BZRK

ahead. Bug Man had sent his spinners scurrying away to relative safety. If he lost his spinners he lost, period.
    “Banzai,” Vincent said, just loudly enough for Nijinsky to hear, and sent his biots rushing into the nanobots.
    The nanobots were spreading to left and right in the vast chamber of the chiasm. The fluid environment slowed V3 and V4 a little, like running into a headwind. But it also meant Bug Man couldn’t drop wheels and ramp up his speed, which left the biots the faster of the two.
    Bug Man would try a pincer. He would pull back the center and send the wings around like the claws of a crab.
    Vincent wasn’t having it. He charged until he was at the midpoint between the scurrying wings, noted that the nanobots on the right were slipping and sliding, gaining weak purchase on tight, slick terrain, and pivoted toward them.
    V3 and V4 each stabbed a nanobot in the com-stack. That was better than ripping them open: it was faster and it would leave Bug Man wasting time trying to restore visuals.
    The biots clambered right up over the two blinded nanobots and sat atop them. The biots were longer, so their tails and heads hung off fore and aft, which meant two useful things: Bug Man would have to climb up over the legs of his own blind nanobots to get at Vincent—a notoriously difficult move, especially if you were platooning.
    And by climbing atop the useless nanobots, Bug Man’s visuals would be confused. Nanobot sensors would have a hard time making sense of the tall pile of arms and torsos.
    But that wasn’t slowing the Bug Man down. He had a move of his own. Two nanobots ran up and stopped just out of reach of Vincent’s stabbing and cutting arms. Then two other nanobots used the stopped nanobots the way a gymnast uses a mini-trampoline to vault.
    Two nanobots came soaring down at V3 and V4, lances out.
    “Heh,” Vincent said to no one. “Nice.”
    The police had formed a cordon and were now passing people through a small gap. Get your IDs out. Get your stories straight.
    Sure enough, three supposed demonstrators flashed what had to be NYPD or FBI IDs and were passed through to stand with the officers and point out the suspicious.
    One of them pointed at Nijinsky.
    “Shit,” Nijinsky said.
    Vincent collapsed the legs on the left of V3 and the right of V4 and rolled the biots over the legs of the blinded nanobots.
    Bug Man’s aerial attack missed, and he slammed into the blinded nanobots, stabbing his own creatures.
    A net wash: two of Bug Man’s boys dead, but time wasted and time was not his friend.
    Time to swim.
    He pushed off into the transparent fluid. Biots were not good swimmers—their legs could motor away, but the result was more of a churn than a swim. Twisting the claws with each stroke could give it some additional forward momentum, but not much. The only comfort was that nanobots were even worse.
    The biots floated just above the massed nanobot army.
    “You look familiar,” a cop said to Nijinsky. And just in time Nijinsky’s fingers slid from the fake passport in his inner coat pocket to the real one.
    “Well, I do some modeling,” he told the officer, a short, powerfully built woman.
    The male officers scowled.
    “Where have I seen you?”
    Nijinsky shrugged. His biots were racing to catch up to the battle raging deep within the president’s brain. He was not Vincent—experiences on multiple levels at once tended to make him a bit slow and distracted.
    “You mean . . .” he said, as his biots dodged around a sticky cluster of macrophages.
    “Like what do you model?” she asked, getting less friendly by the second. She flipped open his passport while Vincent waited with seeming calm and a slightly puzzled expression behind him. “Simple question, Mr Hwang. What do you model?”
    “Oh. Well, I guess most people recognize me from the Mountain Dew billboards.”
    The cop shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”
    “Armani underwear?”
    She crinkled her forehead at him, comparing face to photo. “Were you ever in a movie?”
    Yes, he had been in a movie. But he wasn’t happy about it. And the cop had been playing with him because she was grinning, and he could see that she was anticipating enlightening her fellow officers.
    “Yes, Officer,” he said, “I—”
    “It’s sergeant,” she corrected, and pointed at the stripes on her sleeve.
    “Sergeant,” he corrected tersely. “I was in the last
Saw
movie.”
    “What happened to you in that movie?” Now