the president of the United States was still strong and in charge.

  She sat. A sort of sigh of relief rose from the audience, and shuffling as people got comfortable.

  The Right Reverend Jenny Hayes did a reading, followed by MoMo’s own parish priest, Father Miguel Richards. The choir sang. It was lovely. MoMo would have liked that, although he would have been bored by the readings.

  Then the first lady of Canada, Hanna Ellstrom, gave the first eulogy. She’d been a friend to MoMo; they’d liked each other and had hung out at important functions while their more important spouses were doing their terribly important business. Ellstrom’s voice broke when she described a joke MoMo had played on her.