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melt glass and soften structural
    steel. A human body is a marshmallow.
    The Gateway was a black, bent, crumpled horror that reminded
    some observers of a very old woman, bent by arthritis, in the act of
    falling to her knees.
    Buildings on either side had burned as well. Buildings farther
    back in Kowloon, where the gas had rolled through the streets before
    catching fire, were burned. Some had exploded, simply popped open
    like rotting fruit. Kowloon Park was a field of ash.
    The Chinese government had not been able to conceal the extent
    of the disaster. It was visible from satellites and from the decks of
    passing ferries and cruise ships. This was Hong Kong, not some pro-
    vincial outpost. The whole world passed through Hong Kong.
    The government had kept a faithful account of the dead and pre-
    sumed dead. Now over a thousand. The “presumed dead” included
    37
    MICHAEL GRANT
    those so badly burned that no more than a few bones with the mar-
    row boiled away had survived and could not be identified.
    Divers were still pulling bodies out of the blistered and twisted
    hulk of the liquid natural gas carrier—the ship dubbed the Doll
    Ship —that lay at the bottom of Hong Kong harbor. The Chinese gov-
    ernment was nowhere near as forthcoming on this part. The official
    story was that it had been simple error on the part of the ship’s cap-
    tain. He was dead: he wasn’t going to argue.
    No one spoke openly of the bodies of children found blown apart.
    No one spoke of the fact that one of the ship’s spheres, and possibly a
    second one as well (it was hard to tell), had never contained LNG but
    had instead been something very much like a human zoo.
    Crewmen who had managed to jump ship were picked up and
    spirited away to a camp in far-off Qinghai Province. A small number
    of British Royal Marines were held there as well. And twenty-four
    civilians, neither crew nor soldiers—inmates on the Doll Ship —were
    being held at a small local hospital that had been taken over by the
    Ministry of State Security. The MSS had drafted a dozen radiologists,
    neurosurgeons, and pathologists, snatched them up from cities all
    over China and bundled them off to Qinghai.
    Interrogations were under way.
    Medical investigations were under way.
    Neither was terribly gentle.
    Chinese premier Ts’ai attempted to shut down the camp, ordered
    all survivors to be executed and their bodies cremated. Which would
    have worked had not the governor of Qinghai Province slow-walked
    that order. He smelled a rat.
    38
    BZRK APOCALYPSE
    Two weeks after the Hong Kong disaster, the MSS briefed certain
    members of the Central Committee on their findings from the sur-
    vivors. And on Ts’ai’s unusual and very out-of-channels effort to shut
    down the investigation.
    Twenty-four hours later the Chinese official news agency reported
    that Premier Ts’ai had suffered a stroke. He was getting the best care
    available, but doctors were not hopeful.
    In fact, the top of the premier’s head had already been sawed off.
    His brain had been carefully scooped out of his skull, flattened and
    stretched, frozen, cut into handy one-centimeter sections, and was
    now being examined minutely under a scanning electron microscope.
    They found numerous strands of extremely fine wire—nanow-
    ire—in segments as long as three centimeters, and a dozen tiny pins.
    Similar wire had been found in the brains of survivors of the Doll
    Ship .
    A careful—but less drastic—autopsy of President Helen Falkenhym
    Morales found no evidence of brain abnormality. Then again, the
    single nine-millimeter bullet she had fired into her own head had
    bounced around a bit inside her skull and made a mess of the soft
    tissue.
    The FBI director, a man who would not have fared well himself if
    his brain had been carefully examined under an electron microscope,
    pushed for the conclusion that the suicide was a result of depression
    following the death of her husband.
    FBI forensic experts