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FIVE

Vincent was also visiting London, but miles away from Noah and Nijinsky.

Vincent was twentysomething, a trim, average-size guy with carefully barbered brown hair and a downturned mouth and eyes that were brown but with no sense of warmth in them. He had a slightly curved nose and nostrils that flared and a faint scar that extended half an inch above and half an inch below his lips.

He held himself like a guy who wanted to avoid attention, but he didn’t have the gift of disappearing in a crowd. He had the curse of being noticed, no matter how careful he was to keep his eyes down and his face impassive. People still noticed him because there was just an air about Vincent that suggested tamped-down emotion and volatility barely disguised by his careful movements and his soft, almost inaudible voice.

He was at dinner, sitting at a dark table in a nice but not stuffy Indian restaurant on Charlotte Street, picking at a poppadom. The target sat across the room at one of the larger, brighter, noisier tables.

There were five people at that table and the target—Liselotte Osborne—was not the richest or most powerful, so she didn’t sit at the head, she sat halfway down on one side, with her back to Vincent.

Nevertheless, Vincent had an excellent view of her eye. The left one.

A part of Vincent’s mind was in the room, hearing without focusing on conversation punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter, seeing the reflection of yellow overhead lights in standard restaurant-grade wine glasses, wondering abstractedly about the choice of art on the papered walls.

Another part of Vincent’s mind was across the room, perched on Liselotte Osborne’s left lower eyelid. From that vantage point Vincent saw thick-trunked trees that grew in impossibly long curves from spongy, damp pink tissue. These trees had no branches; they were like rough-barked brown palm trees, bending away to disappear out of view behind him. The bark was then glopped in uneven patches by a black tarry substance, like someone had thrown big handfuls of tar at the lashes.

Eyelashes.

Eyelashes with mascara.

Vincent’s spidery legs stepped over a pair of demodex, like crocodiles with the blank faces of soulless felines. Reptilian tails of demodex babies protruded from the base of the eyelash. They wiggled.

From his perch between two rough-barked, gooey, drooping eyelashes Vincent saw the vast, wet plain of white stretched out to the horizon, a sea of milk beneath a taut wet membrane. Within that milky sea were jagged red rivers. When he tuned his eyes to look close, he could make out the surge and pause, surge and pause of Frisbee-shaped red blood cells and the occasional spongy lymphocyte.

He was looking out across the white of Liselotte’s eyeball—an eyeball shot through with the red capillaries of a woman who’d had too little sleep, rimmed with black tar, home to microfauna he could see and, of course, a multitude of lifeforms too small even for a biot to make out.

Vincent felt a rush of wind and saw a barrier rushing toward him at terrifying speed. It was an endless, faintly curved wall of pink-gray that appeared to be maybe ten feet tall. It came rushing across the eyeball like a storm front, swift, irresistible. Jutting far out from that pink-gray wall were more of the dark brown palm trunks, curving upward and extending beyond the range of Vincent’s sight. Like a wall festooned with ridiculously curved pikes.

Liselotte was blinking.

Vincent said, “Sparkling, please,” in response to the waiter’s question about what sort of water he would prefer.

“And are you ready to order?”

“What’s the speciality of the house? Never mind—whatever it is, I’ll have it. Extra spicy.” He handed the menu to the waiter, who insisted on telling him the special anyway.

It did not matter to Vincent. Food generally did not matter much to Vincent. It was just one of many pleasures to which he was indifferent, although highly spicy foods created a sensation that was something related perhaps to pleasure.

Vincent—his real name was Michael Ford—suffered from a rare disorder called anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure. It’s usually a symptom of long-term drug use. Or schizophrenia. But Vincent was neither a junkie nor crazy.

Well, not crazy in the clinical sense.

Yet.

The biot with the functional and not very clever name of V2, tensed its six legs and timed the onrushing eyelid. When it was just a few dozen feet away micro-subjective or “m-sub”—less than a few millimeters macro-actual or “mack”—the biot leapt.

It flew through the air. It spread short, stubby wings that helped it avoid tumbling. It also spread its legs wide in flex position to take the shock. Then it scraped down the side of an eyelash, picked up a smear of mascara, landed, and jabbed six sharp-tipped legs into flesh. The ends of the legs split to become barbs, locking the biot in place.

Always dangerous to use the barbs because if you had the bad luck to be too near a nerve ending the target just might feel the faintest irritation. And just might decide to scratch the itch. Which wouldn’t crush the biot but could sure as hell relocate it and waste valuable time.

The fast-moving upper lid slammed violently into the lower lid. The giant lashes wobbled and vibrated overhead, a sparse forest of palm. It was an earthquake there on the eyelid, but with barbs deployed V2 was fine.

Sticky liquid squeezed up between the lids and then, when the top lid began to pull away, stretched like chewed gum until it snapped.

Tears.

Vincent had been through a crying jag on another mission and had ended up with his biot all the way down the face and trapped in running snot.

But these weren’t weeping tears, just lubrication.

The upper lid receded, zooming across the icy white and then over the iris. Vincent would have found it exhilarating if he were the sort of person who did exhilaration.

There were many parts of the human body that were disturbing up close. But few more surprisingly so than a human iris. What looked like blue ice from a distance was an eye-of-Jupiter storm up close. Right at the outer edges Vincent saw blue, or at least a gray that was like blue. But it was not smooth; rather it was a twisted, fibrous mess, thousands of strands of raw muscle, all aimed inward toward the pupil, all with the job of expanding or contracting the iris to let in more or less light.

Close up—and it was impossible to get any more close up than V2, perched on the very edge of the lid—the iris looked a bit like layer upon layer of gray-and-orange worms, thinner at the outer edge of the iris, stronger at the rim of the pupil.

The pupil itself swept by below, a terrible, deep, black-in-black hole. A pit. But then if you looked straight down and caught just the right light, you could actually see to the bottom of that pit, down to the random blood vessels and the juncture that was the attachment point for the optic nerve.

Vincent did not get that image this time. Not in candlelight and soft, yellow fluorescence. He just saw the pupil as a black, circular lake, growing wider as the snake muscles of the iris shortened themselves fractionally.

The biot was 400 microns—less than half a millimeter—long and equally tall. But the m-sub feel of it—the image a biot runner experienced—how it felt to him, made it seem to be about seven feet long and almost that tall. To the twitcher it felt like something the size of a large SUV.

In mack it was the size of a healthy dust mite. But when you’re a dust mite, you don’t feel tiny. You feel big.

As the eyelid reached its apogee, V2 jumped off. The biot landed on the milky sea, then flattened itself down as the eyelid zoomed away, hesitated, then came sweeping back overhead like a gooey pink blanket.

Vincent thought, Light, and Lo! There was light. Twin phosphorescing organs on the biot’s head spread ultraviolet light.

He waited for the eyelid to come back up again, ate another bite of poppadom, jabbed a single leg into the underside of the eyelid and let it pull it up and over the slick eyeball, and sipped his water.

It was quite a ride. And as Vincent watched the waiter refill his glass he felt a frisson, a sort of echo of what V2 felt, its back sliding along the slickery surface of the eyeball.

The trick with entering the brain by way of the eye was to reach the hole at the back of the bony eye socket. It was possible for a biot to cut through bone, but it was never quick or safe. It was the kind of thing that would start a firestorm of bodily defenses.

Reaching the hole—Vincent had forgotten the official name for it—was best done by circumnavigating the eyeball. In the m-sub it was a long walk. And all of it through the dragging wetness of tears and the vertiginous movements of the orb looking this way or that.

The two other paths to the brain—through the ear or the nose—had bigger difficulties. Earwax and the distinct possibility of a watery blockage in the one, and unimaginable filth in the other: pollen, mucus, all manner of microfauna and microflora.

This was better. For one thing, you could, if you chose, sink a probe into the optic nerve and get some macro optics—see a bit of what the target was seeing, though it was usually very rough gray scale.

The second greatest threat to a biot was getting lost. When you were the size of a mite, the human body was the equivalent of roughly five miles from end to end. So V2 dutifully made its way around the eyeball, squeezed between membranes, became a bit disoriented, before finally reaching the optic nerve just as Vincent’s dinner was being placed before him.

And then, quite suddenly, he came across not the second greatest, but the single greatest threat to a biot.

They attacked with blazing speed, wheels spinning but still getting traction on the eyeball. He saw three of them immediately as they raced around from behind the redwood tree of the optic nerve.

Which answered the question of whether Professor Liselotte Osborne—leading expert on nanotechnology, consultant to MI5, the woman who could either push or derail the security agency’s investigation into nanotechnology—was free or infested.

Two more nanobots were behind V2.

Five to one odds. Although if he hung around for long, more would be on the way.

Who was the twitcher? Vincent watched the way the nanobots moved in. Too reckless. And platooned into two packs, mixing relatively benign spinners and fighters. Not an experienced hand. Not Bug Man. Not Burnofsky. Not even the new one, what was it she called herself? One-Up. Yeah. Not her, either. All of them could run five nanobots as individuals, rather than two platoons.

Vincent tasted the curry. Very hot.

He chewed carefully. It was important to chew thoroughly. It helped digestion, and digestion was often a problem during these long trips across multiple time zones.

And at the same time Vincent spun V2 toward the two nanobots he wasn’t supposed to have noticed.

Vincent took no pleasure in the food, but he came as close to pleasure as he ever did when he stabbed a cutter claw into the nearest nanobot, right into its comm link, and spilled nanowire.

Vincent’s phone pulsed.

Only one person could ring him and always get through.

He pulled his phone out and looked at the text. His concentration wavered, and he very nearly lost two of V2’s legs to a low scythe cut from a nanobot.

Grey and Stone confirmed dead. Sadie injured/OK.

Vincent was not good at experiencing pleasure. Unfortunately he was perfectly able to experience grief, loss, and rage.

He had set aside the first news of the crash. He had stuck it in a compartment. He was on a mission, he had to focus, and from long experience he knew not to trust news reports. Maybe Grey McLure had not been on the plane. Maybe.

This, however, came from Lear. If Lear said it, it was true.

Vincent texted back, missing a couple of letters as he jammed a sharp leg into the vulnerable leg joint of the second nanobot and watched it crumple.

But more nanobots were coming. A new platoon of six.

Tgt LO infst. Engaged. Withdrfing.

If he had two biots in this, he might fight this battle and win. With three he’d be confident. But this was a losing fight.

A follow-up text from Lear: Carthage.

Vincent stared at the word. No, no, no. This was not his thing. This was not what he did.

A beam weapon cut one of his six legs. The cut didn’t go all the way through, but it snapped off. It wouldn’t slow him much, but it would throw off the biot’s equilibrium.

This was not the time to stay and play smack-the-nanobot and maybe lose. It was time for extraction, and as quickly as possible.

Carthage. The Roman Empire’s great enemy. Until the Romans conquered it; murdered or enslaved every man, woman, and child; burned every building to the ground; then sowed the earth with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again.

Carthago delenda est. It had been a slogan in Rome: Carthage must be destroyed.

Vincent wiped his mouth with his napkin.

He pushed back his chair.

V2 turned and ran from the four near and many farther-off nanobots. More were scurrying down the optic nerve. They weren’t a problem: using their four legs, the nanobots were slower than a biot. Only when they had a fairly smooth surface could the nanobots switch to their single wheel and outrun a biot.

Unfortunately the eyeball was perhaps the ultimate smooth surface.

V2 motored its legs at full speed. Back around the eyeball.

Vincent made his way slowly across the room toward Liselotte Osborne.

V2 waited until two of the nanobots were close enough to open fire. Their fléchettes ate a second leg away.

Vincent felt the echo of the pain in his own leg.

V2 sprayed sulfuric acid to left and right simultaneously. It wouldn’t kill the nanobots, but it would slow them, bog them down in puddles of melting flesh. And even on just four legs and dragging stumps he could maybe outrun the remaining nanobots.

Liselotte Osborne cried out suddenly.

“Oh! Oh!”

She pressed fingers over her eye.

“What is it?” one of the men asked, alarmed.

V2 was nearly crushed by the pressure, but Osborne’s fingers were to the north of it now, blocking the nanobots, and V2 had a clear path ahead.

“My eye! Something is in my eye. It’s rather painful.”

Vincent moved smoothly forward. “I’m a doctor; it could be a stroke. We need to lay this woman down.”

Funny how effective the phrase “I’m a doctor” can be.

Vincent eased Osborne from her chair and laid her flat on her back. He crouched over her, pushed her hand gently away from her face, and touched the surface of her eye with his finger.

Through V2’s optics he saw the massive wall of ridged flesh descending from the sky and ran to meet it.

Vincent’s free hand went into his pocket and came out, unnoticed, holding something black that might have been an expensive pen. He pressed the end of it against the base of Osborne’s skull.

V2 leapt onto the finger just as two nanobots emerged in the clear from the acid cloud.

Vincent pressed the clip on the pen and springs pushed three inches of tungsten-steel blade into Osborne’s medulla.

Vincent gave the blade a half-twist then pressed the clip again and withdrew what looked for all the world exactly like a nice Mont Blanc.

“This woman needs help,” Vincent said.

V2 ran up the length of his finger and dug barbs into his flesh.

Vincent stood up abruptly. “I’m going to summon an ambulance.” He turned and walked toward the exit.

It would be ten minutes before Liselotte Osborne’s friends and coworkers realized the doctor had not summoned anyone or anything at all. And by then the pool of blood beneath her head had grown quite large, and she was no longer complaining of pain in her eye.