Authors: Michael Grant
Tags: #Teen & Young Adult, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction
get him under control.
“That was excellent,” Lystra said. “You try to nail the timing,
yeah, and arrange something spectacular, but wow, that was better
than I’d hoped for. Yeah.”
Bug Man stared in horror. “I liked that dude. He was the fun one.”
“Who, the prince?” Lystra laughed. “Don’t go soft on me, Bug.
Much more to come. I’ve got three officers at a nuclear missile base
near Novosibirsk. High hopes. Fingers crossed, yeah?”
And yes, she had her fingers crossed. She left and closed the door
behind her.
Bug Man watched as the prince was hauled away to a waiting
ambulance. “Fuck you, crazy lady. Yeah? I liked him. He was a gamer.”
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NINETEEN
“I need your help.”
Keats to Wilkes and Billy the Kid.
Plath was asleep. He had crept silently from bed to bed waking
them, holding a silencing finger to his lips.
“Anything for you, pretty blue eyes,” Wilkes said, and yawned.
“Plath has been wired,” he said. He knew she might wake up at
any moment. No time for delicacy. “She’s been wired, she knows it,
but she won’t pull the wires. It’s got to her. We need to go in there and
clean her up.”
Anya was not invited. Plath had a biot in Anya. Keats badly
wanted to ask Anya if she had built any more biots for Plath. But Plath
might have been watching through Anya’s eyes, or listening in her
ear.
“You saying someone from Armstrong wired her?” Wilkes asked.
Keats hesitated. “This is lunacy. This is mad. But she saw some-
thing. Down in the meat. She doesn’t think it was a nanobot. I helped
her look. I didn’t find anything. But I have found wire, a lot of it.”
He let that sink in. “She thinks Nijinsky—” Wilkes began.
“No,” Keats said. “Whatever it is, whoever’s running it, it’s still
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apparently active, so not Nijinsky. Someone else. Maybe one of you
two. Maybe a traitor from some other cell.”
Wilkes got up, came over to Keats, and sat down beside him. Very
close, uncomfortably so. “How do we know it isn’t you?” she asked.
“You’ve had a biot in her for a long time, right? Fixing that hole in her
artery or whatever? Could be you, right? And maybe you’re just lying
in wait for one of our biots to come crawling along and,
boom
!”
“This is kind of crazy,” Billy said.
“Nah, this isn’t
kind of
crazy,” Wilkes said. “This is full-on crazy.”
She heh-heh-heh laughed and said, “This is where it all goes, right?
I mean, this is where it kind of had to go, didn’t it. You start play-
ing with people’s brains, man . . . How do you know? Right? Whole
world’s going crazy. All those big brains. And now your prince dude.”
Keats nodded tightly. “Right.”
Wilkes pulled away from him. “Maybe I just transferred one of
my kids to you, Keats. Just now.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged.
“Maybe it’s me, and if I put one of my kids into Plath, maybe
that’s my second one, you know? Maybe I get in there and make it
worse. What’s Plath doing? What’s she up to? Did this wire make her
soft in the head?”
“She’s planning to blow up the Tulip.”
“What’s a tulip? A flower, right?” Billy asked.
Wilkes snorted. “It’s a skyscraper in Midtown. Blow it up? What’s
that even mean?”
“It means that she’s given the go-ahead to Caligula to blow it up.
Kill everyone in it. Destroy all their labs, all their computers.”
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BZRK APOCALYPSE
Wilkes stared at him.
“Lear told her to—” Keats began.
“Lear?” Wilkes shrilled. “Lear told her to murder all those peo-
ple?”
“That was her own . . . her own solution. Maybe. Who knows?
She’s met with Caligula. She knows she’s wired, and she knows it’s
wrong, but she can’t, you know. . . . She can’t pull the goddamned
wires. We have to do it for her. And we have to find whatever is in
there. Nanobot or biot, we have to find it and kill it.”
“Who is doing it?” Billy asked. “I mean, who is wiring her brain
to do—”
“To do what Lear wants done?” Keats asked, his voice rising.
“Who is wiring her to do
exactly what Lear wants done
?”
Wilkes drew a sharp breath. “The hell,” she said.
“I don’t have any choice but to trust you two,” Keats said. “For all
I know, you’re as wired as she is. Or maybe you just think it’s okay. Or
maybe I’m as messed up as she is and the way I see this is all wrong.
But I have no choice, I have to . . . I can’t . . .” He spread his hands,
helpless.
“You’re talking about ripping out wire that Lear or someone
working for Lear put there?” Wilkes asked. “Lear’s going to see that
as treason. You know what that means? You know who comes to talk
to you when you betray Lear? Jesus, Keats, if she’s as wired up as you
say, Plath’ll send Caligula after you herself.”
“I know!” he raged. He pushed his fingers back through his hair.
“I know. I know.”
No one spoke. Keats sniffed and wiped at his eyes. “This fight
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has changed,” he said. “This isn’t us against them anymore. Not that
simple. I mean, doesn’t there have to be some line we draw? Doesn’t
there have to be something we won’t do, even if it means maybe we
lose? And doesn’t there have to be some limit on how far we’ll
let
ourselves be used?”
“The Twins don’t have a limit,” Wilkes said.
“Neither does Lear,” Keats said. “I think he’s the one using
biots—creating them, killing them—to drive people crazy. Sweden.
The prince. The Brazilian.” He waved his hand vaguely. “Probably
a bunch of other stuff. The Twins, Lear, they’re just two sides in the
same crazy game, Wilkes.”
“Yeah. And we are playable characters, right? We’re game pieces.”
“If we let ourselves be,” Keats said.
“So now you’re taking over?” Wilkes asked.
“Only until Plath is cleared. Then . . .” He shrugged. “Then we . .
. I don’t know.”
“I’m in,” Wilkes said, but her usual smart-ass smirk was gone.
Her face was gray and slack. She looked far older than she could have
been. “Death or madness. Right? We’ve always known it would come
down to that.”
Keats nodded. “Death or madness.”
The Russian officers proved to be disappointments to Lear. A major
and two lieutenants duly lost their minds as their biots died, but at the
time they were not on duty. The major wandered off into the Siberian
wastes and froze to death. One lieutenant was dead drunk, too inca-
pacitated to do much of anything.
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BZRK APOCALYPSE
The remaining lieutenant had just finished a shift. He saw the
windows opening in his mind and acted quickly. He stripped off his
sidearm and threw it into the snow. Then he ran toward the medical
dispensary, but lost his mind halfway there.
Naked, he charged the guarded gate of the missile silo and was
arrested by security.
The lack of a nuclear event—it would have registered on seismo-
graphs—disappointed Lystra.
So she opened her laptop and scanned the list of high-value tar-
gets. She picked out the pilot of a Virgin Australia plane making the
long haul from Los Angeles to Sydney.
As he approached Sydney in a few hours, his biots would be born,
windows would open, and if Lystra was lucky the world would have one
more thing to fear. An appetizer, so to speak, before the pasta course.
“Funny,” she said. “Yeah.”
She watched some old
Beavis and Butt-head
on Netflix, and fell
asleep with it still playing.
Bug Man had never heard of
Beavis and Butt-head
. That would
give him an excuse in case she woke up and saw him creep into her
room with his heart in his throat. He could say,
I heard this on TV,
didn’t know what it was, so I came in and . . .
. . . and lifted your phone.
And then you killed me, so, yeah, yeah, crazy bitch, yeah, then you
killed me. The end.
Suarez had not found it necessary to threaten him much. Dr. Bab-
bington was amenable enough once she’d made clear that she would
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do bad things to him if necessary. And an assault rifle was hard to
argue with.
“Because society is going to crumble. That’s why. She’s absolutely
convinced that society is about to crumble like a stale cookie.”
“Who? Who are you talking about?” she had demanded.
“Jesus, you don’t even know who is running this? Our lord and
mistress. The owner. Of Cathexis. Lystra Reid.”
“Lystra Reid? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m quite sure. This is only one of two
secret
facilities. This
is where we create the sleighs, where we train pilots: this isn’t the final
level any more than Cathexis is the final level.”
“There’s a third base?”
A third base. Three hundred kilometers south in a small dry val-
ley. Dry valleys are a phenomenon unique to Antarctica, places of
rock and little else, where for reasons of ice drift and unusual wind
patterns the ground is bare of snow.
If Lystra Reid had built a base in a dry valley, it would not be one
of the McMurdo group. The McMurdo Dry Valleys were more or less
permanently infested by scientists collecting rocks and drilling core
samples and complaining about their grant proposals.
She pointed this out to Babbington.
“Yes, well, this dry valley is an odd duck. It’s extraordinarily deep
and also quite narrow—just two kilometers across at its widest point.
The ice is piled high against both mountain ridges, and sooner or
later, of course, the weight of all that ice will crumble the mountains
and take the valley. Soon by geological standards, so within a hun-
dred thousand years.”
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BZRK APOCALYPSE
He laughed, obviously thinking that was a science joke. When
Suarez mustered up a half smile, he seemed encouraged.
“There’s actually a meltwater river there, helped by some subter-
ranean geothermal activity, and the whole place is quite sheltered
from the wind. It’s a garden spot, really. The average annual tempera-
ture remains within twenty degrees of fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. So
sometimes it’s actually above freezing.”
“Garden spot.”
“Anyway, that’s where the third base is.” He showed her on a map.
And that was when Babbington made an ill-fated leap for the
gun. In a hand-to-hand battle of SEAL vs. scientist, the outcome was
not in doubt.
Babbington landed on his butt several feet from where he started.
“I’d stay there if were you,” Suarez warned.
He took her advice, crossed his legs awkwardly like a kindergar-
tener, and sat.
“I’m afraid I will have to lock you up, Dr. Babbington. I’m sure
there’s a tool locker somewhere. They’ll find you when the party is
over and when the weather clears. Do you have to use the bathroom?
Because you’ll be tied up for as much as a day.”
Amazing,
Suarez thought,
how quickly life can get weird. One
minute you’re driving an LCAC delivering oranges and booze and
hauling away garbage, and the next minute you’re beating up scien-
tists and preparing to get yourself killed in some dry valley at the end
of the world.
She had no doubt that this Lystra Reid person was capable of kill-
ing. You don’t set out to build secret bases defended by sophisticated
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weapons because you’re peaceable by nature.
But the question in her mind was whether this whole thing,
whatever was going on here, was a secret government op unknown
to Tanner. Tanner was low-level; this could simply be something
way above his pay grade. In which case she would earn no thanks for
barging in on this third base unannounced.
But they wouldn’t kill her, not if this was a government op. They’d
give her a stern lecture, make her sign more threatening letters, and
just maybe hire her on.
If, on the other hand, it wasn’t a government op but some actual
crazy woman buying missiles and building a secret lair at the frozen
anus of planet Earth, well. . .
She had to tell
someone
what was up: a witness she could trust to
follow up just in case Imelda Suarez was never heard from again. She
glanced at the computer on a work desk.
“User password on that computer?” she asked, sliding into a chair.
Babbington shrugged. “1234ABC.”
“Seriously?” She typed it in and got access to her own e-mail
account. She wrote a message to her brother, Frank. Frank was with
the Capitol Police. He wouldn’t be cleared for this information, but
she knew she could trust him.
She spent a few minutes locating a good, strong steel tool locker
and pushed Babbington and a bottle of water inside.
“You okay in there?”
“Well . . .”
“You’ll be fine.”
Then: the sleigh.
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BZRK APOCALYPSE
Suarez was honest enough to admit that she was motivated in
part by an almost lustful desire to drive the sleigh. It was an object of