Plath’s biot climbed through the tangled wilderness toward the ring of light, claw over claw, a precarious handhold, a wild leap, like Tarzan swinging through the jungle, only here beasts were tiny and the “trees” seemed to ignore the laws of physics.
“Are you okay?” Keats asked her.
“As long as he doesn’t turn the water back on, I think I can climb out.”
“And what are you seeing through his eye?” Wilkes asked. “I haven’t been able to tap in yet.”
Plath focused on the visuals from another biot. “I see …Wait. Wait. I think he’s sending us a message.”
“A message?”
“Oh, my God,” Plath said. She read it aloud. “‘Bailing. No good to you now, Vincent. I quit.’”
“What does that mean?” Wilkes asked.
Keats said, “He figured out his only move is to declare neutrality. He’s making himself useless.”
Plath focused her attention on the macro. Wilkes was frowning, not quite sure what Keats was saying. Keats looked troubled. He said, “I suppose that’s a good thing?”
Plath heard the question mark. She said, “The Twins lose the president. But so do we. And we lose the chance to turn Bug Man. He’ll leave, move out of range, and take our biots with him.”
“We can’t wire him in time to stop him,” Keats said.
“No, we can’t. However, he’s just up two floors,” Plath said.
Wilkes let go of her heh-heh-heh laugh. “Check with Lear?”
Plath hesitated. “No. Not Jin, either. When Vincent’s back with us, he’s in charge. Until then …It’s me.”
Domville watched his Marines recede behind the Doll Ship. The Sea Kings were already starting to pick them up.
Benjaminia and Charlestown were still full of people. The fools were cheering, thinking they’d won something. They were singing some mad song about the Great Souls.
Well, the Great Souls were nowhere to be seen, and neither was the ship’s crew. Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor was a place of great activity; most who had jumped would be rescued if they didn’t panic.
His concern was with the people in the cruise ship and the hotel, dead ahead. He thumbed a text report. Not very official, but it was all he could manage at the moment.
Officers and men behaved very well. The fault lies solely with me.
He thought about adding a patriotic “God Save the King,” but that didn’t seem quite the thing, really. So he signed it:
Cheers. Domville.
The starboard bow of the Doll Ship struck the Holland America ship Volendam a glancing blow. A glancing blow that made a metal shriek like the sound of Godzilla in the movies.
Domville was knocked to his knees, and it was from that position that he saw cabins torn apart as the side of the Volendam was opened like a tin of sardines.
He saw men and women exposed, dressing, lounging, going to the bathroom, all suddenly revealed as the side of the Volendam was ripped off.
The hulls of both ships crumpled, railing buckling inward, bits of rigging suddenly everywhere, debris flying, and the all while that awful metal shriek that went on and on.
It was a lifeboat winch that tore the hole in the last LNG sphere.
The blast of depressurizing LNG actually jolted the Doll Ship. Domville jumped to his feet and began running to the powerful jet, made visible only by the heat-wave-like distortion of the lights of the cruise ship.
A spark would ignite it.
Domville wanted to be that spark, but not yet, not yet, not while natural gas was blasting into the last few dozen meters of open cabins. The jet of gas had to waft clear of the boat. It was at exactly that point, as it blasted over empty waters, that he wanted to light it—before it could spill into the streets and passageways of the Harbor Town complex and provide fuel for an explosion big enough to level the city.
A spark. A lighter. Anything and the gas would ignite.
He froze, listening to the cries of people on the cruise ship. The suddenly stopped scream as a man fell into the grinding metal. The now-distant noise of helicopter rotors. And the overpowering roar of the gas jetting out.
He felt the Doll Ship sag, slow. It was listing to starboard, which was good, good, bring that jet down to water level, let it blast harmlessly into the water until the ship rolled over and sank.
The Doll Ship moved past the docked cruise ship, sagged farther to starboard, and now was the time, now, now! Domville raced toward the gas jet and standing in the edge of the methane hurricane, puffed his cigar.
Nothing. The cigar had gone out!
Domville fumbled frantically for his lighter as the Doll Ship, slower but not stopped, barreled on toward the Harbor Town pier.
He found his lighter. Thought, Too bloody late, most likely, and flicked it.
Domville was hurled, a burning torch, into the dock at the waterline. He was dead before the impact.
A huge blast of flame burning at 1,600 degrees Celsius incinerated the dock, boiled the water and sent up a vast cloud of steam that rolled across the face of the Gateway Hotel.
Then, the sheer force of the jet of flame began to shift the Doll Ship. Its starboard list became less pronounced and the blowtorch, that massive, terrifying blowtorch rose as the Doll Ship rolled toward its left side.
Three hundred and ninety rooms on thirty-six floors of the Gateway Hotel. The fiery blast burned its way from bottom to top. It blew out windows, incinerated everything and everyone inside instantly. In seconds the hotel was a shell.
The steel support beams were warping, collapsing inward like a tall man bent over from a blow to the stomach. A minute more and the building would be gone and the blowtorch would burn on and through and ignite the city.