BZRK Reloaded (28 page)

The admiral nodded, and the Sea King veered away just as the
first rocket-propelled grenade was fired. It shot past the helicopter
and exploded in the sea.

“That was close,” Admiral Domville observed with no apparent
concern.
The Sea King zoomed along the length of the Doll Ship and came
to hover just over the bow. Pia saw Hong Kong harbor now unmistakably close, tight-packed skyscrapers with every known type of craft
from oil tankers to pleasure boats in the foreground. The city lights
were coming on as darkness fell.
The marines from the second Sea King now began sliding down
to the undefended bow.
“You know how to do this?” Domville asked Pia.
Pia slid a pistol into her pocket, grabbed a line, snapped on a
friction carabiner, and said, “I think it will come back to me.” She
swung out into the air and dropped toward the deck thinking it was
a hoary old action-movie cliché but, in fact, she really was too old
for this shit.

It took about three minutes before it clicked for Bug Man. He was
back at the twitcher station, hooking into the president’s nanobots
when it occurred to him that offices are cleaned at night, not in the
morning.

Even then he froze for a few seconds, not wanting to believe it.
Surely not. Surely BZRK hadn’t found him? How could they? And if it
was BZRK, why hadn’t the girl with the strange eye tattoo just pulled
out a gun and shot him?

But even as he raced through the steps to understanding and
accepting, he already knew: they were going to wire him.
He shoved himself out of the twitcher station, tore off the glove,
and ran for the small bathroom. Where had the phony cleaning lady
touched him? His wrist? How long a run from wrist to eyeball or nose
or ear?
The bathroom must have been some long-ago executive’s pride
and joy. It wasn’t large, but it had a sink, a toilet, and a very small
shower. Jindal had rented this office for the bathroom—twitching
jobs could go on for a long time and they couldn’t very well have Bug
Man running down the hall every time he needed to pee.
Bug Man turned the shower on hard and hot. He stripped off his
clothes, dropping them to the floor, grabbed a washcloth and soap and
began to scrub. He opened his eyes and stared up into the powerful jet.
It hurt like hell and he couldn’t do it for more than a few seconds.
Then he vigorously, even brutally, scrubbed his face with the washcloth and soap, rubbing like he was trying to remove his own skin.

She jumped from her chair, grabbed Vincent’s arm and said,
“Shower! He’s on to us!”
At that moment, down at the nano level, she was just crossing
from horizontal (and upside down) to vertical as she rounded the long
arc of Bug Man’s jaw. Vincent’s biots were ahead of her, barely visible.
The water hit like a dense meteor shower. In the m-sub the first
drops of water were the size of swimming pools. They exploded across
the skin with unimaginable force. Plath sank her biot talons into dead
epidermal cells and crouched low.
The first drops had missed Vincent, but he must have seen them
because he appeared frozen in place. And that was the last she saw
of him because now the water was coming down like a fire hose. She
could no longer make out individual droplets; it was like a tropical
downpour where every drop falling was the size of a house. The violence of the assault was shattering, indescribable.
One biot managed to reach out and grab a hair, then pulled itself
to that hair and held on. Her other biots kept having to grab new skin
cells as others gave way like roof shingles in a hurricane.
Then the spray moved away, but her biots were still completely
submerged in rivulets of water, each a rushing whitewater river.
Then the sky turned white and down from above came the washcloth, bigger than a circus tent. It was a massive, undulating wave, a
fabric of rough cables woven together, with frayed ends like shrubsize bottlebrushes. It dropped across the landscape and moved swiftly
down, then reversed direction, up and suddenly one of her biots, P-1,
was torn from the epidermis. It was on its back, underwater, surrounded by a forest of massive threads.
Plath bit her lip and tried to climb back up one of the terrycloth
threads to reach the skin again. She climbed over and through a cluster of bacteria like tiny blue tadpoles, also trapped in the material.
The bacteria made her shudder, but she’d seen them before. They
swam blindly around her biot legs like she was wading through a tidal
pool of guppies.
P1 fought its way atop the bottlebrush thread, but then the water
came again, pounding her through the cloth, beating her between
bottlebrushes and skin, unable to grasp either firmly.
Loose!
P1 was caught in flowing water, like a child carried away on a
water slide, slipped from the cloth, rushed madly over skin, grabbed
frantically at anything that passed. Suddenly a deep pool that swirled
like a draining toilet, madly around and around.
She was in Bug Man’s navel.
Then just as suddenly she was spilled out, caught by the raging
torrent and carried into a dark forest of curling, leafless trees. She
grabbed hold, one leg, then a second, holding two hairs where they
met and rubbed together.
She chose one and held on to it for dear life.
Her other two biots had held on much higher up on Bug Man’s
body. But Bug Man knew how things were down in the meat, he knew
the resilience of biots.
P3, the biot 4.0, now saw something terrifying. It was a football
field in length, a rectangle containing three full-length steel blades each
capable of leveling a forest. The razor’s edges didn’t seem especially
sharp in the m-sub, but they had a terrifying perfection that was alien
to biology. In the gaps between blades Plath saw stubs of hair.
Bug Man was going to shave everything from face to wrist.
The blades touched down, pressed against the epidermis, and
hurtled toward her biots. P2 was close enough to the left edge of the
razor to make a mad dash to the side, racing from hair to hair like
some demented Tarzan swinging through the trees.
But P3 was flat in the razor’s path.
She was watching a car crash, seeing what was coming, powerless
to avoid it. She could only hold on and hope as the first of the blades
flew harmlessly by overhead, a scythe that missed its wheat stalk.
But the second blade, a tenth of a second behind the first, snapped
the tree P3 was holding on to, and she was jammed between blades in
a Pick Up Stix jumble of broken hairs, random skin cells, and soap.
She felt, with the P3’s superior senses, the sudden swoop up, away,
through the air.
Bug Man thrust the razor up against the showerhead where the
power of the water was irresistible.
P3 was blown out of the razor.
It fell, trapped inside a water droplet. Fell like a missile toward
the shower floor.

Pia and Admiral Domville had the sense to stay behind the advancing phalanx of marines that now worked its way back with swift
efficiency toward the melee on the stern.
Neither had any business participating in the action, one was a

Pia was tense and frankly afraid. Domville was neither. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was wondering how in God’s name
he could possibly explain this to his own superiors—quite possibly a committee of Parliament, God forbid—but most of his brain
had been swept up in a giddy froth of testosterone and adrenaline.
Several of his ancestors had swung cutlasses and fired cannon, and
Domville was thrilled to be carrying an assault rifle and going into
harm’s way.

Unless of course it ended badly, and he was forced into early
retirement.
The first group of marines retreated under renewed pressure and
the haphazard but deadly assault of hand grenades. No order to mow
down the mob had been given, but one marine was dead and another
was bellowing in pain from shrapnel in his knee, and as well trained
as the marines were, their mood was nevertheless ugly.
Domville’s detachment came rushing up the starboard side, out
of view of the mob, then attacked with a loud hurrah using rifle butts
and kicks to push them back.
Finally, the mob broke. First a few ran, then more, then all but a
handful were racing back to their familiar spheres.
“Keep them bottled up!” Domville shouted. “Lieutenant, I’ll take
three men to the bridge.”
The lieutenant detailed three marines as Domville and Pia began
to run up the series of steep metal stairs that led to the bridge.
As he climbed, Domville’s earpiece informed him that a Chinese
coastal patrol vessel was on an intercept course and the Doll Ship
was now in Chinese waters. He had to wrap this up and present the
Chinese with a fait accompli. He could claim he was in hot pursuit of
an obviously illegal vessel holding international citizens as hostages.
That might work.
The fact that half a dozen of those international citizens now lay
dead and bleeding on the deck would, however, be a complication in
that narrative.
They were racing up the last stairway to the bridge when a crewman appeared holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
The first marine fired his weapon and the crewman staggered
back spraying blood from his neck—but not before he squeezed the
trigger.
The RPG flew a mere ten feet before hitting a crossbeam. The
explosion knocked all of them back down the stairway, and had it
not been for the blood landing on Pia’s legs it might almost have been
comic.
She crawled out from under the tangle of bodies, all still living,
thankfully, though one corporal had a gushing wound in his arm.
Domville was stunned but already leading the charge back up the
stairs, roaring for the others to follow him.
By God, Pia thought, the man needs a cutlass.
They burst onto the bridge. Captain Gepfner raised his pistol and
was shot a dozen times before he could so much as twitch. He was
dead when he hit the deck.
The other officers raised their hands and yelled, “Don’t shoot!
Don’t shoot!”
Pia found herself panting, heart pounding, face-to-face with
something …someone …unlike anything she had ever seen before.
The body was too wide, the number of legs all wrong, and the head,
that two-faced head . . .
“No reason to shoot,” Charles Armstrong said.
“I’ve talked to the surviving Morgenstein twin,” Pia said, panting. “There’s every reason to shoot.”
“We are not armed. We are in your power,” Charles said, placating.
“Who is in charge on this bridge?” Domville demanded.
“I suppose I am.” The second mate actually raised his hand, like
a schoolboy.
“Then get this ship headed away from land, back into international waters,” Domville ordered him.
“I can’t sir. The helm is not responding.”
“What? Nonsense. Put this ship about this instant!”
“Sir, the helm is locked out. All controls are locked out. The captain did it, sir. It’s all computer-controlled. He locked it out when he
realized we wouldn’t be able to stop you.”
Every eye looked toward the bow. Off to the left there was a very
strange sight: Sleeping Beauty’s Castle rising in spotlights peeked
up from Disneyland Hong Kong. All around the ship was a series of
small green islands like lumps of bread dough waiting to rise.
Directly ahead, what looked to be waterfront warehouses and
blocks of residential skyscrapers. Ahead and to the right a veritable
wall of skyscrapers, twinkling now, some limned in neon, loomed
over swarms of cargo ships, tankers, cruise liners and smaller craft
cutting phosphorescing wakes in the water.
Already the small craft were scattering as the Doll Ship plowed
on at a relentless fourteen knots.
There were now two Hong Kong Police vessels racing to intercept, but both were relatively small patrol boats. A larger Chinese ship
kept its distance, but Domville saw them unlimbering a deck gun.
“All engines stop!”
“Sir, as I said, we are locked out!”
“Then we’ll go to engineering. Sergeant, you’ll stay here with Ms
Valquist. You two, and you, mister,” he said, indicating the baffled
and increasingly worried second mate, “you are with me and if you
hesitate in the slightest I will have you shot.”
They ran from the room.
“It looks as if we’ll run straight into the harbor,” Benjamin said.
“I wonder what happens to the natural gas tanks when that happens.”
“Do you have a way to stop this ship?” Pia demanded.
“The only one who could seems to be dead.” Charles waved an
arm at the dead Captain Gepfner.
“The admiral will find a way,” Valquist said, projecting confidence she didn’t feel.
“I devoutly hope so,” Charles said.
“There will be quite an international contest to see who gets to try
you two first. I hope the Chinese win. Unlike my country, or Britain,
they still have a death penalty.”
To her amazement, Charles laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re
mere passengers aboard this vessel. You’ll find nothing proving that
we own this ship or hire its crew.”
“You think your lawyers and your money will protect you? You’ll
be tried for a thousand different felonies. Kidnapping, torture, murder. You’re monsters.”
“Don’t call us that,” Benjamin said, twisting his mouth into a
brutal snarl.
“None of the people on this ship will testify in your courts,”
Charles said smugly. “You’ll find they are absolutely loyal. They are
happy, and we are the source of their happiness. We’ll produce a hundred witnesses to every one of yours.”
Pia felt rather than heard an explosion down deep within the
ship. Suddenly the whole ship careened sharply, turning radically to
starboard.
Pia staggered, slammed into the captain’s chair, saw the Twins
fall over onto their back.
The small Asian woman, Ling, lurched into the remaining marine.
Pia heard a strangled sound, dismissed it, then realized too late
what it was. A knife was buried to the hilt in the marine’s throat.
The remaining crew bolted en masse.
Pia turned her pistol on Ling, fired, missed, and suddenly the
smaller woman was on her, delivering sharp blows to Pia’s midsection, head and throat.
The blow to her throat stopped her breathing. It was like sucking air through a collapsed straw. She fired again and Ling spun and
dropped.
Pia fell to her knees, dropped the gun and tried to squeeze her
throat open, digging desperate fingers into her windpipe, but now
blood was filling her mouth.
Min, shot but not dead, got up, whipped off her belt, stepped
behind Pia, wrapped it around her throat and twisted.
Pia thought how unnecessary it was to strangle her when she was
already choking.
That was not her last thought.
Her last thought, her very last thought, was that she hoped someone would take care of her cat back in Stockholm.