He killed his last one there, in the base of a pimple, having to shove seething bacteria aside while ripping the hydra apart.
The ringing stopped, Nijinsky did not answer. “Googling the number.”
Each of the fourteen visual inputs now showed no hydras in sight. None in the blood, none in the fat.
The new awareness began to fade, slow as a sunset. His normal consciousness began to return. He began to feel his own heart. He knew the goggles were rimmed in sweat. His skin was cold but seemed to vibrate, like his body was plugged into a massager. His ears were ringing.
Nijinsky said, “The number is an office building in the city, looks like a main switchboard number—it ends in double zero. Not far from here, maybe eight, ten blocks.”
“Bug Man?”
The phone rang again, same number.
“Did you get them all?” Billy asked him.
Keats was silent. He tried to answer but he couldn’t. Words wouldn’t come yet, like that part of his brain–body connection was numb and needed to get circulation back.
“Did you get them all?” Billy asked again.
Keats was pulling out. Nanobots crawled back through the rush of platelets, easier coming back out with the current, though the current had slowed now as the clotting factor webs adhered and began to twine together. Nanobots and biots cut their way back through the fat cells that had sagged to fill in the tunnel. It was like digging out after a mine cave-in. He felt an edge of claustrophobia he hadn’t experienced earlier in the mindlessness of battle. He was conscious of Wilkes’s biots joining him.
Plath’s biots waited as Keats’s army emerged.
He wanted to ask her whether any hydras had come this way, but he wasn’t all the way back yet, words still …Instead, one of his biots made a gesture, sweeping a claw around the crater.
“Three came back this way,” Plath said up in the macro. “I got them. Take the goggles off, Keats. Do you hear me?”
Still Keats didn’t speak, but a hand went up to his head and peeled them off.
His eyes moved slowly to focus on her. Then he looked down at his hand, where the goggles lay. She took them from him and he did not protest.
Wilkes pointed a finger at Keats, looked at Plath, and in a voice that was half awed, half laughing, said, “Your boyfriend here is a son of a bitch down in the meat. I mean, damn!” She nodded her head fast, “Oh yeah, honey, game. Game! He got them all, I maybe got a dozen; he didn’t leave me any, he got them all.”
“Nonsense,” Burnofsky said. But his voice lacked any confidence. He was going through the motions, trying not to sound defeated.
“The replicants are easy to kill,” Plath said. “They aren’t controlled, they’re just programmed, and they can’t defend themselves. Even the factory models were helpless without a twitcher.”
She looked from the stunned Keats to the feral Wilkes; from Nijinsky to Burnofsky. “Your big secret weapon can be killed, Burnofsky.”
“Once they’re in their millions you’ll never stop them! You won’t even find them until it’s too late!”
Plath stood up. Her joints cracked from the tension. “Jin, what are we doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that call. From the office building. You know who it is, or at least who it probably is.”
“It’s probably a big building. It’s getting light out….”
Plath stared at him. Was he looking for an excuse to do nothing?
She looked around the gloomy church. In the far corner sat Vincent with Anya. Vincent actually seemed to return her gaze, almost as if he knew her.
She reached and touched Keats’s cheek. He looked up at her, but he did not speak. He was shattered, for now at least. He had not lost any biots, but he had just played and won a game no human should have been able to play. He and Vincent, both lost for different reasons in the same war, both, she hoped, coming home again.
She looked at Nijinsky, who had not been the same since arriving in Washington. He refused to meet her gaze.
Three broken men. And Billy, who was holding the tail of his shirt to the small hole in his face.
Burnofsky’s phone rang again, again the same number. Someone was desperate.
“We have to go after Bug Man,” Plath said. “It’s why we came here.”
“Enough for now,” Nijinsky said. “I’ll update Lear. He’ll—”
“I’m curious about something, Jin,” Plath said.
“Yes?”
“Earlier, when we were going after the hydras, before Keats just… well, did whatever he just did. Wilkes jumped in with her biots, you didn’t. Why?”
“I would have.”
“You didn’t.”
“Are you calling me a coward? I set off a bomb, Plath. I just killed a bunch of men tonight. Are you calling me a coward? I’m not the one who didn’t have the courage to take out the Armstrong Twins!”
Plath recoiled. There it was, out in the open.
Nijinsky was shrill, over-the-top outraged. Too much to be real. “The only reason this whole thing isn’t over is because you didn’t step up when you had the chance, Plath!”
“Oh, tensions mount,” Burnofsky taunted.
To Plath’s surprise, Wilkes spoke up. “Because she’s a normal kid, Jin, and normal people don’t like killing. How did you like it?”
Nijinsky blinked. “She can’t just call me a coward,” he said weakly.