BZRK Reloaded (31 page)

Was Vincent seeing what Bug Man was doing? He had to hope
so, he had to pray, and he did pray most fervently, that Vincent saw he
was bailing on the president.

“I’m out!” he yelled, chattering. “I’m getting out!”

Fighter nanobots, spinners, all of them were assembling at the far
end of the president’s optic nerve, two dozen all together now, wheels
down and racing for daylight.

Bug Man looked around for a piece of paper. Nothing. He pulled
out his phone and thumbed text onto a note. Then as his tiny soldiers,
all platooned together, ran full tilt, he held the message up in front of
him. He pinched the text as large as it would go:

Bailing. No good to you now Vincent. I quit.

If it is possible for a place to be both hellish and beautiful, the drainpipe was it. Looking through her biot’s eyes, Plath looked up and
saw hard fluorescent light from high above. It was a ring of light,
brilliance around a dark center formed by the drain stopper.

A huge, rough pillar of steel rose up to the stopper and extended
down, out of sight, to the levering mechanism. She would have liked
to be there, climbing that steel post, because although it was tangled
here and there, long stretches of it were clear.

But here, on the wall of the pipe, she was in a jungle. Hairs as big
as anacondas, in every shape and type, formed a bewildering thicket.
They soared free, or were squashed together; they were scaly and
rough-barked; some were clean, others had joined to form nests of
bacteria.

And such bacteria. Varieties she had never seen, some like soccer balls, some like tadpoles, some mere twitching sticks, still others
busily dividing. They came in all the colors of a demented rainbow.
These, here, were the great predators of the human race, the tiny bugs
that twisted guts and dimmed eyes and burned humans alive from
the inside.

If the bacteria were frightening, other things were startlingly
beautiful—crystals of unknown provenance, bubbles of soap that
turned the ring of light into a rainbow, fantastic sculptures of debris
trapped in balls of hair.

Plath’s biot climbed through the tangled wilderness toward the
ring of light, claw over claw, a precarious handhold, a wild leap, like
Tarzan swinging through the jungle, only here beasts were tiny and
the “trees” seemed to ignore the laws of physics.

“Are you okay?” Keats asked her.

 

“As long as he doesn’t turn the water back on, I think I can climb
out.”

“And what are you seeing through his eye?” Wilkes asked. “I
haven’t been able to tap in yet.”
Plath focused on the visuals from another biot. “I see …Wait.
Wait. I think he’s sending us a message.”
“A message?”
“Oh, my God,” Plath said. She read it aloud. “‘Bailing. No good to
you now, Vincent. I quit.’”
“What does that mean?” Wilkes asked.
Keats said, “He figured out his only move is to declare neutrality.
He’s making himself useless.”
Plath focused her attention on the macro. Wilkes was frowning,
not quite sure what Keats was saying. Keats looked troubled. He said,
“I suppose that’s a good thing?”
Plath heard the question mark. She said, “The Twins lose the
president. But so do we. And we lose the chance to turn Bug Man.
He’ll leave, move out of range, and take our biots with him.”
“We can’t wire him in time to stop him,” Keats said.
“No, we can’t. However, he’s just up two floors,” Plath said.
Wilkes let go of her heh-heh-heh laugh. “Check with Lear?”
Plath hesitated. “No. Not Jin, either. When Vincent’s back with
us, he’s in charge. Until then …It’s me.”

Domville watched his Marines recede behind the Doll Ship. The Sea
Kings were already starting to pick them up.

Benjaminia and Charlestown were still full of people. The fools
were cheering, thinking they’d won something. They were singing
some mad song about the Great Souls.

Well, the Great Souls were nowhere to be seen, and neither was
the ship’s crew. Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor was a place of great
activity; most who had jumped would be rescued if they didn’t
panic.

His concern was with the people in the cruise ship and the hotel,
dead ahead. He thumbed a text report. Not very official, but it was all
he could manage at the moment.

Officers and men behaved very well. The fault lies solely with me.

He thought about adding a patriotic “God Save the King,” but
that didn’t seem quite the thing, really. So he signed it:
Cheers. Domville.
The starboard bow of the Doll Ship struck the Holland America
ship Volendam a glancing blow. A glancing blow that made a metal
shriek like the sound of Godzilla in the movies.
Domville was knocked to his knees, and it was from that position
that he saw cabins torn apart as the side of the Volendam was opened
like a tin of sardines.
He saw men and women exposed, dressing, lounging, going to
the bathroom, all suddenly revealed as the side of the Volendam was
ripped off.
The hulls of both ships crumpled, railing buckling inward, bits
of rigging suddenly everywhere, debris flying, and the all while that
awful metal shriek that went on and on.
It was a lifeboat winch that tore the hole in the last LNG sphere.
The blast of depressurizing LNG actually jolted the Doll Ship.
Domville jumped to his feet and began running to the powerful jet,
made visible only by the heat-wave-like distortion of the lights of the
cruise ship.
A spark would ignite it.
Domville wanted to be that spark, but not yet, not yet, not while
natural gas was blasting into the last few dozen meters of open cabins.
The jet of gas had to waft clear of the boat. It was at exactly that point,
as it blasted over empty waters, that he wanted to light it—before it
could spill into the streets and passageways of the Harbor Town complex and provide fuel for an explosion big enough to level the city.
A spark. A lighter. Anything and the gas would ignite.
He froze, listening to the cries of people on the cruise ship. The
suddenly stopped scream as a man fell into the grinding metal. The
now-distant noise of helicopter rotors. And the overpowering roar of
the gas jetting out.
He felt the Doll Ship sag, slow. It was listing to starboard, which
was good, good, bring that jet down to water level, let it blast harmlessly into the water until the ship rolled over and sank.
The Doll Ship moved past the docked cruise ship, sagged farther to starboard, and now was the time, now, now! Domville raced
toward the gas jet and standing in the edge of the methane hurricane,
puffed his cigar.
Nothing. The cigar had gone out!
Domville fumbled frantically for his lighter as the Doll Ship,
slower but not stopped, barreled on toward the Harbor Town pier.
He found his lighter. Thought, Too bloody late, most likely, and
flicked it.
Domville was hurled, a burning torch, into the dock at the waterline. He was dead before the impact.
A huge blast of flame burning at 1,600 degrees Celsius incinerated the dock, boiled the water and sent up a vast cloud of steam that
rolled across the face of the Gateway Hotel.
Then, the sheer force of the jet of flame began to shift the Doll
Ship. Its starboard list became less pronounced and the blowtorch,
that massive, terrifying blowtorch rose as the Doll Ship rolled toward
its left side.
Three hundred and ninety rooms on thirty-six floors of the Gateway Hotel. The fiery blast burned its way from bottom to top. It blew
out windows, incinerated everything and everyone inside instantly.
In seconds the hotel was a shell.
The steel support beams were warping, collapsing inward like a
tall man bent over from a blow to the stomach. A minute more and
the building would be gone and the blowtorch would burn on and
through and ignite the city.
But the roll that had begun was accelerating. The ship’s ballast
had shifted decisively. It rolled onto its side, sending the flame shooting hundreds of feet into the air.
Now at last the remaining residents of the Doll House panicked.
The inside of Benjaminia was a slaughterhouse—dead marines,
many more dead villagers, hung from bloody catwalks. The sphere
turned on its axis, and floors became walls. Bodies fell through the air.
Like the turning drum of a dryer, the sphere rolled on and now
people clinging to desperate handholds fell screaming and crashed
into the painted mural of the Great Souls.
Water rushed in through the opened segments.
The blowtorch submerged but burned on and turned the water to
steam as the Doll Ship sank, and settled on the harbor floor.

There was a knock at the door. Bug Man knew who it was. His message had been delivered.

He set his platooned nanobots on their course, out of the president’s eye, racing away down her cheek. Then he detached from the
twitcher gear and went to the door.

Five people stood there: the strange girl with the creepy eye tattoo, a serious-looking boy with startling blue eyes, a pretty but angry
girl with light freckles on her cheeks. And—supported by an auburnhaired woman—a young man with dark hair and an intense brow
and eyes that stared straight past Bug Man.
“They’re out of her,” Bug Man said.
They all stepped inside.
“I guess, given who we are and what we do, we don’t shake hands,”

Bug Man said. Then he looked at Vincent and laughed softly. “Poor
bastard’s still not right, is he? And he kicked my ass anyway. Well.”
“We could kill you,” the blue-eyed boy said.
Bug Man looked sharply at him. “That accent’s not from around
here.”
“Not quite as posh as yours,” Keats said.
“There are five of you. You could kill me, but what would be the
point? I’m out of Morales. The Twins will kill me if they ever get a
chance. The game is over for me.”
“Proof?” Plath snapped.
Bug Man nodded toward his twitcher station. Wilkes went over
and put on the glove.
“I burned it all down myself,” Bug Man said. “I had everything.
I beat Kerouac. I beat Vincent. Plenty of money. I had a girl . . .” He
shrugged. “But I guess it didn’t mean much, eh? Just a game, right?”
Keats swung his fist with every ounce of rage he could muster.
Bug Man went down on his butt, blood pouring from his nose. Then
Keats buried the toe of his shoe in Bug Man’s rib cage. No one moved
to stop him.
“Kerouac is my brother,” Keats said. “That was for him. And
now, you have something of ours.”
Bug Man prudently said nothing as Keats stuck his finger in his
eye and held it there as the biots left Bug Man.
Sitting at the twitcher station Wilkes suddenly jerked sharply.
“His nanobots are out. But look at the news!”
A small TV monitor beside Bug Man’s main screen was showing
a CNN feed.
Wilkes tapped the keyboard and the news feed opened much
larger on the main screen.
“What is it?” Plath asked.
“She’s lost it,” Wilkes said.

“I first met Monte when we were . . .” she began.

The autocue went on with the usual story, the story they had both
told for a long time. It was an amusing and touching story. But it
wasn’t the truth.

They had met when Monte Morales, driving a bit drunk, ran her
off the road. She’d been on a bike. When she fell off she rolled into a
ditch. Monte had come running, yelling, “No, no, no!” and she had
risen from that ditch covered in mud and spitting a stream of obscenities that turned the air blue.

The bike was ruined so he let her drive his car. She left him standing by the side of the road yelling, “Hey! I said you could drive it not
steal it!”

The next day she had found him from the information on the
car’s registration. He had apologized, she had not. She’d told him her
only regret was not running him over. He’d said . . .

“I think your greater regret was in not kissing me.”
The audience gasped.
She had spoken it out loud, all of it.
It had always seemed like an important secret, and now …Well …

There were so many worse secrets now.
Gastrell got the news on her iPhone. Massive explosion Hong
Kong. Likely terrorist. Threat condition Orange.
The president had begun her eulogy. And it wasn’t going well.
The Secret Service had obviously been advised as well. The lead
agent was already moving toward the president, protocol be damned,
Condition Orange came with orders to immediately secure the
POTUS.
“I loved him,” the president said. “And now …How . . .?”
She stared at the Secret Service agent stepping briskly to her and
said, “Are you arresting me?”
The agent froze. The audience stopped breathing.
Cameras zoomed in close on her face and what looked like a
single tear rolled from her eye. It seemed dark, for a tear, almost as
if she was weeping blood. Even with high definition cameras it was
impossible to make out that the dark tear was a rush of platooned
nanobots.
“Madam President, I’m—” the agent said.
The president stepped to him and suddenly shoved him back.
He stumbled, tripped backward, and landed hard. Morales squatted
beside him and reached inside his jacket.
Two other agents were rushing now, not knowing what was happening, just that something sure as hell wasn’t right.
When the president stood up she was holding a pistol.
“Jesus Christ,” Gastrell said.
The agents froze. In all their training, there was nothing about
the POTUS wielding a gun.
Morales walked calmly back to the podium. The gun was in her
hand. She looked out over the audience and at the world beyond and
said, “I don’t know why.”
Then as a chorus of screams echoed, she raised the gun to her
temple and squeezed the trigger.

Deng Shi had two jobs, one more profitable than the other. On the
one hand, he was a shrimper. On the other hand he engaged in a
little light smuggling—no drugs, just cigarettes, booze, a bit of tax
avoidance really, no harm in it.

He had in his time seen a fair share of strange things in the waters
of Victoria Harbor. But what he saw now beat anything.
He steered his boat a few degrees to starboard, veering toward the
object—no, objects, there were two—in the water. He yelled down to
one of his crew to get a grappling hook.
One man with a hook was not nearly enough. It took four strong
men and a winch.
Ten minutes later Deng stood amazed and a little awestruck by
what looked very much like two men melted together. There was also
an elderly woman, but she was practically invisible standing beside
the creature—he couldn’t yet quite think of them as humans.
It seemed one single life jacket and the small woman had managed to keep them afloat. Deng spoke no English, and neither the
Twins nor Ling spoke any Cantonese. But one of Deng’s deckhands
was Vietnamese.
It took an hour to work out the details, for Deng to lend his phone
to Charles Armstrong, to wait while he contacted Jindal, and then
to get confirmation that half a million U.S. dollars had appeared in
Deng’s bank account. The other half of the money would be delivered in cash when Deng put the Twins ashore in Vietnam. There was
an Armstrong factory facility there that paid many bribes: the Twins
would not need to undergo too many formalities, and there would be
no questions.