“What’s your name?” Lebowski asked. Before he had a chance to answer she swung downward and smashed the golf club into his thigh.
Which nearly made Nijinsky swoon from pain.
But was also an interes
ting choice.
“Tell me your name!”
“Santino Corleone,” he answered.
“That’s very cute. Funny, you don’t look Italian.”
“You’re very observant.”
She smashed the club down on his shoulder again. It hurt, but it had started to go numb from the earlier blow.
“Careful, you don’t want to hit my face,” he gasped. “You’ve got very strict instructions not to hurt my face.”
Sugar Lebowski laughed, not a pretty sound. “Yeah, I’ll admit: that’s quick of you. Very quick. What are you, Chinese? Korean?”
“I thought I was Italian.”
“You know what won’t mess up your pretty face?”
She hauled a child’s red wagon with an electrical charging unit inside into position in front of him. She ostentatiously plugged it into the wall. The dial lit up and a voltmeter needle jerked.
A set of jumper cables ran from the transformer, and Sugar lifted them carefully. She was ready, Sugar was. Ready and just a little eager.
The blond man spoke then. His accent was German, Nijinsky was pretty sure of that. “This is unnecessary. I can be—”
“Seriously? A squeamish Kraut?” Sugar snapped at him.
The German waved a hand at her and Nijinsky both. “Why am I here in the middle of the night? To watch you play games? Let me touch him, please, so I can begin my work.” He made a vague gesture toward the twitching chair.
So, he was indeed a twitcher. Sent here to wire Nijinsky, turn him around, and use him as a Trojan horse. Nijinsky looked at him with interest. Older than a lot of twitchers. He wondered how many bugs he had on board. Not that there was much Nijinsky could do if the twitcher unloaded onto him. He had only one biot still on board. The other two were nearing the medial rectus, one of the major muscles controlling the movement of Sugar Lebowski’s eye.
From where he sat the muscle looked a bit like one of the massive cables used to hold up a suspension bridge. It attached to the eye in a way that suggested an unsuccessful attempt to fuse steel wires into bloody ice.
“Looks like you washed very carefully, lady,” Nijinsky said.
“Call me Sugar,” she said, and stabbed at his chest with the clamps of the electrical charger. Nijinsky’s body jumped as far as it was able to without snapping ropes.
He sagged, and it seemed to take a few seconds at the very least for his brain to begin to make sense of the world.
“Okay, Sugar,” Nijinsky said. “That pissed me off. I’m releasing a bit of sulfuric acid onto the muscle that holds your right eye steady laterally. You know, side to—”
“What?” She turned a horrified look on the German. “That’s a bluff.” It wasn’t quite a statement, and it wasn’t quite a question.
The twitcher shrugged. “Some biots are equipped with—”
Sugar pulled a gun and held it to Nijinsky’s head. “Stop it, right fucking now!”
“It’s too late for the medial,” Nijinsky said. “You’ll probably start blurring pretty soon.”
“I can feel it!” she cried, and slapped her free hand to her face.
“Let me get him out of there,” the twitcher said, and moved toward her.