BZRK (BZRK 1)

“Standing orders,

sir: we step into a fight between you two. Your own orders.”

“He’s let them take him. They’re inside him, and he’s let them do it. He’s weak! He’s always been weak!”

She put her knee on the hand, yanked the chair close, and fastened Charles’s hand to the crossbar.

“Following your own orders, sir,” Sugar pleaded, but she didn’t look as if she believed it. She was darting glances at the door, like she was counting steps, like the elevator door a hundred feet away was the doorway to paradise.

Benjamin was weeping now, blubbering like a baby.

“He’s here!” one of the TFDs yelled, and Army Pete, a teenaged boy wearing a droopy army surplus jacket, was practically hurled into the room.

Sugar said, “What the hell took so long? You, twitcher! You’re going in.”

Army Pete was a mediocre twitcher and a first-rate smart-ass. But he knew enough as he surveyed the scene—the bloody boy on the floor and, far worse, the terrifying spectacle of a handcuffed Charles still trying to beat a raving Benjamin—to avoid favoring everyone with his wit.

“Got a twitcher chair? I can’t do shit without my gear.”

“Damn!” Sugar yelled. “Get a chair up here. Now!”

Army Pete started to object, but no one heard him for the rush of TFDs racing to comply. Or at least racing to get the hell out of the Tulip.

THIRTY

“I’m with you, Vincent,” Nijinsky said.

With him on the street, holding his friend, propping him against a wall.

And with him now as his two fresh, undamaged biots ran to the rescue.

“Too late,” Vincent whispered.

Nijinsky stared across a half centimeter of space that felt like a city block, at Bug Man’s forces. Two of the nanobots were slowly, maliciously dismembering Vincent’s biot.

Nijinsky felt each ripped limb through the shuddering form of his friend.

Eleven of Bug Man’s nanobots.

Two of Nijinsky’s biots.

Maybe. Maybe. But Nijinsky was not Vincent. He would almost certainly lose, and if he lost, then he would be where Vincent was now: a shattered man, helpless and vulnerable.

Bug Man did not attack. Bug Man did not want this battle, either. He didn’t need it. By now his spinners would be deep within the president’s brain.

The two of them stared at each other through alien eyes, Bug Man and Nijinsky.

Nijinsky made his lead biot open its arms in supplication.

Bug Man’s nanobots stood still for a long minute, doing nothing at all.

Then they lifted the body of Vincent’s second biot and shoved it through the fluid. It floated on the current, and Nijinsky was able to grab what was left.

Carrying the legless, eyeless, mutilated body, he turned and ran away.

Up in the world of streets and skyscrapers, Vincent said, “Jin … Jin …”

“Yes, Vincent.”