TWENTY-NINE

“Yeah, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” Bug Man cried.

The dead biot—so very dead, split into two barely connected pieces, dead, and floating legless, dead, through the fluid—was a miracle.

He had lost half his force doing it, and the chiasmic chamber was dotted with legs and sensors and wheels and unidentifiable pieces of circuit and metal skin. The Bug Man logo floated by one of his screens, but none of that a mattered: he had killed one of Vincent’s biots.

It froze him for a moment.

No one had ever killed one of Vincent’s boys.

No one! Only him. Only Bug Man.

“Oh, fuck yeah.”

He could take his time now, minimize risk, because unless Vincent was Clark Kent, he was sucking wind right now and more distracted than he had ever been before.

Bug Man quickly took stock. He had eleven active fighters. All his spinners were safe.

Eleven to one, and the twitcher, the mighty Vincent, was somewhere gasping and wheezing like he’d been gutshot.

Vincent’s remaining biot had managed to propel itself to the upper surface. It was hanging from a neuron bundle, staring down at the eleven nanobots that now rose slowly through the goo.

“I’ll be gentle, bitch!” Bug Man exulted. “Hah-hah!”

He would form a perimeter on the surface first. Keep four of his nanobots floating, just in case Vincent launched off again.

He had him surrounded.

Hell, yes, he had Vincent surrounded. And Vincent’s biot seemed almost helpless. It stared with its insect eyes and with its human eyes, and it did nothing, not a damned thing, as Bug Man’s nanobots closed the ring.

Keats’s biots tore across the cellular floor toward something towering and dark.

As it happened he was facedown now on that very floor, though to him it was smoothly polished wood—very, very different in the macro than what he saw in the nano.

In fact he was bleeding on that floor. Blood flowed from his nose and formed a pool that oozed around his cheek and the side of his mouth. Each time he breathed out through his mouth a red bubble formed. He saw a reflection of his eye in the dark pool. The eye looked scared.

“My brother is … he’s not feeling well,” Charles said.

Keats could not see his biots, of course. But he looked in every direction, trying to match up what he saw with his eyes and what he saw in his brain.

Nothing.

Well, not nothing exactly. He saw three legs beneath the desk. Three legs wearing identical shoes. One left, one right, one … neither. The leg in the middle was thinner, but it wore not only the identical shoe in a smaller size but an identical sock and identical trouser leg.

He couldn’t see anything above the knee. And he doubted that he wanted to.

“Egg scramble, bamble!” Benjamin yelped suddenly. “What … what did I just do?”

Plath’s nanobots were somewhere in Benjamin’s brain, that much was instantly clear to Keats. And in a second or two the Twins would realize what had happened. A few seconds after that they would begin to torture him to find out where Plath was.

Or maybe kill him, if they concluded he was the twitcher.

And they would bring in their own twitcher with nanobots to go in after Plath’s biots.

He had to get to her. Had to. But his biots were racing toward what might be a table leg for all he knew.

More men were coming in now. He could hear them in the macro. And far more important, he could feel the vibration in the nano. The vibrations. Coming from his right, from the door.

Which meant … which meant the biots were moving toward the Twins. Or toward Sugar. Or toward any of the forest of legs that now rushed past him, over him, security guys, guns in hand.

“We don’t need more of your thugs, Sugar, we need a goddamned twitcher!” Charles bellowed. The three feet pressed against the floor. The chair was pushed back. This time the Twins rose successfully.

The biots were close now, close to a wall a hundred feet tall, a wall with a long, horizontal cave beneath it.

It had to be a shoe. Or a table leg. No, a shoe.

“We have Army Pete in the building,” Sugar said, desperately. “He’s downstairs. We need to get him up here to place his nanobots and then—”

“He’s a third-rate hack!” Benjamin snarled.

“Our best guys are—”

“Get him!” Charles said.

“You, you, and you: get Army Pete. Drag his ass up here and make sure he’s loaded up,” Sugar said, relieved to be snapping orders again.

“The army was filled with communists in those days!” Benjamin ranted.

The biots were in the open-sided cave formed by the shoe. Had to be that. Had to be a shoe, didn’t it?

The ceiling above K1 and K2 was creepy in its normality. It looked like a vast quilt—plastic fibers woven together as if by a million tiny seamstresses. It had the look of basketwork, almost uniform, weird in its unnatural uniformity.

And suddenly that ceiling was coming down fast. Keats made his biots leap and twist. Biot legs clutched strands of neoprene and scampered upside down toward light at the end of the toe.

The shoe flattened as the Twins walked. It seemed as if the biots must be crushed, but there was a pattern in the sole and Keats sent his creatures diving into a long, straight channel, then forward again.

He couldn’t help but stare as Charles and Benjamin walked. Left. Right. Drag a nearly limp middle leg. Left. Right. Drag.

The center leg had some movement, but it was as if it was numb. It moved in a jerky sequence all its own, out of synch and thus hauled along, scraping toe across the floor.