BZRK (BZRK 1)

“You want to put your filthy little bugs inside me?” she demanded of the German.

“It’s not so bad being cross-eyed,” Nijinsky offered.

He saw the acid working. It didn’t take much to melt through the first few strands of taut muscle. He used the tail spur of his biot to add a few more drops. The biot would eventually secrete more, but the acid bladder was quite small, and only a small amount could be used at any time.

Of course Sugar wouldn’t know that. The twitcher might not, either.

“I can feel it. It’s burning!”

“Stupid woman, get out of my way.” The German slid his hand into one of the gloves at the makeshift station, drew Sugar to him with the other, and as she wriggled away, cursing, he brushed his free hand against her face.

Then he slid the second glove into place and sat staring intently at the monitor.

“Get out of me or I’ll shoot you now,” Sugar snarled at Nijinsky, doing her damned best to intimidate him. He had no doubt she meant it. It made him sad.

The feeling surprised him a little. He’d never really expected to survive this war. But he’d always pictured his final moments as one of terror and defiance. Sadness, though. That was the feeling. So many things he would miss out on.

The German’s nanobots were an unseen swarm, presumably heading into and eventually around Sugar’s right eye.

And then, suddenly, the cable snapped. One second the muscles of Lebowski’s eye were stretched overhead, and the next second they were gone and only acid-melted stump ends were left.

In the macro, Nijinsky saw Sugar’s eye jerk inward.

Her left eye.

The twitcher saw it, too. “You stupid woman, he’s in the other eye!”

“But I felt it!”

Nijinsky shrugged as well as he could. “Power of suggestion. And just so you know: what happens next you won’t feel at all because strangely enough the brain itself does not feel pain.”

“What are you doing to me?” Cold terror now. Good. He was glad he could at least make her afraid. It seemed fair enough, since she would almost certainly make him dead.

“That depends. You call off your boys outside and let me walk out of here, and nothing. Otherwise I dump all the acid I have deep inside your brain, where it will eat through until—”

She jabbed the gun hard against him.

“You have orders not to kill me, don’t you?” Stalling. No doubt she’d been ordered to deliver him wired. But she could always claim she had no choice. And she wasn’t looking as if rational calculation was dominating her thinking.

She tried to manage the jumper cables with just her free hand, but it sent up a shower of sparks, so she set the gun down in the wagon.

Well, Nijinsky thought: better than a bullet.

She jabbed the cables against the bare flesh of his neck.

The pain was awful. But brief. There was a popping sound and the garage went dark.

Typical suburban homes are really not wired for performing electrical torture. A breaker had blown.

Nijinsky had worked one leg free of the rope. He kicked it straight out. With all his strength. And he felt the satisfying impact with Lebowski’s knee.

She fell into him. He wrapped his one free leg around her and held her tight, willing himself to get his face close enough to hers to retrieve his biots, who were already far from the center of her brain, having left no dripping acid behind there, and were rushing to—

The lights came back on.

And at the same time Nijinsky saw something far worse than the enraged face of Sugar Lebowski. There, waiting for him, just off her lower eyelid, as though they had anticipated his every move, were two dozen nanobots.

The German had read the bluff.