Authors: Michael Grant
“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.”
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 the 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.
Then at last it was time for the main event. No one was expecting great eloquence from Morales. She had never been an especially
compelling speaker.
As she walked slowly up the steps to the special bulletproof
podium, the president knew that all she had to do was read the speech.
It was short, just twelve minutes long.
Twelve minutes.
Bug Man had a sketchy, grainy view out over the audience at National
Cathedral. He had excellent positions for viewing through the president’s eyes. After all, he’d had weeks to get it right. But there were
still limits on the method, and none of the people were recognizable, they were just dancing gray pixels. The huge columns were just
shapes and shadows.
The words on the autocue swam into view, ghostly and blurred.
Only a few words could be made out. He might have brought in still
more nanobots to refine the resolution, but he was going the opposite
direction: his nanobots were retreating from the dark corners of the
president’s brain, rushing for the exits, and soon those nanobots still
attached to the optic nerve would also be detached.
There was no winning this game, but there was a way to keep
BZRK from winning: destroy the value of what they had. And what
they had was him: Anthony Elder, Bug Man.
They were after him because he controlled the president. If you
can’t get the puppet, get the puppeteer. And if the puppeteer no longer
pulls the strings?
It was bug-out time. Bug Man …out!
And then? And then what? The question made his stomach
clench in a knot. He would have to run very far, very fast. Get his
nanobots out of the president and leave them somewhere they would
never be found. If he did that BZRK would have no use for him. The
Twins would still try to kill him, but they’d look for him a whole lot
harder if he still had a grip on Morales.