BZRK: Apocalypse
Page 90

One of the coffees survived the fall, and she took a sip before getting back to her research. Surely there must be a way to break out of this limited protocol and access more cameras.
She was beginning to regret having killed all three of them—she could have used some help. But then she stumbled upon an open link that led her helpfully to a schematic of the base. The schematic had green dots for camera locations.
The first was password protected. She tried the usual combinations, and none worked. So she rifled the pockets and wallets of the dead, and finally found a tiny slip of yellow legal pad.
“Thank God for unreliable memories.” Moments later: “And bingo. We are in.”
The sun was just millimeters above the horizon, and the weak light left the valley in darkness. Stadium lights cast a circle of eerie orange across the main buildings, excepting the house, which cast its own warm, buttery light.
Plath was shaking with cold and fear by the time she had descended the long ramp and then crunched her way across the gravel to the house. She did not spot—indeed did not look for—the sniper who watched her through his telescopic sights.
She climbed the few stairs and stood on the porch of the impossible house belonging, she was certain, to Lystra Reid, also known as Lear.
She pulled off her glove and knocked.
The door flew open to reveal an attractive young woman wearing white yoga pants, shearling boots, and a blue down vest over a sheer white tunic.
Plath pushed up her goggles and slid back her hood.
“Oh. My. God.” Lear said. “It is you.”
“May I come in?” Plath asked, feeling an absurdity in it all that went beyond the merely surreal.
“Mmm, not just yet. First, I should tell you there’s a very good shot watching you, yeah, and ready to fire at any excuse. So. Shrug off the coat, keep your hands where I can see them, and don’t move.” In order to emphasize her point, Lear pointed with one hand at the gun in the other.
Plath complied.
“Now, turn around slowly.”
This, too, Plath did.
“Ah! There we go. You do have a gun. I thought you might.” Lear pulled the gun from Plath’s waistband and tossed it out onto the ice. It came to rest by a lawn ornament, a pink flamingo that must have been someone’s idea of witty commentary on the climate.
“Now, come on and warm up,” Lear said. “Bug and I are drinking excellent bourbon, would you like some?”
“Bug?”
Plath looked past Lear and saw a badly battered Bug Man, sitting on a couch and looking miserable and humiliated, and perhaps just a little hopeful.
“You two have met, right?”
“Briefly,” Plath said. Then added, “I don’t drink.”
“Yes, you do, yeah, not a lot but on occasion,” Lear said smugly. “Yeah.” She handed Plath a glass. Plath took a sip, grimaced, and put the glass aside.
“If we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to get into the spirit of things,” Lear said, her face darkening.
So Plath picked the glass back up and followed Lear’s direction to sit, sit down, take it easy, relax.
Plath sat. She saw the TV, currently on a YouTube of a burning house. Where it was she had no idea. Bug Man sat stiff and wary.
“I did it,” Plath said.
“Did it?” Lear asked.
“I blew up the Tulip. I gave the order to Caligula. Then I followed the breadcrumbs here.”
That had the desired effect of throwing Lear off stride. “Are you trying to tell me that—”
“Did I know it was you behind it?” Plath interrupted. “Yes. After you killed Jin it was obvious that he had failed you, somehow. Was it that he found out the reason you’d ordered him to wire Vincent?”
Lear, small smile growing. “In a way. Nijinsky hated you. He didn’t like being pushed aside for some kid. So that was part of it. But yeah, he was starting to get cold feet. Developing a conscience.”
“I didn’t want to die choking on my own tongue on an escalator. So I didn’t fight it very hard. I could have sent my own biots in to stop it all happening, my own rewiring. But I could see where it was all going.”
“Oh?”
“I came to like the idea. I came to like the whole, meticulous planning of it. It was brilliant. It was genius. It’s historic.”
Lear’s nostrils flared, and her eyes widened. “Historic?”
So, Plath noted, she liked that word. “Well, yeah,” she said. She took a sip of the whiskey, suppressed the face she wanted to make, and instead said, “It gets better as you get used to it.”
“Historic, yeah?” Lear prompted.
“I remember this lecture in history class. All about Genghis Khan. You know, the Mongol guy.”
“I know.”
No, Plath thought, Lear had not heard of the great Khan. But she didn’t like admitting it. “Well, the point was that Genghis killed, like, thirty million people, no one is sure how many. Maybe twice that much. There was this one thing where he took a bunch of captured enemies, and built a platform on top of them. His own soldiers had lunch on the platform as it slowly crushed all the men beneath.”
“Yes,” Lear said fervently.
“But the point was, that later, like nowadays, we look back on him, Genghis, I mean, as a great historical figure. He, like, improved the economy and so on by clearing out a bunch of people who were in his way. But he killed millions.”