Bzrk (15 page)

“I’ll need to take a few cells,” Anya said.

They were in a lab, Noah—Keats, had to remember that— supposed it was a lab, anyway. He’d never been in a lab before and didn’t know what they looked like except from films. But Dr. Violet was wearing a white coat. And most of the equipment was white and chrome. And the floor was stainless steel, as were the walls.

So: a lab. Or maybe just a steel room with some unfathomable pieces of equipment, the only familiar part of which was the syringe in Dr. Violet’s hand.

It had a tiny little hook on the end of the needle. Wait, that couldn’t be right. And there was no plunger, just a needle, really and—“Ow!”

She had stabbed it into the pale part of his arm, and now there was a tiny gobbet of his own meat stuck to the end of the needle and a small but enthusiastic bleeder.

“That’s the only part that isn’t automated,” she said with a distant smile. “Also the only part that hurts.” She handed Keats a Band-Aid.

Dr. Violet set the syringe on a small stainless-steel holder. She then took a windowed plastic bag from a drawer, tore it open, and withdrew something rectangular, the size of a phone, or a little smaller. It was white, smooth, sleek with rounded edges. It looked like something from an Apple store.

She pressed the only button, and the rectangle opened like a blooming flower. A light came from within.

“It’s called a crèche,” Vincent said. “Each crèche holds two biots. Or will, once they’ve grown.”

Dr. Violet deposited the piece of human flesh within the petals, pressed the button again, and it closed.

Plath did not cry out in pain when it was her turn. But she’d had warning, unlike Keats.

He wondered what her real name was. He wondered if he’d ever know. Susan? Jennifer? Alison? He had the feeling everyone but him knew it.

She was looking around the room with some expression other than fear or nervousness. More like regret or loss, maybe.

Keats was good at reading expressions. Girls always told him he understood them. It had worked for him, that ability to actually pay attention to girls’ emotions. It seemed that looking at their faces occasionally, and not just at their breasts or bums or legs, worked wonders. Occasional glances at eyes and mouth and forehead, that was the ticket.

Which was not to say that he wasn’t aware of the curve of Plath’s breasts as she leaned over to take the Band-Aid.

The crèches slid into what looked very much like ancient CD drives.

“There are many unique aspects to the biot process,” Anya said. “Gene splicing, of course. The basics of that are well established. But intra-species splicing at these speeds is new and unique to McLure. And very closely guarded.”

“Why not get it out there?” Keats asked. “I mean, look, secrecy is the
problem
, isn’t it? If everyone just knew that this was possible …”

Similar looks from Dr. Violet and Vincent silenced him.

“It’s illegal,” Plath said. Not like she was guessing, or like she was just realizing it. But like this fact had long been known to her. “If the government ever learned that we … that they … were recombining DNA to make whole new life-forms? This place would be swarming with FBI, everyone involved would be in prison, and the company would be bankrupted.”

Keats started to ask something else, but a flicker, just a slight, unspoken no from Vincent stopped him.

What he’d been about to ask was this: Why doesn’t the other side, the bad guys, why don’t
they
tell the FBI?

But the answer was clear enough, when he thought about it. It was a pact of silence. Both sides had incriminating evidence on the other. If one side went public, so would the other. If that happened, both sides would be hauled off to prison. And the technology would die.

Except: no.

No, that was wrong, wasn’t it? It wouldn’t die. It would be taken over by the government, weaponized even more than it already was.

And what government could resist the opportunity to engage in a bit of nanowar with whatever enemies arose? Even if those enemies were their own people?

Keats noticed Plath watching him. She knew all this. She was watching the thoughts revealed on his face. Timing him. Wondering how long it would take for him to put it all together.

She seemed moderately impressed by what she saw.

And I just realized who you must be, too,
Keats thought.
Oh, my
God: you’re the
daughter
. The surviving McLure.

He sat back in his chair. He’d been leering at a billionaire. That couldn’t possibly work out well.

Still. They were just a wall apart back at the … what was it supposed to be called? BZRK headquarters? That sounded a bit melodramatic for a dump above a greasy deli.

And she didn’t seem the snobbish—

Keats put his hand to his forehead. Suddenly the room was spinning. He put his other hand on his chair, afraid he was going to be tilted out of it.

“Do you have a bedpan or something?” Vincent asked Dr. Violet.

She nodded, stood up, drew two enamel kidney-shaped pans from a drawer, and handed one each to Keats and Plath.

Plath was actually the first to vomit.

Keats found that fairly revolting, but a small triumph. A very small triumph since he hurled ten seconds later.

The world was spinning around, and he was a scrap of nothing caught in a whirlpool.

“What you’re experiencing now is normal,” Vincent said.

It didn’t feel normal. Keats heaved again and this time missed the bowl. He fell forward. Vincent caught him before he could hit the floor.

Renfield stepped in to do the same for Plath, who was cursing in between retching sounds, a very unhappy-sounding girl.

“We call it childbirth,” Vincent said. His voice was matter-of-fact, calm, not like he was trying to soothe Noah’s panic but doing it, anyway. “It’s a kind of inside joke. Because what’s happening is that your biots are quickening. Becoming alive. You’re feeling the disorientation of being in your own bodies while simultaneously being somewhere else.”

Keats had a sudden flash of a dark, flat plain stretching out beyond view.

A flash of lightning.

A series of flashbulb pops.
Pop!Pop!Pop!

An elephant. Crippled.

No, a spider. Legs forming. But as big as an elephant.

Forming as he watched. Writhing. Almost as if it was in pain. Crying out with the writhing of still-forming limbs since it lacked a mouth to scream.

Beams of brilliant green light.

A spray of mist.

And suddenly a different view. A close-up in a flash of grainy light: a second creature, like the first, jerky movements, legs that ended in lobster claws, thrashing.

Then, “Oh, God!” Plath cried. “I saw its face.”

She tried to bolt from her seat, but Renfield held her in place with hands on her shoulders.

“Biots often have a sort of eerie resemblance to the donor of their human DNA,” Dr. Violet said. “Each of you has two biots growing. You’re seeing one of them through the still-forming eyes of the other.”

“Okay, okay, I don’t …” Keats said, and then whatever he’d been about to say was blown away by an image in flashing strobe light of the monstrous spider, turning, turning, and oh, God, oh, God, he was seeing through both sets of eyes, seeing himself seeing himself seeing himself as a sort of vile spider with no, no, noooo! Eyes! Blue eyes like his own eyes, oh, God.

“It can be disturbing,” Vincent said from a million miles away.

What were they doing to him?

Keats saw his brother, shackled, screaming, screaming, and now his own head was filled with lunatic visions.

He whimpered. He didn’t care that he whimpered.

He didn’t care that he was crying aloud, howling like a mad thing. Howling. Like his poor, mad brother.

Vincent felt sick inside. This was a dirty trick he was playing. They’d had no preparation. No training. He at least had seen films; he had seen micrographs. He’d been shown what to expect. By that cold bastard Caligula, yes, but shown, anyway. Better than the nightmare Keats and Plath were entering.

These two, these straining, shrieking, sobbing teenagers were taking it all in one awful jolt of disorientation.

He hadn’t just thrown them off the deep end and told them to swim. He’d thrown them into the ocean and told them to outswim the sharks.

He closed his eyes, and the memories came rushing back. The violent nausea. The feeling of being twisted out of reality, like the hand of some malicious god had reached down to rip him out of the fabric of time and space.

And they still had no idea. No
idea
. No way to understand that this transformation was permanent. No way to really understand that they had just bet their sanity. Their lives.

But Lear needed them. Lear was right. No time for the usual niceties; here you are, kids: welcome to the asylum.

Wait till they see the demodex. Wait until they see their first mite. Wait until they see the blood cells rushing around them like Frisbees.

Wait until they stare out through another man’s eye.

And wait … Vincent froze.

All the while, V1 and V2 had been making their way along Dr. Violet’s optic nerve.

Something. What was it? He’d seen something, something that made the hairs on the back of his head stand up, twitched by tiny muscles, a signal of fear. What did he have to fear?

He backed V1 up.

Sent V2 ahead cautiously.

What had he seen and not seen?

And there it was. Just a few cells torn from the optic nerve when someone disconnected too quickly.

Trap.

FOURTEEN

“They’ve got the new repeater in place, Anthony.”

Bug Man glared at Burnofsky, enjoying watching him sweat. Bloody old fart. He looked like that aging rocker who had just died. The old junkie. Bug Man would hate ever to have to infest Burnofsky, see that wrinkled old parchment skin up close, probably crawling with parasites with all his natural defenses weak. Those bushy eyebrows would be alive with vermin.

“Is it looped in?”

“Damnit, get back in there, Bug, or I’ll do the job for you,” Burnofsky snapped.

“And have you end up wasting two dozen of my branded nanobots? Have Vincent think he took me down?” Bug Man stormed back into the playroom.

He slipped on the gloves and slid back into the seat. Burnofsky watched over his shoulder as he tested the communications. Twenty-one of the twenty-four screens lit up. Most showed other nanobots. Some had views of the brain fold where they were hiding. Down in the meat. Brain mapping was off for the moment.

“Now bugger off, old man, you can watch from the other room.”

“Macro is on its way.”

“The fuck?” Bug Man raged. “I thought you said there was no way!”

Burnofsky shrugged. “I ran your suggestion by the Twins. They agreed with you: they thought it was worth the risk to go macro as well. So I guess if you want credit for the kill, you’d best hurry, because it may be a bullet not a nanobot that does the job.”

Bug Man quickly formed the nanobots into four platoons of six each. Not even the Bug Man could handle twenty-four individual nanobots. The platoons would perform identically, which sometimes ended up with the tiny robots getting in one another’s way, but there were techniques to minimize that. If you had the skills.

He would send them in waves, a platoon at a time. The first group would locate Vincent’s biots. If Vincent spotted them, they’d engage immediately. If not, they’d wait while the remaining forces were moved up. Then, bam! Waves of four, maybe ten or twenty seconds apart. Boom, boom, boom, and down goes Vincent.

Bug Man had a fantasy: he wanted to take one of Vincent’s biots alive and haul it out into the macro.

Keep it alive and play with it for a while. As Vincent went slowly mad.

Plath pushed Renfield’s hands off her shoulders. She wasn’t going to freak out, but she didn’t want to be touched.

The pain in her healing arm helped keep her focused. And maybe Vincent’s soothing tone, but not being touched; and then she slipped to her knees, bent her face forward, and retched again on the floor.

What was that she was seeing? Some nightmarish beast, and another beside it. Standing on tall, clean, pyramidal spider legs on a long field of bumpy, grainy material that made her think of leather.

Vincent’s voice, urgent, no longer soothing, said, “It’s a trap.”

And he was on his feet, grabbing Anya Violet as she turned to run, snatching her trailed arm. She almost got away, wriggling out of her lab coat. But Vincent caught her and yanked her violently toward him and locked her neck between his forearms.

She squirmed but could not get away.

“Is she—” Renfield snapped.

“Nanobot sign,” Vincent said. “No contact yet, but any second now. Contact Caligula. We have a problem.”

Renfield tapped his phone. “You should kill her,” he said, not looking at Vincent, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Snap her neck and retrieve your biots. Let AFGC come and do cleanup. Let Plath and Keats grab their babies—they’re viable by now in their crèches. Then we get out of here.”

Plath stared at Vincent. She and Keats just stood there, helpless, not really knowing what was happening, not knowing what was coming, sick in stomach and heart, minds swimming.

Was she going to see a murder? Right here in front of her? Was she going to see Vincent snap the woman’s neck?

“Get their biots,” Vincent said to Renfield. “We’re getting out of here. We’ll take Dr. Violet with us.”

“Let go of me,” Anya cried. “Get off me!”

“And have them track their nanobots?” Renfield drew a gun from the back of his belt. Not the Taser he’d shown before. This was the real, very real, thing.

Vincent said something that sounded like, “I’m not Scipio,” which meant nothing to Sadie and not much to Renfield or Noah, judging by the blank expressions. “Unless you’re taking over here, Renfield, get their crèches.”

Renfield looked shocked by the suggestion that he was taking over. He licked his lips, nervous.

He pushed Keats aside to punch commands into the console. The drawers that had slid open to take the crèches now slid open to release them.

Renfield glanced at them, read the labels, and handed them to Plath and Keats respectively. “I’d hold on to these real carefully if—”

“I’m under attack,” Vincent said.

And there they were, zooming into Vincent’s split field of vision, four … five …

At that moment Vincent was seeing three different realities.

There were Keats and Plath staggering from the mind warp that was the biot quickening. And Renfield with a gun dangling in one hand while he passed the crèches to the two teenagers. And Anya’s hair, right in his face, and the smell of her, and the surge of her blood pushing to squeeze past the pressure of his strong forearms.

And in the micro, two visuals, V1 and V2. Color-enhanced to full. The true view in the nano was gray scale—cells had color only in large numbers and seen from a distance. But with enhanced color the nano world became vivid: greens, reds, eerie yellows, and startling pinks.

The only way to fight a battle: Technicolor.

The nanobot twitcher must have realized that he’d been spotted by Vincent’s biots. Now they were wheels down and zooming toward him along the cable of nerve, their daddy longlegs arms trailing as stabilizers.

Vincent pushed Anya away, spun her around, set his biot legs to grip, and punched her hard in the eye. Hard enough to cause her to drop to her knees.

In the micro it was two impacts. The first, the punch, was much the harder. Hard enough that even after it was absorbed by the skull bones and the giant gooey mass of the eyeball, it still hit like a magnitude-nine earthquake.

The nanobots, caught off guard, toppled off their unstable unicycle wheels. Two crashed together. A leg went flying. A sensor array twisted.

V1 and V2 shot forward, six legs each, powering ahead, measuring the seconds before the next impact.

The easiest kill on a nanobot was the sensor array: the little robots weren’t much good without eyes. The array was two triangular visual sensors, plus UV emitters, and what was believed to be a sort of microwave sonar.

This entire mass sat slightly elevated on a short, thick mast. Breaking the mast, snapping it off, was almost impossible. But it had a weakness that allowed it to be twisted.

The second-easiest kill was to jam the leg gear. A nanobot had a single motor that ran all its functions, but it was well shielded. On each side were three articulated legs, all attached to a single hub.

The single wheel was in the center. It extended below the belly of the tiny robot and would make contact whenever the legs lowered the body.

Down in the micro they looked big, of course, as big as tanks. Giant spiders made of strangely pebbly steel. With their legs trailing and wheels spinning, they moved at what seemed like freeway speeds.

Wheel-up and running, they were still very quick, but slower than a biot.

To Vincent’s inner eye there were two visual screens showing the nanobot attack from the target position, and separately from an off angle.

He had one, maybe two seconds before Anya’s knees hit the floor and there would be a second impact.

Both Vincent’s biots zoomed forward, legs a blur. They hit the two crashed nanobots.

V1 stabbed a cutting blade into the leg joint of one.

Leap! And V2 landed, all legs joined to form a single point of impact on the second.

And there! A flash of color betrayed a crudely drawn logo on the side panel of one nanobot. It was a grinning face with an insect exploding from its head: Bug Man.

Vincent’s biots gripped nerve again, and the second impact came, gentler than the first, just enough to make an onrushing nanobot swerve.

It zoomed past, and Vincent tripped its trailing legs. It spun, and as it spun, Vincent fired his saddle-back beam weapon. It hit the only thing it could kill: the nanobot’s sensor array.

Three down and two to …

And then, the swarm was coming up from both sides, a rushing torrent of nanobots.

“Could use some help,” Vincent said.

“Left or right?” Renfield replied, and touched his finger to his ear, picking up his biots.

“Right,” Vincent said.

Renfield grabbed Anya’s face. He stuck a finger into her right eye as she yelled and kicked at him and cursed furiously.

But Dr. Violet was irrelevant now. She was no longer a person: she was a battlefield.

“I’ve got you, Vincent, got you so good,” Bug Man said.

The impact—that had been clever, Vincent must have punched the host body, playing the macro as well as the nano. And that had cost Bug Man three nanobots.

So forget the wave upon wave, time to swarm for a quick kill. He sent the three intact platoons down the side of the nerve, walking on the vertical—gravity didn’t mean much down in the meat.

Now Bug Man saw nineteen screens, all filled with the two enemy creatures. From one nanobot he had a nice, clean, close-up of one of Vincent’s biots. Almost handshake close, it seemed. Close enough to see the face, with its insect compound eyes huge above the smeared brown mockery of its pseudo-human eyes.

The close-up view cost him: with superhuman speed Vincent’s biot leapt sideways, charged, and ripped the nanobot open.

Another screen dark. But it didn’t matter. It may have been a kill, it may have been a blinding, but Bug Man was playing his troops as four platoons now, and even blind nanobots could still follow directions.

Swarm,
Bug Man thought, and saw his screen fill with the desperate biots as his entire force charged, following four variations on that core instruction.

He saw Vincent’s two biots spin, stab, leap. Goddamn, he was good. A bloody ninja, he was! Two more nanobots were crippled.

So fast!

Not fast enough, though. Not this time.

Nanobots ripped an arm from one of the biots. It waved on Bug Man’s screen as it flew away, and he laughed.

Two legs gone from one of Vincent’s children, so now it wasn’t moving nearly as fast, firing that little popgun laser and missing, and burning stripes into the nerve tissue.

Bug Man understood: Vincent was drawing the immune response. They would sense the damage and send macrophages oozing up to kill the invaders.

Stupid and desperate. The macrophages were a hindrance to nanobots, but they could actually kill a biot—if they managed somehow to glom on.

What was Vincent playing at?

What did he know?

For just a few seconds, Bug Man hesitated.

“My eyes!” Anya Violet cried.

“I’ve got two on—” Renfield shouted.

BOOM!

The door of the lab blew inward.

Not from impact like a battering ram, but from explosives.

The concussion knocked everyone flat. Ears ringing.

Plath screamed. No one heard.

Keats shouted, grabbed his head with both hands as blood gushed from his nose.

Men in Land’s End khaki and polo shirts under L.L. Bean down jackets came rushing in, guns drawn, a swarm of thugs in colors called jonquil, bright leaf, and lavender ice.