BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“You’ll be fine.”

Then: the sleigh.

Suarez was honest enough to admit that she was motivated in part by an almost lustful desire to drive the sleigh. It was an object of beauty. A work of art. It screamed “speed” just sitting there.

She shed her parka, stuffed it into the very minimal storage space behind the cockpit seat, and slid into the leather chair. The pedals were where they should be. The yoke was awkwardly placed by her lights, but she could live with it. The displays were elegant and wonderfully easy to read.

She closed the canopy and realized the hangar doors were shut. So she climbed back out, scrounged around until she found a remote control, and climbed back in. It was just as good the second time. She had to fight the urge to run her fingers over the displays. Beautiful. If Rolls-Royce, Tesla, and Porsche teamed up to make a hovercraft, this would be it.

There was an autopilot, but she couldn’t imagine trusting herself to a computer—not at the speeds this thing moved, not on the most treacherous terrain on planet Earth. But she turned on the automated warnings as well as, after some hesitation, the impact-avoidance system that would take control if she was in immediate danger of crashing.

“You wreck this thing and your future will be very much in doubt, Imelda,” she told herself.

Then, finally, she fired up the engines.

It was noisy but not deafening in the cockpit. She felt the surge of suppressed power as the twin jets throbbed. The sleigh rose on a cushion of air.

She keyed the remote, and the hangar doors slid open. Beyond the doors was whiteness, white on white as far as the eye could see.

She punched her destination into the GPS, released the cable tie-downs, and slid toward the gap at walking speed then running speed and was just hitting fifty knots by the time she blew out of the building, keyed the doors over her shoulder, and rocketed out onto the ice.

Oh, yes.

She smiled and held it at fifty knots until she had played with the controls for a while and come grudgingly to trust the forward-scanning radar.

The ice here was rippled but with no rises over eighteen inches. The sleigh’s jets adjusted automatically to push more air into the cushion as she reached obstacles.

Very soon fifty began to feel slow. Boring. Despite the fact that the ice was flying by beneath her. In her rearview mirror she saw a vortex of ice crystals, a shimmery white contrail.

“Well, in for fity, in for a hundred, right?”

She punched it, and the sleigh took off like a rocket.

“Oh, yes,” Suarez said. “Ah-hah-hah!”

TWENTY

Plath was still asleep when they struck.

One from Keats, two from Wilkes, two from Billy. Five busy biots raced up through her eye and into her brain.

They had planned. Wilkes and Keats would focus on ripping up wire in the places where Keats had found it. Billy would go hunting for the intruder and call for help if he found something.

“It’s mostly all up in here,” Keats said. “Hippocampus and some Broca’s area.” Amazing how quickly one could learn something as esoteric as brain architecture when life and death were involved.

The three of them were downstairs in the darkened living room. Hopefully Plath would not awaken and come down to find out why Keats was not in her bed. If she did, they would know it: arteries would start pumping faster as she woke and began to stir.

“Go ahead, Billy. But if you find something, don’t fight it. Call us for help.”

Billy had a Coke by his side. He was dressed in a Washington Nationals jersey many sizes too large and slumped down to look cool, with the result that he looked even younger than he was—a small, round head and solemn face in a pile of rumpled clothing. None of them had anything to do with their hands.

“There’s the first wire I found,” Keats said to Wilkes. Down in the meat he was pointing it out to her nearest biot.

“It’s encrusted,” Wilkes said. It’s been there for some days at least. Maybe longer. Meaning maybe we pull the wire, but the neurons have already made it redundant.”

The wire was crisp and clean, only a few molecules in circumference. But neurons had grown over and around it in places, like kudzu, vines twining sensuously around the metal of the wire.

“Maybe,” Keats admitted. “But I won’t have that in her brain.”