He set the crowbar in place and heaved with all his might.
The pipe snapped. Whatever sound it made was obliterated by the roar of high-pressure gas gushing into the room.
He choked from the smell, reeled back, staggered to the far end of the chamber, and set the timer on the explosive device for ten minutes.
That should be enough.
TWENTY-FIVE
Sadie McLure. In person. In the flesh. And the rest of her little crew as well. Benjamin Armstrong felt disappointed. It should have been a triumph, but she was walking in under her own power, head held high.
“Someone get me a … a knife! Or a baseball bat! Something,” Benjamin snarled.
“Benjamin,” Charles chided mockingly. “There will be plenty of time for that.”
“I’m going to beat her bloody and rape whatever is left of her!” Benjamin saw his own spittle flying. He felt the way Charles drew him back, restraining him, knowing Benjamin otherwise would have gone at the girl with his fist until some better weapon appeared.
More and more security men and women were arriving—by elevator, by stair—all armed, all looking to the Twins for guidance.
“The building is going to blow up,” Plath said calmly.
“Of course it is,” Benjamin sneered. “You know, your father was the smart one, not you, you stupid little bitch!”
“Caligula is in the basement,” Keats said, striving to mirror Plath’s even tone, despite the realization that one way or the other, his own time was fast running out.
He flashed on a memory of his brother Alex, chained to his cot in a mental institution in London. Mad. Utterly, terribly mad from the death of his biots. Of course, Alex had had more than one die. But at the same time, Alex had been strong.
“It’s Caligula,” Plath repeated.
Charles’s eyes narrowed. “What is Caligula?”
“He’s the one in the basement. Looks like he’s rupturing a pipeline. He’ll wait until the gas builds up and—”
“System!” Charles yelled. “System: show all cameras in the basement of this building!”
On the huge screen with its multitude of squares showing the Armstrong empire, five windows opened. Three were black. But two were still in operation, one trained on an instrument panel, while the other was a grainy long shot of pipes and …
“There!” Jindal cried, pointing. “There’s someone down there. You can just see their back!”
“One of the engineers,” Charles scoffed, but he didn’t sound too sure of himself.
Suddenly the grainy figure reeled back, spun away from whatever he had been doing.
In Caligula’s head Keats’s efforts were beginning to work. Blood that had been just a single-cell spray from the throbbing artery had become a gusher, like a cartoon of an oil well. The clear cranial fluid around his biot was growing opaque with the floating Frisbees of red blood cells and the soggy sponges of white blood cells.
The force of the blood knocked his biot loose of its perch and sent it spinning, end over end. What had been a sort of narrow but calm seam of watery fluid was now a turbulent underground river.
He would not make it back to the artery.
“He’s hemorrhaging,” Keats said. To the Twins he explained, “I have a biot in his brain. I’ve cut an artery. I’ve damaged one optic nerve.”
The camera no longer showed the man in question.
“Can you get back to his eye?” Plath asked.
She still hadn’t realized … Keats nodded. “On my way.”
“You don’t give orders here!” Benjamin raged at Plath.
But his brother was no longer with him on that. Charles said, “Why would Caligula blow up the Tulip?”
Plath glanced at Keats, who seemed to her to be elsewhere. Looking through his biot’s eyes, seeing a different scene altogether.
In fact, Keats’s biot was racing madly back toward Caligula’s eye. His biot swam and crawled, shouldered its way through the clinging platelets, the lymphocytes, the tendrils of detached neurons, floating like seaweed.
He had never moved so fast. He didn’t wonder at which direction to take, which planes to use to flow through the 3D maze of Caligula’s brain. The calm had come over him.
He knew what was coming for himself, but he was no longer afraid. A slight smile stretched his mouth. His eyes glistened.
He was there, in that place of peace and calm and wild, frantic action.
“Floor Thirty-Four,” Plath said to Benjamin. She didn’t know what Floor 34 was. Just that it was the one part of the Tulip aside from the data center that was unreachable by elevator. A guess. An intuition.
A bluff.
The silence that followed was all the confirmation necessary. Charles was shaken.
“And who sent Caligula to do this act of terrorism?” Benjamin asked, voice silky and malevolent now.
“Me,” Plath said.
Charles blinked. “But … Surely you …” His tone was almost pleading.
“Lear,” Wilkes said when Keats remained silent. “It was Lear. He’s wired her. He got Vincent to wire her. We’ve cleared her brain of wire, but—”
“So now you see that we were right! Now, now with our beautiful people all dead on the Doll Ship, all destroyed. Now you—”
“Look, you’re a piece of shit who needs to die a painful death. The two of you,” Wilkes snapped. “But we do not blow up buildings full of innocent people. We’re trying to stop this from happening.”