Bzrk Apocalypse (7 page)

less well managed. Not so poorly managed as to seem obvious; just a

few scant clues left here and there for those who were watching the

movements of Plath’s money.

The
fake
safe house was above a bankrupt dry cleaner. A sound

system played ambient noise from within—TV, music, the sound of

laughter, occasional yelling. A timer turned the lights on and off. And

random people delivering handbills were hired to enter and leave the

place at odd times of day and night. It wouldn’t stand up to in-depth

surveillance, but it would do as a diversion. It was already, according

to Stern, drawing the attention of Hannah Thrum, the chairwoman

of McLure Holdings, the parent company of McLure Labs. Thrum

was almost certainly working for the Armstrong Twins as well, but

that was all right, so long as Plath knew where all the players were.

Let Thrum follow the money. She was a numbers person. Num-

bers people loved to believe they saw deeper than anyone else,

believing their numbers were truth. In reality, Thrum was chasing

numbers like a kitten chasing a piece of string.

Plath, Keats, and Billy carried their sandwiches back to the parlor

where Nijinsky, Vincent, and Wilkes waited. Anya sat beside Vincent

on the couch. Plath stood, leaning back against a walnut Restoration

Hardware china cabinet, bit into the sandwich, and looked over her

sparse troops.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Nijinsky was a bit less elegant and less well turned out than he’d

been just a few weeks ago.

Wilkes had shaved half her head and dyed the other side a sickly

yellow that was only vaguely related to blonde. Wilkes—named for

Annie Wilkes, the insane fan in Stephen King’s
Misery
—was a tough

chick, a pierced, tattooed (including a sort of down-swept flame tat

under one eye), leather-and-lace teenager whose personal history

strongly suggested that people not mess with her. There was a fire-

damaged school in Maryland that stood witness to what happened

when Wilkes lost it.

Billy the Kid: a scrawny mixed-race kid who had shot his way out

of an Armstrong attack on the Washington cell of BZRK. Shot his

way out, and then shot his way back in to finish off any Armstrong

survivors.

Keats. The working-class London boy with impressive gaming

skills and too-blue eyes. And a very nice, taut body, not that Plath

should have been thinking about that at the moment. But she was;

in fact, she was recalling a specific moment on the island, standing

at the railing of their deck, watching the sun come up, Noah as he

was then, behind her, his strong arm around her waist, drawing his

forearm over her body, over her breasts, kissing the nape of her neck.

She took a breath. It was deeper and noisier than she’d intended,

and she wondered if people guessed that she’d been daydreaming.

Finally, of course, there was Vincent himself. Vincent had

brought Sadie into BZRK. He had basically created Plath. He’d been

their fearless leader until he had lost a biot in a battle with Bug Man.

To lose a biot was to lose your mind.

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MICHAEL GRANT

The biot–human link was still not understood. The mechanism

that allowed the human “parent” to see through biot eyes, to move

biot limbs, and to be so intimately connected with them that losing a

biot was like some kind of psychic lobotomy—that mechanism, that

force
, was not understood. In fact, it had been a complete surprise

when first discovered at McLure Labs by Plath’s father, Grey McLure,

and had remained a mystery to him to the day he had been murdered

in spectacular fashion.

The effects of the brain–biot connection were plain to see. Vin-

cent, who had once been so dead calm, so in control, had fallen into

madness. And the only way to save him had been with crude inter-

vention down in the folds of his brain.

Plath herself had done the job. She had delivered acid to sites in

Vincent’s brain that stored specific memories of his dead biot. She

had watched through her own biot eyes as Vincent’s brain cells burst

and boiled and died, erasing memory, thoughts, ideas, and perhaps

some piece of his personality.

After that Vincent had clawed his way back from madness. He

had gone back into battle against Bug Man, and he’d won. But that

did not mean Vincent was
back
.

“Okay,” Plath said. “It’s been a month. Things have calmed down

a bit. Where do we stand?” When no one volunteered an answer, she

nodded and said, “Jin?”

Nijinsky turned cold eyes up to her. He had not fared well in the

last month. While Keats and Plath were both tanned and rested—

well, as rested as they could be, given the fact that their boat had been

blown up—Nijinsky had become increasingly frayed and ragged. His

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

clothing was no longer perfect. His hair was at least two weeks past

its optimum. He was still by any normal standard a spectacularly

handsome, well-turned-out person, a tall Chinese American with a

graceful way of moving and a sad, sympathetic smile.

The changes would be visible only to someone familiar with his

previous level of perfection. But the signs were there, even more vis-

ible in the red-rimmed eyes, the stress lines above the bridge of his

nose, the grim tightening around his mouth. And of course the sour

smell of a body oozing alcohol residue through its pores.

“It’s been a busy month,” Nijinsky said. “Sorry you two missed it.”

“Lear agreed I should disappear for a while,” Plath said calmly.

“I’m known.”

“Yes. And Lear agreed that I should get stuck with the shit work.”

He shrugged and tried on an insincere smile. “Well, here’s where we

stand. Vincent is about seventy percent.” He looked at Vincent and

asked, “Fair?”

Vincent nodded. His cold gray eyes focused, then lost focus.

“Fair.”

“Billy is thoroughly qualified for missions down in the meat. He

has two biots. Wilkes is still Wilkes, God help us all.” This he said

with a certain wry tone that was very much the old Nijinsky.

“What else could I be?” Wilkes asked, framing her face with her

hands.

“Anya remains a bitch,” Nijinsky said, trying to sound jokey

about it and not succeeding. “The president is dead, long live the new

guy, President Abbott. The country is freaked out, but we are still

not under surveillance—as far as we can tell. The Chinese premier

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MICHAEL GRANT

just had a very sudden illness, and we know he’d been compromised

by the Armstrongs. So, it’s possible the Chinese government is . . .

aware.”

“And Burnofsky?” Keats asked.

Nijinsky shrugged. He looked away, not avoiding Keats, but

seeing that weirdly colored window inside his brain. He had a biot

resting on Burnofsky’s optic nerve. The biot was tapped into visual

input from Burnofsky’s right eye.

“At the moment he’s working,” Nijinsky said. “I can’t make out

what’s on his monitor—I have a pretty good tap, but you know what

it’s like.”

They all, all except Anya, did know what it was like. Tapping an

optic nerve was a bit like watching an old-fashioned TV in a thunder-

storm back before cable, when the picture could be wildly distorted

and never entirely clear.

“Has he been in touch with the Armstrong Twins?” Plath asked.

Nijinsky nodded. He tapped a cigarette out of some exotic, foreign

pack and lit it. “Four days after that ship went down in Hong Kong.

By the way, Lear is sure that was an Armstrong thing. Some kind of

messed-up human zoo. By that point I was done wiring Burnofsky. I

sent him back in. But nothing face-to-face. Wherever the Twins are

now, they aren’t talking to Burnofsky in person; it’s all video link.”

“Do you have a biot in his ear?” Plath asked.

“No.”

There was pause while everyone absorbed this. It meant Nijinsky

could see what Burnofsky was seeing, but could not hear what he was

hearing.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Why not?” Plath asked, deceptively quiet.

Nijinsky blew his smoke toward her. It was not a subtle gesture.

He resented being demoted and didn’t mind if she knew. “Because I

was using my other biots to train Billy, here.”

“For a month?”

Nijinsky shook his head. “Fuck you, Plath.”

Keats’s eyes narrowed angrily, but Plath remained cool. “A lot has

been asked of you, Jin. And you’ve endured a lot.”

“Endured,” he said, sneering at the word. “Yes, I’ve endured a lot.

A lot of enduring has gone on.”

“Why not have Anya generate a new biot and use it?”

Billy and Wilkes were watching the back-and-forth between the

two, like spectators at a tennis match. Vincent was elsewhere in his

mind. Keats was keeping still, irritated by Nijinsky, but accepting that

this was up to Plath to handle.

“Why not generate a new biot?” Nijinsky mocked. “When you

play Russian roulette, you put one bullet in the gun and spin the

chamber.
Click
.” He mimed shooting himself in the head. “A one-

in-six chance you’re dead. Two bullets? That’s a one-in-three chance.

Three? At that point it’s fifty-fifty. You
know
why not, Plath, so don’t give me that hard look. Vincent barely survived the loss of one biot.

Keats’s brother is shackled in a loony bin for losing two biots. You

want to hear what Burnofsky’s hearing? Tell Wilkes to do it. Or do it

yourself, Plath.”

Plath nodded. “Okay. Fair enough.”

“What are we doing?” Anya asked wearily. “What is this all

about anymore? The Armstrong attempt to control the president

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MICHAEL GRANT

is obviously ended. And it seems the same is true of the Chinese

premier. The Twins are in hiding. Burnofsky has been wired and

switched sides. Bug Man is gone. What are we doing? Are we play-

ing a game? If so, what is our next move?”

“They still have the technology,” Plath said. “They will try again.

In some other way. They won’t give up.”

“How do we know that?” Anya demanded.

“They found Keats and me. They blew up the boat that was com-

ing to pick us up.”

“Convenient, wasn’t it?” Nijinsky said.

Plath didn’t say anything to that, because she’d had the same

thought.
Convenient
. If you wanted to push her and Keats back to

New York. Say, after you’d ignored an order to get your ass back there

already.

The punishment for desertion is death, isn’t it? Or is that some

Hollywood bullshit?

The boat had blown up, but there was no follow-up. No attack

on the beach, no attack on the compound they’d been staying in. No

attack as they rushed to the airport and flew away from the island.

No attack waiting for them when they refueled in Kenya or

Madeira, and no attack when they’d landed at Teterboro.

Had a quick change of hair color somehow thrown off the kind of

people capable of tracking her to Madagascar and then to Île Sainte-

Marie? Not likely.

Just enough violence to send her running back to New York. Not

as if someone was serious about killing her.

Like someone wanted her back in the game.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Get back in the game.

That had been the text from Lear. The one she’d ignored, because,

why? Because she was Sadie McLure, that’s why. Since when did she

take orders? What was she, someone’s butler suddenly?
Fuck you,

Lear. I’m on a beautiful island with a beautiful boy who loves me and

wears himself out trying to please me.

For the first twenty-four hours after that she had felt liberated.

Like maybe she had regained control of her life. But slowly her doubts

had grown. What right did she have to blow off Lear? Lear was BZRK.

Lear was the general, and she was a lowly lieutenant or whatever.

And he’d been right, hadn’t he, Lear? Right that she had to get

back in the game? The Armstrong Twins seemingly still lived. The

nanobot technology still existed. The liberty of all humanity was still

in danger.

The Armstrongs still had to be stopped. Didn’t they?

“I’ve heard from Lear,” Plath said. She wasn’t sure why, but she

was reluctant to tell them. Maybe because once she said it she would

have to take action.

“Did he mention whether he liked the whole blonde look you

have going on?” Wilkes. Of course.

“Lear says the Armstrongs have developed some kind of remote

biot killer. Nature unknown. No other details. But . . .” She shook

her head ruefully. “But his instructions are to destroy AFGC. Destroy

their data in particular so this new technology doesn’t go into use.”

Long silence. Much mute staring. Biots already faced a number

of potential enemies, from the slow but irritating defenses of the body

itself to the much more dangerous nanobots. But nanobots could be

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MICHAEL GRANT

faced, fought, and, with luck and skill, killed. The idea of a weapon

that could kill in some unfathomable way, in some way that did not