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.