Not Keats’s concern. Just kill them.
A millimeter and a world away K2 and six nanobots squeezed through fat cells like partly deflated beach balls made of wax, all white with clinging platelets and strands of unknown fibers. The hydras had stopped tunneling and now were digging and consuming, creating a sort of cavern in the skin as they entered a new replication cycle.
They were everywhere in the cavern, top, bottom, sides, all busy and oblivious and Keats tore into them, slaughtering, dismembering. It was like work in a meatpacker’s plant, assembly-line chopping and hacking, killing as fast and efficiently as he could.
The bodies of massacred hydras clogged the cavern until his nanobots were forced to dig through the debris of their bodies to find more to kill. Lymphocytes were oozing into the chamber, adding their slow-moving predation to the slaughter.
And then, a very different creature. Also blue, also a hydra, but gleaming with sharp, distinct lines, with bristling weapons. But even this, a first-generation hydra, a factory-made hydra not a cheap replicant, was uncontrolled. Mindless. programmed.
K1 yanked out two legs and left it crippled and helpless. The lymphocytes would finish the job.
Heedless, a mad rush now, just rush, all fourteen visuals at once, and oh, God, it was good.
It was blankness. Emptiness and fulfillment. A wild beast, fourteen wild beats, chasing and killing and chasing and killing.
Plath, not wearing the goggles, able still to see in the macro, up in the world, saw an ecstatic smile on Keats’s face. She had never seen him smile like that, lips trembling, teeth bare.
She felt her gaze drawn irresistibly to Burnofsky. She expected to see him gloating at the animal revealed in Keats. But he was not gloating. His mouth worked, and he chewed his lip. His washed-out eyes were hungry.
He was jealous. He was a junkie watching another addict mainlining the ultimate drug.
Plath felt sick. Her biots waited on the crater as Wilkes’s two biots came rushing by and swan dived into the blood. Clotting nets were slowing the flow now. Plath couldn’t see Keats’s nanobots or biots, just the tumbling platelets and, riding that red tide like driftwood, the nanobot legs, heads, and insides.
A tear rolled down Burnofsky’s cheek.
Keats’s blue, blue eyes had disappeared behind the bug-eyed goggles.
Wilkes was laughing to herself. Heh-heh-heh.
He’d said he loved her, and she had not answered. Now she wondered if she gave him everything he wanted, her body, even her love, would any of it matter as much to Keats as this terrible game?
“What’s happening?” Billy asked her.
“Madness,” Plath answered.
Pia Valquist and Admiral Edward Domville rode through the storm aboard a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter. It was not the very best way to travel through high winds and lightning. The natural background noise of the helicopter itself was deafening, but when you added shrieking winds and sudden thunder like God tearing the sky open with his bare hands, you had a great deal of noise.
And a great deal of movement as pockets of wind acted like surprise elevators, dropping the Sea King hundreds of feet, or shooting it suddenly upward, all the while buffeting it back and forth. There was something about the constant bobbing and weaving that made Pia think of a boxer in the ring, always keeping his head in motion.
Admiral Domville was less inclined to be thinking of colorful descriptions. He was busy being sick into a plastic bucket.
“Seasickness is nothing to be ashamed of!” Pia yelled at the top of her lungs.
“Nelson was frequently seasick,” Domville yelled back during a brief moment of coherence.
Then, quite suddenly, they were through the storm, and the massive piles of dark gray clouds gave way to scattered clouds lit by a fading sun. The noise was still ferocious, and the motion of the helicopter was still erratic, but it was nevertheless a relief.
A crewman came back and motioned to the tiny window. Pia reluctantly disentangled herself from the jump seat and stutter stepped over to look out; she saw the Albion sailing serenely below them.
She gave a thumbs-up signal.
“We can land,” the crewman said. “We won’t have to use the winch.”
“The what?” Pia asked. It was the first anyone had mentioned a winch. “Did you say ‘winch’?”
The landing was fairly smooth. The reception was Royal Navy spit and polish. Domville played his role, but as soon as was decent he drew the Albion’s captain aside. Introductions were brief and to the point.
“Captain, I’m going to ask for the loan of some of your marines.”
“Certainly, sir,” the captain said, as though nothing could be more natural than an admiral dropping out of the sky in company with a Swedish spy and demanding to abscond with a platoon of his men.
“We need to have a conversation with an LNG carrier that is rapidly approaching Hong Kong harbor.” He gave the course and position of the Doll Ship.
“We’ll have to step smartly if we’re to intercept before they reach Chinese territorial waters,” the captain said.
“Indeed.”
“Just time for a cup of tea before you go,” the captain said briskly.
Minako did not want to get her hopes up, not yet. Hope would just make her heart beat faster, and she could barely draw breath as it was. Were they really here to rescue her?
“Only two ways off this ship,” Silver said. “We take a lifeboat, or we steal that helicopter. I can fly the chopper, but it’s been a good long while, and that’s a pretty good storm raging out there.”