Back in the room. The same machine lay waiting. The monsters had not yet returned.
“You can go,” KimKim informed Kyla.
“I’m sorry, but you don’t dismiss me,” Kyla said. “You’re just crew. You aren’t even enlightened. You are not sustainably happy.”
“Whatever, just bug off,” the second crewman said.
“No!” Minako cried. “Don’t leave, they’ll do terrible things to me! It’s a trick!”
“It is a bit of a trick,” the second crewman said with a sigh. His left fist shot out, and Kyla’s head snapped back. She fell straight back onto the deck, her head bouncing from the impact.
Minako yanked free of KimKim but didn’t make it far: he was quick. His hand closed around her arm like a vice. And he said, “You are not alone.”
Minako froze.
Then, in Japanese so flawless it could only have come from a native speaker, he said, “My full name is Kenshin Sugita—KimKim is my nickname. I work for the Naichō, the intelligence service of Japan.”
“But you tried . . .” she gasped.
“No. I knew they would never break the rules, the men are too afraid. But it made them trust me.”
She looked at the second crewman, who shrugged and said, “Listen, I’ve only been on this floating hell for a couple of weeks. I needed work. Bad. But enough is damned well enough. My name is Silver. Formerly Gunnery Sergeant Silver. U.S. Marine Corps.”
“My father is …my father was a marine.”
“That’s why I’m going to get myself killed with this crazy Nip, here,” Silver said. “And you should know better than to say anyone was a marine, past tense. In or out of service, alive or dead: once a marine, always a marine.”
Minako drew a shaky breath. “Semper fi?”
“Damn straight. Now, let’s get the hell off this boat.”
“How . . .” Minako began, faltering. Then she tried again. “How old are you?”
KimKim looked at her like she might already be crazy. “I’m twenty-nine.”
“As I recall, I’m forty-seven,” Silver said, puzzled.
Minako smiled her first smile since Okinawa. Twenty-nine and forty-seven. Both were prime numbers.
Keats took the rickety steps two at a time, with Plath hot on his heels. Burnofsky was still tied to the scaffold. Billy had a twitcher headset on, a glove on one hand, the other hand clawing at his face.
Billy shrieked. “They’re eating me!”
“What?” Keats shot a hard look at Burnofsky, but the old man seemed to be almost dreamy, a slight smile on his bloodless lips, eyes half closed.
Nijinsky and Wilkes came running.
Keats ripped the twitcher goggles off Billy’s head and settled them onto his own.
Plath said, “It just looks that way, Billy, you’ve never been down in the meat before.”
But while she was placating, Keats was seeing.
At least two dozen nanobots were busily scraping at Billy’s skin. There was something like pinkish ash lumped here and there in piles. And as he watched a stray dust mite came lumbering along, oblivious to everything, nearly blind, a harmless but grotesque consumer of sloughed skin cells.
The mite was about the size of the nanobots, a fat, swollen spiderlike creature with stubby legs. The nanobots ignored the mite as they tunneled eagerly into epidermis. Then the mite blundered into one of the nanobots and in an invisibly fast motion the nanobot cut the mite into two pieces. Other nanobots rushed to help, and the mite spasmed as it died.
The nanobots ate the pieces of the mite.
Other nanobots ate Billy’s skin.
They began to extrude a paste, and other biots rushed to that paste and with a blur of tiny tools and jets of flame—
“They’re building more nanobots!” Keats said.
“What?” Nijinsky had come running from downstairs. He angrily snatched the goggles from Keats. He looked. He pulled the glove from Billy’s hand and slipped it on. Like he was the responsible professional who would tell them all . . .
“Can’t be,” Nijinsky said.
“Oh, I think it can,” Burnofsky said.
Nijinsky took the goggles from his head and dropped them on the floor. “Self-replication is biological, not mechanical,” he said, repeating what he’d been told once, somewhere. “Those nanobots are complex machines.”
“Indeed,” Burnofsky said. “And I appreciate the compliment.” He turned to Plath “Of course, I was building on your father’s work—”
“His work wasn’t this,” Plath said. “He didn’t do research so he could destroy, he—”
“He did it for the same reason we all do it. For ego. To say he’d done it. To not only play God but to be God!” Burnofsky shouted. “You spoiled little brat, you aren’t the pimple on her ass. If she was alive, she’d—” Suddenly he seemed unable to catch his breath.
“Who? Who are you talking about?” Keats asked. “That daughter you murdered?”
“Give me a fucking drink!” Burnofsky yelled, spittle flying.
“Tell me how to turn off those nanobots,” Nijinsky shot back.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Burnofsky said. “I don’t think I’ll do that. And we call them hydras. Cute, isn’t it?”
“It’s starting to hurt,” Billy said, almost like he didn’t want to interrupt. A thin trickle of blood ran down his cheek.