Nijinsky blew his smoke toward her. It was not a subtle gesture. He resented being demoted and didn’t mind if she knew. “Because I was using my other biots to train Billy here.”
“For a month?”
Nijinsky shook his head. “Fuck you, Plath.”
Keats’s eyes narrowed angrily, but Plath remained cool. “A lot has been asked of you, Jin. And you’ve endured a lot.”
“Endured,” he said, sneering at the word. “Yes, I’ve endured a lot. A lot of enduring has gone on.”
“Why not have Anya generate a new biot and use it?”
Billy and Wilkes were watching the back-and-forth between the two, like spectators at a tennis match. Vincent was elsewhere in his mind. Keats was keeping still, irritated by Nijinsky, but accepting that this was up to Plath to handle.
“Why not generate a new biot?” Nijinsky mocked. “When you play Russian roulette you put one bullet in the gun and spin the chamber. Click.” He mimed shooting himself in the head. “A one-in-six chance you’re dead. Two bullets? That’s a one-in-three chance. Three? At that point it’s fifty-fifty. You know why not, Plath, so don’t give me that hard look. Vincent barely survived the loss of one biot. Keats’s brother is shackled in a loony bin for losing two biots. You want to hear what Burnofsky’s hearing? Tell Wilkes to do it. Or do it yourself, Plath.”
Plath nodded. “Okay. Fair enough.”
“What are we doing?” Anya asked wearily. “What is this all about anymore? The Armstrong attempt to control the president is obviously over. And it seems the same is true of the Chinese premier. The Twins are in hiding. Burnofsky has been wired and switched sides. Bug Man is gone. What are we doing? Are we playing a game? If so, what is our next move?”
“They still have the technology,” Plath said. “They will try again. In some other way. They won’t give up.”
“How do we know that?” Anya demanded.
“They found Keats and me. They blew up the boat that was coming to pick us up.”
“Convenient, wasn’t it?” Nijinsky said.
Plath didn’t say anything to that, because she’d had the same thought. Convenient . If you wanted to push her and Keats back to New York. Say, after you’d ignored an order to get your ass back there already.
The punishment for desertion is death, isn’t it? Or is that some Hollywood bullshit?
The boat had blown up, but there was no follow-up. No attack on the beach, no attack on the compound they’d been staying in. No attack as they rushed to the airport and flew away from the island.
No attack waiting for them when they refueled in Kenya or Madeira, and no attack when they’d landed at Teterboro.
Had a quick change of hair color somehow thrown off the kind of people capable of tracking her to Madagascar and then to Île Sainte-Marie? Not likely.
Just enough violence to send her running back to New York. Not as if someone was serious about killing her.
Like someone wanted her back in the game.
Get back in the game.
That had been the text from Lear. The one she’d ignored, because, why? Because she was Sadie McLure, that’s why. Since when did she take orders? What was she, someone’s butler suddenly?
Fuck you, Lear. I’m on a beautiful island with a beautiful boy who loves me and wears himself out trying to please me.
For the first twenty-four hours after that she had felt liberated. Like maybe she had regained control of her life. But slowly her doubts had grown. What right did she have to blow off Lear? Lear was BZRK. Lear was the general and she was a lowly lieutenant or whatever.
And he’d been right, hadn’t he, Lear? Right that she had to get back in the game? The Armstrong Twins seemingly still lived. The nanobot technology still existed. The liberty of all humanity was still in danger.
The Armstrongs still had to be stopped. Didn’t they?
“I’ve heard from Lear,” Plath said. She wasn’t sure why, but she was reluctant to tell them. Maybe because once she said it she would have to take action.
“Did he mention whether he liked the whole blonde look you have going on?” Wilkes. Of course.
“Lear says the Armstrongs have developed some kind of remote biot-killer. Nature unknown. No other details. But . . .” She shook her head ruefully. “But his instructions are to destroy AFGC. Destroy their data, in particular, so this new technology doesn’t go into use.”
Long silence. Much mute staring. Biots already faced a number of potential enemies, from the slow but irritating defenses of the body itself to the much more dangerous nanobots. But nanobots could be faced, fought and—with luck and skill—killed. The idea of a weapon that could destroy biots in some unfathomable way, in some way that did not even allow for a fight, was terrifying. It would be push-button madness.
Finally, Nijinsky laughed—a low, slow sound weighed down by cynicism. “Well, I’m going to use that word again. Convenient. We’re all sitting here wondering why we’re still playing this game, and what do you know? Turns out the bad guys have the means to drive us all insane and then enslave the human race.” He lit a second cigarette and blew the smoke insolently at Plath.
She thought about telling Nijinsky to put it out. Show him that she was back and in charge.
But was she in charge? That was not clear.
She checked Keats. He was as dubious as Nijinsky.
“Yeah,” she said by way of acknowledging their doubts. “Yeah. Convenient. But I guess unless we want a visit from Caligula, we’d better . . .” She faded out, realizing what she was saying.
It was Anya who put it into words. “In the Great Patriotic War—what you call World War Two—Russia had soldiers. And behind the soldiers they had NKVD. Secret police. If a soldier complained, the NKVD shot him. If a soldier failed, the NKVD shot him. If a soldier said, ‘To hell with this, I am going home,’ the NKVD shot him. And then they arrested the man’s family and sent them to the gulag.”
“Well, they were fighting the Nazis,” Billy piped up.
Anya snorted a derisive laugh. “Yes, murderous, evil Nazis. And who were the NKVD? Murderous, evil Communists.”
“I’m confused. Which are we supposed to be?” Wilkes asked.
A News Item.
Wellington, NZ. Wellington Police Superintendent Thomas DuPré gave a press conference today in which he discussed the recent suicide of two Wellington Police Department officers, and an attempted suicide by a third, who remains in care at Wellington Hospital.
“All three officers reported seeing strange visions about an hour prior to their suicide attempts. They variously described these hallucinations as involving bizarre insects and strange objects.”
Superintendent DuPré said all three were tested for drugs but results were negative. “It’s possible that this tragic episode is simply a rather horrible coincidence.”
All three incidents occurred nine days ago. The two successful and one attempted suicides were particularly brutal and appeared to be unplanned.
The investigation is ongoing.
Nothing was said publicly about the fact that the three officers, while on their way together to