BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

It was bug-out time. Bug Man …out!

And then? And then what? The question made his stomach clench in a knot. He would have to run very far, very fast. Get his nanobots out of the president and leave them somewhere they would never be found. If he did that BZRK would have no use for him. The Twins would still try to kill him, but they’d look for him a whole lot harder if he still had a grip on Morales.

Was Vincent seeing what Bug Man was doing? He had to hope so, he had to pray, and he did pray most fervently, that Vincent saw he was bailing on the president.

“I’m out!” he yelled, chattering. “I’m getting out!” Fighter nanobots, spinners, all of them were assembling at the far end of the president’s optic nerve, two dozen all together now, wheels down and racing for daylight.

Bug Man looked around for a piece of paper. Nothing. He pulled out his phone and thumbed text onto a note. Then as his tiny soldiers, all platooned together, ran full tilt, he held the message up in front of him. He pinched the text as large as it would go:

Bailing. No good to you now Vincent. I quit. If it is possible for a place to be both hellish and beautiful, the drainpipe was it. Looking through her biot’s eyes, Plath looked up and saw hard fluorescent light from high above. It was a ring of light, brilliance around a dark center formed by the drain stopper.

A huge, rough pillar of steel rose up to the stopper and extended down, out of sight, to the levering mechanism. She would have liked to be there, climbing that steel post, because although it was tangled here and there, long stretches of it were clear.

But here, on the wall of the pipe, she was in a jungle. Hairs as big as anacondas, in every shape and type, formed a bewildering thicket. They soared free, or were squashed together; they were scaly and rough-barked; some were clean, others had joined to form nests of bacteria.

And such bacteria. Varieties she had never seen, some like soccer balls, some like tadpoles, some mere twitching sticks, still others busily dividing. They came in all the colors of a demented rainbow. These, here, were the great predators of the human race, the tiny bugs that twisted guts and dimmed eyes and burned humans alive from the inside.

If the bacteria were frightening, other things were startlingly beautiful—crystals of unknown provenance, bubbles of soap that turned the ring of light into a rainbow, fantastic sculptures of debris trapped in balls of hair.

Plath’s biot climbed through the tangled wilderness toward the ring of light, claw over claw, a precarious handhold, a wild leap, like Tarzan swinging through the jungle, only here beasts were tiny and the “trees” seemed to ignore the laws of physics.

“Are you okay?” Keats asked her.

“As long as he doesn’t turn the water back on, I think I can climb out.” “And what are you seeing through his eye?” Wilkes asked. “I haven’t been able to tap in yet.”

Plath focused on the visuals from another biot. “I see …Wait. Wait. I think he’s sending us a message.”

“A message?”

“Oh, my God,” Plath said. She read it aloud. “‘Bailing. No good to you now, Vincent. I quit.’”

“What does that mean?” Wilkes asked.

Keats said, “He figured out his only move is to declare neutrality. He’s making himself useless.”

Plath focused her attention on the macro. Wilkes was frowning, not quite sure what Keats was saying. Keats looked troubled. He said, “I suppose that’s a good thing?”

Plath heard the question mark. She said, “The Twins lose the president. But so do we. And we lose the chance to turn Bug Man. He’ll leave, move out of range, and take our biots with him.”

“We can’t wire him in time to stop him,” Keats said.

“No, we can’t. However, he’s just up two floors,” Plath said.

Wilkes let go of her heh-heh-heh laugh. “Check with Lear?”

Plath hesitated. “No. Not Jin, either. When Vincent’s back with us, he’s in charge. Until then …It’s me.”

Domville watched his Marines recede behind the Doll Ship. The Sea Kings were already starting to pick them up. Benjaminia and Charlestown were still full of people. The fools were cheering, thinking they’d won something. They were singing some mad song about the Great Souls.

Well, the Great Souls were nowhere to be seen, and neither was the ship’s crew. Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor was a place of great activity; most who had jumped would be rescued if they didn’t panic.

His concern was with the people in the cruise ship and the hotel, dead ahead. He thumbed a text report. Not very official, but it was all he could manage at the moment.

Officers and men behaved very well. The fault lies solely with me. He thought about adding a patriotic “God Save the King,” but that didn’t seem quite the thing, really. So he signed it:

Cheers. Domville.

The starboard bow of the Doll Ship struck the Holland America ship Volendam a glancing blow. A glancing blow that made a metal shriek like the sound of Godzilla in the movies.