BZRK

Sugar Lebowski laughed, not a pretty sound. “Yeah, I’ll admit: that’s quick of you. Very quick. What are you, Chinese? Korean?”

“I thought I was Italian.”

“You know what won’t mess up your pretty face?”

She hauled a child’s red wagon with an electrical charging unit inside into position in front of him. She ostentatiously plugged it into the wall. The dial lit up and a voltmeter needle jerked.

A set of jumper cables ran from the transformer, and Sugar lifted them carefully. She was ready, Sugar was. Ready and just a little eager.

The blond man spoke then. His accent was German, Nijinsky was pretty sure of that. “This is unnecessary. I can be—”

“Seriously? A squeamish Kraut?” Sugar snapped at him.

The German waved a hand at her and Nijinsky both. “Why am I here in the middle of the night? To watch you play games? Let me touch him, please, so I can begin my work.” He made a vague gesture toward the twitching chair.

So, he was indeed a twitcher. Sent here to wire Nijinsky, turn him around, and use him as a Trojan horse. Nijinsky looked at him with interest. Older than a lot of twitchers. He wondered how many bugs he had on board. Not that there was much Nijinsky could do if the twitcher unloaded onto him. He had only one biot still on board. The other two were nearing the medial rectus, one of the major muscles controlling the movement of Sugar Lebowski’s eye.

From where he sat the muscle looked a bit like one of the massive cables used to hold up a suspension bridge. It attached to the eye in a way that suggested an unsuccessful attempt to fuse steel wires into bloody ice.

“Looks like you washed very carefully, lady,” Nijinsky said.

“Call me Sugar,” she said, and stabbed at his chest with the clamps of the electrical charger. Nijinsky’s body jumped as far as it was able to without snapping ropes.

He sagged, and it seemed to take a few seconds at the very least for his brain to begin to make sense of the world.

“Okay, Sugar,” Nijinsky said. “That pissed me off. I’m releasing a bit of sulfuric acid onto the muscle that holds your right eye steady laterally. You know, side to—”

“What?” She turned a horrified look on the German. “That’s a bluff.” It wasn’t quite a statement, and it wasn’t quite a question.

The twitcher shrugged. “Some biots are equipped with—”

Sugar pulled a gun and held it to Nijinsky’s head. “Stop it, right fucking now!”

“It’s too late for the medial,” Nijinsky said. “You’ll probably start blurring pretty soon.”

“I can feel it!” she cried, and slapped her free hand to her face.

“Let me get him out of there,” the twitcher said, and moved toward her.

“You want to put your filthy little bugs inside me?” she demanded of the German.

“It’s not so bad being cross-eyed,” Nijinsky offered.

He saw the acid working. It didn’t take much to melt through the first few strands of taut muscle. He used the tail spur of his biot to add a few more drops. The biot would eventually secrete more, but the acid bladder was quite small, and only a small amount could be used at any time.

Of course Sugar wouldn’t know that. The twitcher might not, either.

“I can feel it. It’s burning!”

“Stupid woman, get out of my way.” The German slid his hand into one of the gloves at the makeshift station, drew Sugar to him with the other, and as she wriggled away, cursing, he brushed his free hand against her face.

Then he slid the second glove into place and sat staring intently at the monitor.

“Get out of me or I’ll shoot you now,” Sugar snarled at Nijinsky, doing her damned best to intimidate him. He had no doubt she meant it. It made him sad.

The feeling surprised him a little. He’d never really expected to survive this war. But he’d always pictured his final moments as one of terror and defiance. Sadness, though. That was the feeling. So many things he would miss out on.

The German’s nanobots were an unseen swarm, presumably heading into and eventually around Sugar’s right eye.

And then, suddenly, the cable snapped. One second the muscles of Lebowski’s eye were stretched overhead, and the next second they were gone and only acid-melted stump ends were left.

In the macro, Nijinsky saw Sugar’s eye jerk inward.

Her left eye.

The twitcher saw it, too. “You stupid woman, he’s in the other eye!”

“But I felt it!”

Nijinsky shrugged as well as he could. “Power of suggestion. And just so you know: what happens next you won’t feel at all because strangely enough the brain itself does not feel pain.”

“What are you doing to me?” Cold terror now. Good. He was glad he could at least make her afraid. It seemed fair enough, since she would almost certainly make him dead.

“That depends. You call off your boys outside and let me walk out of here, and nothing. Otherwise I dump all the acid I have deep inside your brain, where it will eat through until—”

She jabbed the gun hard against him.

“You have orders not to kill me, don’t you?” Stalling. No doubt she’d been ordered to deliver him wired. But she could always claim she had no choice. And she wasn’t looking as if rational calculation was dominating her thinking.

She tried to manage the jumper cables with just her free hand, but it sent up a shower of sparks, so she set the gun down in the wagon.