BZRK

So forget the wave upon wave, time to swarm for a quick kill. He sent the three intact platoons down the side of the nerve, walking on the vertical—gravity didn’t mean much down in the meat.

Now Bug Man saw nineteen screens, all filled with the two enemy creatures. From one nanobot he had a nice, clean, close-up of one of Vincent’s biots. Almost handshake close, it seemed. Close enough to see the face, with its insect compound eyes huge above the smeared brown mockery of its pseudo-human eyes.

The close-up view cost him: with superhuman speed Vincent’s biot leapt sideways, charged, and ripped the nanobot open.

Another screen dark. But it didn’t matter. It may have been a kill, it may have been a blinding, but Bug Man was playing his troops as four platoons now, and even blind nanobots could still follow directions.

Swarm, Bug Man thought, and saw his screen fill with the desperate biots as his entire force charged, following four variations on that core instruction.

He saw Vincent’s two biots spin, stab, leap. Goddamn, he was good. A bloody ninja, he was! Two more nanobots were crippled.

So fast!

Not fast enough, though. Not this time.

Nanobots ripped an arm from one of the biots. It waved on Bug Man’s screen as it flew away, and he laughed.

Two legs gone from one of Vincent’s children, so now it wasn’t moving nearly as fast, firing that little popgun laser and missing, and burning stripes into the nerve tissue.

Bug Man understood: Vincent was drawing the immune response. They would sense the damage and send macrophages oozing up to kill the invaders.

Stupid and desperate. The macrophages were a hindrance to nanobots, but they could actually kill a biot—if they managed somehow to glom on.

What was Vincent playing at?

What did he know?

For just a few seconds, Bug Man hesitated.

“My eyes!” Anya Violet cried.

“I’ve got two on—” Renfield shouted.

BOOM!

The door of the lab blew inward.

Not from impact like a battering ram, but from explosives.

The concussion knocked everyone flat. Ears ringing.

Plath screamed. No one heard.

Keats shouted, grabbed his head with both hands as blood gushed from his nose.

Men in Land’s End khaki and polo shirts under L.L. Bean down jackets came rushing in, guns drawn, a swarm of thugs in colors called jonquil, bright leaf, and lavender ice.

Down in the meat the swarm of nanobots and the two biots were rocked. The hit wasn’t as hard as the punch, but Vincent wasn’t prepared this time. V2 snapped two legs, caught, and twisted in the first arriving macrophages.

Lymphocytes—white blood cells—came in various shapes and sizes, and these were called macrophages. They looked like squashed sea sponges, all rough and bumpy. They were the size of flattened roadkill raccoons. They oozed and squirmed along the nerve highway like slow, stupid attack dogs.

The crippled V2 struggled with one leg to get free, but two of the phages had grips and were enveloping a stump, making purposeful movement all but impossible.

V1 had been sent tumbling into a jumbled pile of nanobots.

Platooned, Vincent realized as they reacted en masse, six acting as one. This close in, unprepared, he had the edge over them, and stabbed and cut in a frenzy, even as he felt, felt it as though they were on his own legs, the macrophages. And now men with guns shouting, “Don’t move! Freeze! Down on the floor!”

Then a McLure security guard, blood all over his chest and gray uniform, gun drawn, lurched into the doorway, and BAM! BAM! BAM!

One of the TFDs went down. And then the back of the McLure man’s head exploded.

Vincent felt the macrophages reach his body, tendrils of Silly Putty that tried to draw him in as if he was a gigantic bacterium.

He felt the stabs and rips of the pile of platooned nanobots, random, stabbing and cutting each other, too, in their frenzy, but hitting him again and again, and now his vision was blurring as Anya screamed, and Keats staggered, and Renfield raised his gun, took aim at the TFDs, and BAM! BAM!

Explosions everywhere, like being inside a drum, gunfire at close quarters, and Renfield was down like a brick, a hole in his chest pumping like a fountain, and a TFD was on one knee feeling around with bloody hands in the area of his own groin and Plath—out of nowhere—with Renfield’s gun and BAM! BAM!

More McLure security, a definite step up from the usual rent-a-cop because they were standing there in a gun battle and giving as much as they took, cursing, screaming, shooting, the stink of gunpowder and blood, machinery holed.

Vincent was on his face, on the floor, deaf to everything but the loudest noises.

And there, amid the crazy, he saw Keats. Keats with hands trembling and yet doing the exact right thing, somehow knowing, picking up the Taser that had fallen from Renfield’s hand as Renfield fell, and now Keats looking right at Vincent and Vincent nodding and the Taser jolt hitting Anya’s body.

Light traveled from the Taser’s firing points to Vincent’s eyes and he sent his biots leaping clear as a split second later the Taser’s charge sent the nerves beneath his spider legs into spasm.

Nerve fibers twitched, yanked the legs from nanobots, hurled others into flesh walls. What seemed like meters m-sub became mere inches m-sub as the spasm contracted nerve and wracked muscle.

Vincent sent both his biots, half-crippled, but not dead just yet, no definitely not dead, straight into the confused mass of nanobots, plowed bodily into them with all the speed they could manage and kept thrashing ahead, dragging the macrophages with them, scraping them off in the tangle of thrashing titanium.