Bzrk Apocalypse (24 page)

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.”

198

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

199

MICHAEL GRANT

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.”

200

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

201

MICHAEL GRANT

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.

202

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

203

MICHAEL GRANT

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.”

204

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

205

MICHAEL GRANT

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.

206

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