BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

Bug

Man stared in horror. “I liked that dude. He was the fun one.”

“Who, the prince?” Lystra laughed. “Don’t go soft on me, Bug. Much more to come. I’ve got three officers at a nuclear missile base near Novosibirsk. High hopes. Fingers crossed, yeah?”

And yes, she had her fingers crossed. She left and closed the door behind her.

Bug Man watched as the prince was hauled away to a waiting ambulance. “Fuck you, crazy lady. Yeah? I liked him. He was a gamer.”

NINETEEN

“I need your help.”

Keats to Wilkes and Billy the Kid.

Plath was asleep. He had crept silently from bed to bed waking them, holding a silencing finger to his lips.

“Anything for you, pretty blue eyes,” Wilkes said, and yawned.

“Plath has been wired,” he said. He knew she might wake up at any moment. No time for delicacy. “She’s been wired, she knows it, but she won’t pull the wires. It’s got to her. We need to go in there and clean her up.”

Anya was not invited. Plath had a biot in Anya. Keats badly wanted to ask Anya if she had built any more biots for Plath. But Plath might have been watching through Anya’s eyes, or listening in her ear.

“You saying someone from Armstrong wired her?” Wilkes asked.

Keats hesitated. “This is lunacy. This is mad. But she saw something. Down in the meat. She doesn’t think it was a nanobot. I helped her look. I didn’t find anything. But I have found wire, a lot of it.”

He let that sink in. “She thinks Nijinsky—” Wilkes began.

“No,” Keats said. “Whatever it is, whoever’s running it, it’s still apparently active, so not Nijinsky. Someone else. Maybe one of you two. Maybe a traitor from some other cell.”

Wilkes got up, came over to Keats, and sat down beside him. Very close, uncomfortably so. “How do we know it isn’t you?” she asked. “You’ve had a biot in her for a long time, right? Fixing that hole in her artery or whatever? Could be you, right? And maybe you’re just lying in wait for one of our biots to come crawling along and, boom!”

“This is kind of crazy,” Billy said.

“Nah, this isn’t kind of crazy,” Wilkes said. “This is full-on crazy.” She heh-heh-heh laughed and said, “This is where it all goes, right? I mean, this is where it kind of had to go, didn’t it? You start playing with people’s brains, man.… How do you know? Right? Whole world’s going crazy. All those big brains. And now your prince dude.”

Keats nodded tightly. “Right.”

Wilkes pulled away from him. “Maybe I just transferred one of my kids to you, Keats. Just now.”

“Maybe,” he acknowledged.

“Maybe it’s me, and if I put one of my kids into Plath, maybe that’s my second one, you know? Maybe I get in there and make it worse. What’s Plath doing? What’s she up to? Did this wire make her soft in the head?”

“She’s planning to blow up the Tulip.”

“What’s a tulip? A flower, right?” Billy asked.

Wilkes snorted. “It’s a skyscraper in Midtown. Blow it up? What’s that even mean?”

“It means that she’s given the go-ahead to Caligula to blow it up. Kill everyone in it. Destroy all their labs, all their computers.”

Wilkes stared at him.

“Lear told her to—” Keats began.

“Lear?” Wilkes shrilled. “Lear told her to murder all those people?”