The square of marines grew to eight, old school, like some desperate Custer’s Last Stand, back-to-back, side by side, a formation so old it was old by the time of the ancient Romans.
“Masks on!” their sergeant roared in a voice that could nearly be heard three miles away on shore.
They took turns slipping gas masks over their faces. The Sea King veered sharply away to lessen the rotor downdraft. Then from the Sea King came rocket-propelled gas grenades, fired straight into the mob. Some of the grenades hit people, knocking them flat. Gas swirled and some choked, but the wind was too strong and the fumes were soon carried off.
But the marines had gained a precious foothold. There were a dozen men now, backs to the helicopter where Minako screamed in sheer terror.
Pia Valquist, aboard the second Sea King helicopter, said, “Let’s come at them from behind!”
The admiral nodded, and the Sea King veered away just as the first rocket-propelled grenade was fired. It shot past the helicopter and exploded in the sea.
“That was close,” Admiral Domville observed with no apparent concern.
The Sea King zoomed along the length of the Doll Ship and came to hover just over the bow. Pia saw Hong Kong harbor now unmistakably close, tight-packed skyscrapers with every known type of craft from oil tankers to pleasure boats in the foreground. The city lights were coming on as darkness fell.
The marines from the second Sea King now began sliding down to the undefended bow.
“You know how to do this?” Domville asked Pia.
Pia slid a pistol into her pocket, grabbed a line, snapped on a friction carabiner, and said, “I think it will come back to me.” She swung out into the air and dropped toward the deck thinking it was a hoary old action-movie cliché but, in fact, she really was too old for this shit.
It took about three minutes before it clicked for Bug Man. He was back at the twitcher station, hooking into the president’s nanobots when it occurred to him that offices are cleaned at night, not in the morning.
Even then he froze for a few seconds, not wanting to believe it. Surely not. Surely BZRK hadn’t found him? How could they? And if it was BZRK, why hadn’t the girl with the strange eye tattoo just pulled out a gun and shot him?
But even as he raced through the steps to understanding and accepting, he already knew: they were going to wire him.
He shoved himself out of the twitcher station, tore off the glove, and ran for the small bathroom. Where had the phony cleaning lady touched him? His wrist? How long a run from wrist to eyeball or nose or ear?
The bathroom must have been some long-ago executive’s pride and joy. It wasn’t large, but it had a sink, a toilet, and a very small shower. Jindal had rented this office for the bathroom—twitching jobs could go on for a long time and they couldn’t very well have Bug Man running down the hall every time he needed to pee.
Bug Man turned the shower on hard and hot. He stripped off his clothes, dropping them to the floor, grabbed a washcloth and soap and began to scrub. He opened his eyes and stared up into the powerful jet. It hurt like hell and he couldn’t do it for more than a few seconds.
Then he vigorously, even brutally, scrubbed his face with the washcloth and soap, rubbing like he was trying to remove his own skin.
There was a second’s warning. Plath saw that the quality of the light had changed, from soft to harsh. Then a roar, like a waterfall.
She jumped from her chair, grabbed Vincent’s arm and said, “Shower! He’s on to us!”
At that moment, down at the nano level, she was just crossing from horizontal (and upside down) to vertical as she rounded the long arc of Bug Man’s jaw. Vincent’s biots were ahead of her, barely visible.
The water hit like a dense meteor shower. In the m-sub the first drops of water were the size of swimming pools. They exploded across the skin with unimaginable force. Plath sank her biot talons into dead epidermal cells and crouched low.
The first drops had missed Vincent, but he must have seen them because he appeared frozen in place. And that was the last she saw of him because now the water was coming down like a fire hose. She could no longer make out individual droplets; it was like a tropical downpour where every drop falling was the size of a house. The violence of the assault was shattering, indescribable.
One biot managed to reach out and grab a hair, then pulled itself to that hair and held on. Her other biots kept having to grab new skin cells as others gave way like roof shingles in a hurricane.
Then the spray moved away, but her biots were still completely submerged in rivulets of water, each a rushing whitewater river.
Then the sky turned white and down from above came the washcloth, bigger than a circus tent. It was a massive, undulating wave, a fabric of rough cables woven together, with frayed ends like shrubsize bottlebrushes. It dropped across the landscape and moved swiftly down, then reversed direction, up and suddenly one of her biots, P-1, was torn from the epidermis. It was on its back, underwater, surrounded by a forest of massive threads.
Plath bit her lip and tried to climb back up one of the terrycloth threads to reach the skin again. She climbed over and through a cluster of bacteria like tiny blue tadpoles, also trapped in the material. The bacteria made her shudder, but she’d seen them before. They swam blindly around her biot legs like she was wading through a tidal pool of guppies.
P1 fought its way atop the bottlebrush thread, but then the water came again, pounding her through the cloth, beating her between bottlebrushes and skin, unable to grasp either firmly.
Loose!