BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  Then at last it was time for the main event. No one was expecting great eloquence from Morales. She had never been an especially compelling speaker.

  As she walked slowly up the steps to the special bulletproof podium, the president knew that all she had to do was read the speech. It was short, just twelve minutes long.

  Twelve minutes.

  Bug Man had a sketchy, grainy view out over the audience at National Cathedral. He had excellent positions for viewing through the president’s eyes. After all, he’d had weeks to get it right. But there were still limits on the method, and none of the people were recognizable, they were just dancing gray pixels. The huge columns were just shapes and shadows.

  The words on the autocue swam into view, ghostly and blurred. Only a few words could be made out. He might have brought in still more nanobots to refine the resolution, but he was going the opposite direction: his nanobots were retreating from the dark corners of the president’s brain, rushing for the exits, and soon those nanobots still attached to the optic nerve would also be detached.

  There was no winning this game, but there was a way to keep BZRK from winning: destroy the value of what they had. And what they had was him: Anthony Elder, Bug Man.

  They were after him because he controlled the president. If you can’t get the puppet, get the puppeteer. And if the puppeteer no longer pulls the strings?

  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.

  Domville was knocked to his knees, and it was from that position that he saw cabins torn apart as the side of the Volendam was opened like a tin of sardines.

  He saw men and women exposed, dressing, lounging, going to the bathroom, all suddenly revealed as the side of the Volendam was ripped off.

  The hulls of both ships crumpled, railing buckling inward, bits of rigging suddenly everywhere, debris flying, and the all while that awful metal shriek that went on and on.

  It was a lifeboat winch that tore the hole in the last LNG sphere.

  The blast of depressurizing LNG actually jolted the Doll Ship. Domville jumped to his feet and began running to the powerful jet, made visible only by the heat-wave-like distortion of the lights of the cruise ship.

  A spark would ignite it.

  Domville wanted to be that spark, but not yet, not yet, not while natural gas was blasting into the last few dozen meters of open cabins. The jet of gas had to waft clear of the boat. It was at exactly that point, as it blasted over empty waters, that he wanted to light it—before it could spill into the streets and passageways of the Harbor Town complex and provide fuel for an explosion big enough to level the city.

  A spark. A lighter. Anything and the gas would ignite.

  He froze, listening to the cries of people on the cruise ship. The suddenly stopped scream as a man fell into the grinding metal. The now-distant noise of helicopter rotors. And the overpowering roar of the gas jetting out.

  He felt the Doll Ship sag, slow. It was listing to starboard, which was good, good, bring that jet down to water level, let it blast harmlessly into the
water until the ship rolled over and sank.

  The Doll Ship moved past the docked cruise ship, sagged farther to starboard, and now was the time, now, now! Domville raced toward the gas jet and standing in the edge of the methane hurricane, puffed his cigar.

  Nothing. The cigar had gone out!

  Domville fumbled frantically for his lighter as the Doll Ship, slower but not stopped, barreled on toward the Harbor Town pier.

  He found his lighter. Thought, Too bloody late, most likely, and flicked it.

  Domville was hurled, a burning torch, into the dock at the waterline. He was dead before the impact.

  A huge blast of flame burning at 1,600 degrees Celsius incinerated the dock, boiled the water and sent up a vast cloud of steam that rolled across the face of the Gateway Hotel.

  Then, the sheer force of the jet of flame began to shift the Doll Ship. Its starboard list became less pronounced and the blowtorch, that massive, terrifying blowtorch rose as the Doll Ship rolled toward its left side.

  Three hundred and ninety rooms on thirty-six floors of the Gateway Hotel. The fiery blast burned its way from bottom to top. It blew out windows, incinerated everything and everyone inside instantly. In seconds the hotel was a shell.

  The steel support beams were warping, collapsing inward like a tall man bent over from a blow to the stomach. A minute more and the building would be gone and the blowtorch would burn on and through and ignite the city.

  But the roll that had begun was accelerating. The ship’s ballast had shifted decisively. It rolled onto its side, sending the flame shooting hundreds of feet into the air.

  Now at last the remaining residents of the Doll House panicked.

  The inside of Benjaminia was a slaughterhouse—dead marines, many more dead villagers, hung from bloody catwalks. The sphere turned on its axis, and floors became walls. Bodies fell through the air.

  Like the turning drum of a dryer, the sphere rolled on and now people clinging to desperate handholds fell screaming and crashed into the painted mural of the Great Souls.

  Water rushed in through the opened segments.

  The blowtorch submerged but burned on and turned the water to steam as the Doll Ship sank, and settled on the harbor floor.

  There was a knock at the door. Bug Man knew who it was. His message had been delivered. He set his platooned nanobots on their course, out of the president’s eye, racing away down her cheek. Then he detached from the twitcher gear and went to the door.

  Five people stood there: the strange girl with the creepy eye tattoo, a serious-looking boy with startling blue eyes, a pretty but angry girl with light freckles on her cheeks. And—supported by an auburnhaired woman—a young man with dark hair and an intense brow and eyes that stared straight past Bug Man.

  “They’re out of her,” Bug Man said.

  They all stepped inside.

  “I guess, given who we are and what we do, we don’t shake hands,”

  Bug Man said. Then he looked at Vincent and laughed softly. “Poor bastard’s still not right, is he? And he kicked my ass anyway. Well.” “We could kill you,” the blue-eyed boy said.

  Bug Man looked sharply at him. “That accent’s not from around here.”

  “Not quite as posh as yours,” Keats said.

  “There are five of you. You could kill me, but what would be the point? I’m out of Morales. The Twins will kill me if they ever get a chance. The game is over for me.”

  “Proof?” Plath snapped.

  Bug Man nodded toward his twitcher station. Wilkes went over and put on the glove.

  “I burned it all down myself,” Bug Man said. “I had everything. I beat Kerouac. I beat Vincent. Plenty of money. I had a girl . . .” He shrugged. “But I guess it didn’t mean much, eh? Just a game, right?”

  Keats swung his fist with every ounce of rage he could muster. Bug Man went down on his butt, blood pouring from his nose. Then Keats buried the toe of his shoe in Bug Man’s rib cage. No one moved to stop him.

  “Kerouac is my brother,” Keats said. “That was for him. And now, you have something of ours.”

  Bug Man prudently said nothing as Keats stuck his finger in his eye and held it there as the biots left Bug Man.

  Sitting at the twitcher station Wilkes suddenly jerked sharply. “His nanobots are out. But look at the news!”

  A small TV monitor beside Bug Man’s main screen was showing a CNN feed.

  Wilkes tapped the keyboard and the news feed opened much larger on the main screen.

  “What is it?” Plath asked.

  “She’s lost it,” Wilkes said.

  “I first met Monte when we were . . .” she began. The autocue went on with the usual story, the story they had both told for a long time. It was an amusing and touching story. But it wasn’t the truth.

  They had met when Monte Morales, driving a bit drunk, ran her off the road. She’d been on a bike. When she fell off she rolled into a ditch. Monte had come running, yelling, “No, no, no!” and she had risen from that ditch covered in mud and spitting a stream of obscenities that turned the air blue.

  The bike was ruined so he let her drive his car. She left him standing by the side of the road yelling, “Hey! I said you could drive it not steal it!”

  The next day she had found him from the information on the car’s registration. He had apologized, she had not. She’d told him her only regret was not running him over. He’d said . . .

  “I think your greater regret was in not kissing me.”

  The audience gasped.

  She had spoken it out loud, all of it.

  It had always seemed like an important secret, and now …Well …

  There were so many worse secrets now.

  Gastrell got the news on her iPhone. Massive explosion Hong

  Kong. Likely terrorist. Threat condition Orange.

  The president had begun her eulogy. And it wasn’t going well. The Secret Service had obviously been advised as well. The lead

  agent was already moving toward the president, protocol be damned,

  Condition Orange came with orders to immediately secure the

  POTUS.

  “I loved him,” the president said. “And now …How . . .?” She stared at the Secret Service agent stepping briskly to her and

  said, “Are you arresting me?”

  The agent froze. The audience stopped breathing.

  Cameras zoomed in close on her face and what looked like a

  single tear rolled from her eye. It seemed dark, for a tear, almost as

  if she was weeping blood. Even with high definition cameras it was

  impossible to make out that the dark tear was a rush of platooned

  nanobots.

  “Madam President, I’m—” the agent said.

  The president stepped to him and suddenly shoved him back.

  He stumbled, tripped backward, and landed hard. Morales squatted

  beside him and reached inside his jacket.

  Two other agents were rushing now, not knowing what was happening, just that something sure as hell wasn’t right.

  When the president stood up she was holding a pistol. “Jesus Christ,” Gastrell said.

  The agents froze. In all their training, there was nothing about

  the POTUS wielding a gun.

  Morales walked calmly back to the podium. The gun was in her

  hand. She looked out over the audience and at the world beyond and

  said, “I don’t know why.”

  Then as a chorus of screams echoed, she raised the gun to her

  temple and squeezed the trigger.

  Deng Shi had two jobs, one more profitable than the other. On the one hand, he was a shrimper. On the other hand he engaged in a little light smuggling—no drugs, just cigarettes, booze, a bit of tax avoidance really, no harm in it.

  He had in his time seen a fair share of strange things in the waters of Victoria Harbor. But what he saw now beat anything.

  He steered his bo
at a few degrees to starboard, veering toward the object—no, objects, there were two—in the water. He yelled down to one of his crew to get a grappling hook.

  One man with a hook was not nearly enough. It took four strong men and a winch.

  Ten minutes later Deng stood amazed and a little awestruck by what looked very much like two men melted together. There was also an elderly woman, but she was practically invisible standing beside the creature—he couldn’t yet quite think of them as humans.

  It seemed one single life jacket and the small woman had managed to keep them afloat. Deng spoke no English, and neither the Twins nor Ling spoke any Cantonese. But one of Deng’s deckhands was Vietnamese.

  It took an hour to work out the details, for Deng to lend his phone to Charles Armstrong, to wait while he contacted Jindal, and then to get confirmation that half a million U.S. dollars had appeared in Deng’s bank account. The other half of the money would be delivered in cash when Deng put the Twins ashore in Vietnam. There was an Armstrong factory facility there that paid many bribes: the Twins would not need to undergo too many formalities, and there would be no questions.

  AFTER

  “Thrum has taken the bait,” Stern said. “She is watching your accounts, and AFGC is following our search for Lear.” Plath and Stern were both enjoying a stroll through Central Park. It was a lovely day. Frisbees skimmed, kites bobbed and weaved against a pale blue sky, and skaters clogged the paved paths.

  “Okay,” Plath said. Then added, “Good,” because her father had always taught her the value of praising the people who worked for you. “Is there more?”

  Stern didn’t answer at first, then he asked, “Do you want more?” Now it was her turn to hesitate. She knew what he was asking. Did she want to know more? Did she want or need to know more? “Tell me, and I’ll decide whether I want more.”

  Stern sighed. “I’ve been contacted by a person in Lebanon, a hacker who, as you might expect, says his name is Anonymous.” Stern rolled his eyes slightly. “He’s following AFGC following us. He had some very interesting information on the terrorist incident in Hong Kong.”

  “What does it have to do with us?”

  “If this fellow is to be believed, the Armstrong Twins were aboard that LNG ship. In fact, they owned it, and used it as a sort of …as a …I don’t even know what to call it. Some sort of cross between a zoo and an insane asylum, I suppose. A floating chamber of horrors. According to our Lebanese friend, Swedish intelligence and the Royal Navy are involved. The Chinese are trying to put a lid on everything, and they’re damned good at cover-ups.”