BZRK: Reloaded
Page 83

P1 was caught in flowing water, like a child carried away on a water slide, slipped from the cloth, rushed madly over skin, grabbed frantically at anything that passed. Suddenly a deep pool that swirled like a draining toilet, madly around and around.
She was in Bug Man’s navel.
Then just as suddenly she was spilled out, caught by the raging torrent and carried into a dark forest of curling, leafless trees. She grabbed hold, one leg, then a second, holding two hairs where they met and rubbed together.
She chose one and held on to it for dear life.
Her other two biots had held on much higher up on Bug Man’s body. But Bug Man knew how things were down in the meat, he knew the resilience of biots.
P3, the biot 4.0, now saw something terrifying. It was a football field in length, a rectangle containing three full-length steel blades each capable of leveling a forest. The razor’s edges didn’t seem especially sharp in the m-sub, but they had a terrifying perfection that was alien to biology. In the gaps between blades Plath saw stubs of hair.
Bug Man was going to shave everything from face to wrist.
The blades touched down, pressed against the epidermis, and hurtled toward her biots. P2 was close enough to the left edge of the razor to make a mad dash to the side, racing from hair to hair like some demented Tarzan swinging through the trees.
But P3 was flat in the razor’s path.
She was watching a car crash, seeing what was coming, powerless to avoid it. She could only hold on and hope as the first of the blades flew harmlessly by overhead, a scythe that missed its wheat stalk.
But the second blade, a tenth of a second behind the first, snapped the tree P3 was holding on to, and she was jammed between blades in a Pick Up Stix jumble of broken hairs, random skin cells, and soap.
She felt, with the P3’s superior senses, the sudden swoop up, away, through the air.
Bug Man thrust the razor up against the showerhead where the power of the water was irresistible.
P3 was blown out of the razor.
It fell, trapped inside a water droplet. Fell like a missile toward the shower floor.
Pia and Admiral Domville had the sense to stay behind the advancing phalanx of marines that now worked its way back with swift efficiency toward the melee on the stern.
Neither had any business participating in the action, one was a
Swedish intelligence agent and the other a portly, middle-aged, very senior naval officer.
Pia was tense and frankly afraid. Domville was neither. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was wondering how in God’s name he could possibly explain this to his own superiors—quite possibly a committee of Parliament, God forbid—but most of his brain had been swept up in a giddy froth of testosterone and adrenaline. Several of his ancestors had swung cutlasses and fired cannon, and Domville was thrilled to be carrying an assault rifle and going into harm’s way.
This was fun.
Unless of course it ended badly, and he was forced into early retirement.
The first group of marines retreated under renewed pressure and the haphazard but deadly assault of hand grenades. No order to mow down the mob had been given, but one marine was dead and another was bellowing in pain from shrapnel in his knee, and as well trained as the marines were, their mood was nevertheless ugly.
Domville’s detachment came rushing up the starboard side, out of view of the mob, then attacked with a loud hurrah using rifle butts and kicks to push them back.
Finally, the mob broke. First a few ran, then more, then all but a handful were racing back to their familiar spheres.
“Keep them bottled up!” Domville shouted. “Lieutenant, I’ll take three men to the bridge.”
The lieutenant detailed three marines as Domville and Pia began to run up the series of steep metal stairs that led to the bridge.
As he climbed, Domville’s earpiece informed him that a Chinese coastal patrol vessel was on an intercept course and the Doll Ship was now in Chinese waters. He had to wrap this up and present the Chinese with a fait accompli. He could claim he was in hot pursuit of an obviously illegal vessel holding international citizens as hostages. That might work.
The fact that half a dozen of those international citizens now lay dead and bleeding on the deck would, however, be a complication in that narrative.
They were racing up the last stairway to the bridge when a crewman appeared holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
The first marine fired his weapon and the crewman staggered back spraying blood from his neck—but not before he squeezed the trigger.
The RPG flew a mere ten feet before hitting a crossbeam. The explosion knocked all of them back down the stairway, and had it not been for the blood landing on Pia’s legs it might almost have been comic.
She crawled out from under the tangle of bodies, all still living, thankfully, though one corporal had a gushing wound in his arm.
Domville was stunned but already leading the charge back up the stairs, roaring for the others to follow him.
By God, Pia thought, the man needs a cutlass.
They burst onto the bridge. Captain Gepfner raised his pistol and was shot a dozen times before he could so much as twitch. He was dead when he hit the deck.
The other officers raised their hands and yelled, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Pia found herself panting, heart pounding, face-to-face with something …someone …unlike anything she had ever seen before. The body was too wide, the number of legs all wrong, and the head, that two-faced head . . .
“No reason to shoot,” Charles Armstrong said.
“I’ve talked to the surviving Morgenstein twin,” Pia said, panting. “There’s every reason to shoot.”