BZRK (BZRK 1)

The single wheel was in the center. It extended below the belly of the tiny robot and would make contact whenever the legs lowered the body.

Down in the micro they looked big, of course, as big as tanks. Giant spiders made of strangely pebbly steel. With their legs trailing and wheels spinning, they moved at what seemed like freeway speeds.

Wheel-up and running, they were still very quick, but slower than a biot.

To Vincent’s inner eye there were two visual screens showing the nanobot attack from the target position, and separately from an off angle.

He had one, maybe two seconds before Anya’s knees hit the floor and there would be a second impact.

Both Vincent’s biots zoomed forward, legs a blur. They hit the two crashed nanobots.

V1 stabbed a cutting blade into the leg joint of one.

Leap! And V2 landed, all legs joined to form a single point of impact on the second.

And there! A flash of color betrayed a crudely drawn logo on the side panel of one nanobot. It was a grinning face with an insect exploding from its head: Bug Man.

Vincent’s biots gripped nerve again, and the second impact came, gentler than the first, just enough to make an onrushing nanobot swerve.

It zoomed past, and Vincent tripped its trailing legs. It spun, and as it spun, Vincent fired his saddle-back beam weapon. I

t hit the only thing it could kill: the nanobot’s sensor array.

Three down and two to …

And then, the swarm was coming up from both sides, a rushing torrent of nanobots.

“Could use some help,” Vincent said.

“Left or right?” Renfield replied, and touched his finger to his ear, picking up his biots.

“Right,” Vincent said.

Renfield grabbed Anya’s face. He stuck a finger into her right eye as she yelled and kicked at him and cursed furiously.

But Dr. Violet was irrelevant now. She was no longer a person: she was a battlefield.

“I’ve got you, Vincent, got you so good,” Bug Man said.

The impact—that had been clever, Vincent must have punched the host body, playing the macro as well as the nano. And that had cost Bug Man three nanobots.

So forget the wave upon wave, time to swarm for a quick kill. He sent the three intact platoons down the side of the nerve, walking on the vertical—gravity didn’t mean much down in the meat.

Now Bug Man saw nineteen screens, all filled with the two enemy creatures. From one nanobot he had a nice, clean, close-up of one of Vincent’s biots. Almost handshake close, it seemed. Close enough to see the face, with its insect compound eyes huge above the smeared brown mockery of its pseudo-human eyes.

The close-up view cost him: with superhuman speed Vincent’s biot leapt sideways, charged, and ripped the nanobot open.

Another screen dark. But it didn’t matter. It may have been a kill, it may have been a blinding, but Bug Man was playing his troops as four platoons now, and even blind nanobots could still follow directions.

Swarm, Bug Man thought, and saw his screen fill with the desperate biots as his entire force charged, following four variations on that core instruction.

He saw Vincent’s two biots spin, stab, leap. Goddamn, he was good. A bloody ninja, he was! Two more nanobots were crippled.

So fast!

Not fast enough, though. Not this time.

Nanobots ripped an arm from one of the biots. It waved on Bug Man’s screen as it flew away, and he laughed.