Bzrk Apocalypse (23 page)

the planet, let alone on the ice since the navy’s LCACs were decom-

missioned.”

The man lowered the gun, then set it on one of the tool carts. “I

suspect you’re right, Ms. Suarez. Or is it Lieutenant Suarez?”

“Not lieutenant,” she said forcefully. “Semper fi and all that,

but I’m no longer getting paid by Uncle Sam. Do I get to learn your

name?”

“Babbington. Joseph Babbington. Doctor, if that matters to you.

We expected you yesterday; that was the thinking, anyway. We were

ready yesterday. I’m just an engineer. I did some of the design on the

sleigh.”

“The sleigh?”

He shrugged. “It’s a nickname, but it stuck. ‘Santa’s badass sleigh,’

some wit said once, and now that’s what we call it.” He fished a remote

control from his pocket, pressed a button, and the sleigh’s canopy

rose. “Take a closer look.”

Cautiously, very aware that the assault rifle was still near at hand,

she leaned into the cockpit. She took it in with an expert eye, whis-

tled, and said, “About twenty years ahead of my cockpit. Very nice.

That’s a forward-looking radar?”

“Oh, much better than that. What we have there, Lieuten . . .

Ms. Suarez . . . is a computerized obstacle avoidance system technol-

ogy. COAST, because, well, you know how engineers love acronyms.

It senses changes in elevation--obstacles, anything over six inches

above grade level—and either diverts power to the cushion to lift the

sleigh clear, steers clear, or in extreme cases slows to allow the pilot to

choose the course of action.”

190

BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Useful if you’re shooting along at one hundred and sixty knots.”

“
Vital
if you’re shooting along at one hundred and sixty knots

. . . We have two qualified pilots,” Babbington said, with the air of

someone who was tired of playing games. “We need six total. Four

primaries and two backups. You could be the third primary, if you

qualify. And if you’re interested.”

“Since I left the military my interests have had a lot to do with

what I’m paid.”

Babbington searched her face for a long time. He didn’t believe

her. Or at least he didn’t believe her yet. “The pay is three hundred

thousand USD per annum.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s a tough job. It may even be a dangerous job. And it’s a job that

has something in common with your military service: it demands

unquestioning loyalty and obedience.”

She reached in and put her hand on the yoke. They’d gone to

the trouble of padding it with leather. It was like something out of a

sports car.

On impulse she hopped inside, a move that required a twisting

half jump, like a stunt rider mounting a running horse. She made it

work.

The cockpit was snug, but there was room to left and right, flat

surfaces that even included a cup holder. The pedals felt familiar. If

her LCAC was a twenty-year-old Buick, this was a brand-new Porsche.

It even had a new-car smell.

It was seductive.

“Very nice,” she said. “But what’s it for?”

191

MICHAEL GRANT

“For?”

“Dr. Babbington, I couldn’t help but notice the missiles.”

“Indeed.”

“Why would the sleigh require missiles?”

“We’re testing it for the military.”

She wondered if she should let the lie go unchallenged. If she

called him out, would he shoot her? No, she judged: if she failed to

call bullshit, he’d know she was lying.

“That’s very funny,” she said. “What’s the real reason?”

Babbington smiled, a nice, genuine smile. “The owner of the

company is a bit . . . let’s say, she’s a bit unusual. She has a notion that

civilization will soon collapse, and she intends to sit it out right here.

But should that civilization lash out at her in its last throes, she wants

to be able to defend herself.”

“You work for a nut?”

“I used to work for the Pentagon, as did you. Weren’t we working

for nuts then? And those nuts paid rather ungenerous government

salaries.”

Despite herself, Suarez laughed. “Well, you got me there. What

kind of range does this thing have?”

“The sleigh has a three-hundred-fifty-mile operational range. Six

surface-to-surface missiles, four surface-to-air missiles just inside the

engine cowling, twin thirty-caliber machine guns.”

With a show of reluctance Suarez climbed out of the cockpit.

“I have to tell you, Dr. Babbington: three hundred large would

be very nice. Very, very nice. But there’s something else. The U.S.

Navy taught me to drive hovercraft, but that was incidental to my

core training.”

192

BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Which was?”

“Marines, first, as you already know. Then Sea Air Land, Doctor.

Navy SEAL.”

She watched his face turn gray.

She watched his eyes dart toward the assault rifle. Which was in

her hands before he could move.

“This is the part where you tell me everything,” she said. “This

is the part where you answer all my questions, because if you don’t, I

shoot you, and you die.”

Not a good liar, Sadie McLure.

“I told Lear no,” she said.

But it was right there in her eyes.

“Then what are we going to do?” Keats asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. This madness, the Nobel thing,

whatever happened there, that must be the secret weapon Lear wants

destroyed. Right?”

He had not known what to say then. He had not known what he

could safely say to her. He did not know whether the girl he loved

would have him killed for turning against Lear.

It felt as if his insides were dying. Like he was a piece of fruit left

out in the sun, rotting from the inside, collapsing in on himself. He

felt sick.

She was wired. She knew she was wired. Yet she had refused to let

him try to fix her.

The insidiousness of it. She was like a schizophrenic who knows

she’s supposed to take the meds but refuses to. She was becoming

party to her own mind-rape.

193

MICHAEL GRANT

He wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. Everything he was

to her was less important to her now than carrying out Lear’s plan.

She had always held something back from him, he knew that.

That was okay, he’d told himself, she just needed time. At first he’d

decided the reticence was a class thing. That made him feel a bit

better, really, because it was something he could understand. It was

something he could defend himself from emotionally.

He still loved her. But she had never loved him, had she? And now

. . . Now where was Sadie McLure?

“Do you want to make love?” She asked him, that and he wanted

to punch her in the face.

Not her, not
Sadie
, no, it was . . . it was whoever this person was,

this reprogrammed, wired alteration of Sadie. It was this truly new

creature called Plath.

“I’m tired,” he said, and the relief in her eyes was almost more

than he could endure.

“Yeah. Big day tomorrow,” she said.

“Oh? Why?”

Her eyes flicked right—guilty, caught. She shrugged and forced a

phony smile. “Aren’t they all big days?”

She left, heading toward the bedroom they still shared.

Tears filled his eyes and since no one was around to see him

standing there like a fool, he let the tears roll down his cheeks.

Back to New York, that’s what Lystra said. “Back to New York to

watch the show, yeah. A lot happening very soon. Timing. It’s all in

the timing, yeah.”

194

BZRK APOCALYPSE

So here they were. New York City, and damned if the tattooed

madwoman didn’t have an apartment a block away from the Tulip.

He could look straight down Sixth Avenue and see the building. He

could run for it, escape, get to the Twins and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,

but you don’t know what this crazy bitch is doing!”

He could do that. And they’d thank him for the information and

then kill him. Or Lystra would catch him and she would show him

that scary face she had, the one where she seemed almost to turn into

a skeleton. And then she could kill his biots and turn him loose.

Death or madness. Seriously? That’s what it was down to? The

three windows in his head said
yes
,
yes
, that was exactly the choice.

He wondered rather morbidly just what kind of crazy he would

be. Stories were still leaking out of Stockholm. They said some big-

deal banker found a way to hang himself from a chandelier. They said

a French general was found smeared with feces, crying. They said a

famous American horror novelist had run into the street and beaten

a party Santa to death with a fire extinguisher.

Which crazy will you be, Anthony?
he asked himself.

What escape was there? The Twins? The American government?

He stopped breathing. The answer—not a good answer, a weak,

probably worthless answer—popped into his head.

Someone brilliant. Someone with mad skills. Someone who once

had almost, sort of, liked Bug Man. And was just a block away.

Burnofsky.

Lystra had taken his phone. She was on her own phone right now

in the adjacent room, telling her CEO, some dude named Tom, to

fire all the remaining employees, effective now, this minute, shut it all

195

MICHAEL GRANT

down, the whole Directive Medical shebang, stop all checks and buy

more gold. Yeah.
Just don’t touch Cathexis.

Burnofsky. The dude had invented nanobots. It stood to reason

he’d have . . . something. But how to reach him? He knew Burnofsky’s

e-mail and his cell, but Bug Man had no phone.

He would have to wait until she was asleep, th.e monster in the

next room.

Maybe I won’t be a hanging-myself crazy
, Bug Man thought.

Maybe I’ll be a nice, gentle, shit-smeared kind of crazy.

Somehow he was convinced that none of this would ever have

happened if he’d just found the onions sooner. Gotten home.

With a chill he remembered his mother coming down with a

sinus infection a year ago, give or take. She’d had tests done. Her

DNA, too, might be stored somewhere on one of Lystra Reid’s drives.

Her plan was now frighteningly clear. She had used her web of

medical testing companies to acquire and digitize DNA from mil-

lions of people. Once you had the DNA, you could grow a biot derived

in part from that DNA. The biot-DNA-donor mind link would hap-

pen—which would be disorienting all by itself. Suddenly having

windows open in your mind . . . Well, that was going to be disturbing.

But nothing to what came next. Lear wasn’t out to disturb or

unsettle people, she was out to destroy civilization. For that she

needed madness. Widespread, inexplicable, irresistible madness.

So once the biots were born, she had only to kill them. And elec-

trical surge maybe, or extreme heat or acid.

Would it really work? Would one crazy woman be able to bring

the whole world crashing down?

196

BZRK APOCALYPSE

He turned on the television; it was all he had. Al Jazeera TV had a

news bulletin. He reached for the remote. He did not want to see more

video of that horror show in Stockholm.

Suddenly he felt Lystra’s presence and realized he was no longer

hearing her from the other room. “Leave it,” she said, looking toward

the TV screen. “I think something kind of, yeah, big just happened.”

Seven months earlier, the younger British prince had given blood

in a public show of support for a National Blood Service blood drive.

The NBS had been helped in their work by volunteers from Directive

Medical UK.

Of course security for the Royal Family was very tight, so no

one would be allowed to actually know which was his donation. It

was labeled anonymously, just a numerical tracer, and sent off to the

blood bank.

Except that the Directive Medical lab tech had already swapped it

out with an earlier sample.

Now, as the television picture showed, the prince was in a gondola

of the London Eye—the huge Ferris wheel beside the Thames—as

part of an outreach to disadvantaged youth.

The gondolas were large enough to hold a couple of dozen people

at once, and were in fact holding twelve specially chosen children of

carefully varied ethnicities, who shrank in horror against the far end

of the gondola as the prince repeatedly ran at the transparent wall

and smashed his head into it.

Blood smeared the plastic. Blood completely covered the prince’s

face and would have rendered him unrecognizable if not for the

familiar red hair.

197

MICHAEL GRANT

The Eye was slowly coming around, bringing the gondola back

to earth, but that footage from three minutes earlier—brutal video

of the raving royal slamming himself again and again and again—

was competing in one half of the screen with a live shot showing him

flailing, kicking, spitting blood in every direction as appalled Royalty

Protection in plainclothes and uniformed London Met police tried to