BZRK

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.