Freedom (TM)

Gold:$4.189USD/oz.

Unleaded Gasoline:$18.87USD/gallon

Unemployment:32.3%

USD/Darknet Credit:202.4

Chapter 23: // Ultimatum

The heads of America’s intelligence services sat around a circular boardroom table in Building OPS-2B of National Security Agency headquarters. Now outnumbering them at the table was a wide array of private intelligence and military analysts, led by familiar executives from Computer Systems Corporation (CSC), its subsidiaries—EndoCorp and Korr Military Solutions—and the lobbying firm, Byers, Carroll, and Marquist (BCM).

The atmosphere was tense. On a bank of flat-screen televisions behind them, a dozen news channels were silently chronicling the meltdown of the American economy in animated graphics. But the real headlines were reserved for the fate of the U.S. dollar. All the graphs were heading down at a precipitous angle.

Their host opened the meeting.

NSA: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re facing a grave situation. As we sit here, the United States government has lost control of portions of its communications and air defense assets. At the same time, civil disorder is spreading throughout the Midwest, and the dollar is plummeting on foreign markets. I’m hearing calls for martial law coming from lobbyists on Capitol Hill. More worrisome is the talk I’ve heard about implementing Army Regulation 500-3.”

BCM: “It’s being brought up with good reason.”

NSA: “What reason?”

CSC: “Army Regulation 500-3 was intended to preserve civil order in the event government communications are severed due to nuclear attack, natural disaster—”

BCM: “Or technological emergency. I think the Daemon qualifies.”

CSC: “Make no mistake: this is a full-scale attack by the Daemon. Its forces are launching a violent revolution. Regulation 500-3 is called for. Civilian leadership is unable to maintain secure communications.”

NSA: “What I want to know is why our systems degraded so suddenly and completely.”

EndoCorp: “The Daemon is conducting a broad denial of service attack against government domains and communications. It’s also undermining the confidence of capital markets. It’s part of Sobol’s overall strategy.”

DARPA: “Bullshit.”

All eyes turned to him.

EndoCorp: “Excuse me?”

DARPA: “You heard me.”

BCM: “There’s no reason to abandon decorum, gentlemen.”

NSA (holding up his hands to calm the situation): “However, my colleague’s succinct critique stands: we may have outsourced a large portion of our raw intelligence-gathering capability to private industry, but we’re not completely blind. There’s no indication that the systems operated under contract for us have been compromised.”

CSC: “That’s ridiculous. We can show you the proof.”

NSA: “I’m not interested in your digital proof. We’re monitoring network and electromagnetic activity in real time. There’s no evidence our national defense assets have been degraded.”

BCM: “That’s a bold and reckless statement. You’re accusing trusted national security partners of gross negligence, Mr. Director.”

NSA (pointing to the TV monitors): “This so-called domestic uprising related to the economy—Mexican drug gangs running loose, raping and pillaging in the countryside. Panicking the populace.”

BCM: “This is what happens when economies collapse. Order needs to be restored before the chaos spreads. Private security forces are available and more palatable to the public than a government military force.”

FBI: “These gangs—we’ve arrested heavily armed suspects all across the Midwest. They’ve murdered policemen and civil authorities—and more than a few of them have turned out to be professional mercenaries tied to defunct military regimes in Central America and Eastern Europe.”

CIA: “Trained operators whose fingerprints we have on file.”

BCM (raising an eyebrow): “Then you’ve worked with them before?”

CIA: “My question is: who brought them here?”

EndoCorp: “Most likely drug cartels, taking advantage of general lawlessness to make money.”

CIA: “That defies logic.”

NSA: “And what about money?” (Opens up a folder and tosses out reports like a blackjack dealer in Vegas.) “Financial houses controlled by your clients have been selling Treasury bills like crazy—you’re precipitating a run on the dollar.”

BCM: “Our clients have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors, and quite frankly the monetary policies of the U.S. government haven’t—”

DIA: “As if the U.S. government controls the creation of money! It seems the same private institutions entrusted with setting monetary policy were the ones who profited from debasing the dollar. No wonder the public is flocking to the Daemon network. The darknet credit is still worth a damn!”

CSC: “That’s treasonous talk.”

DIA: “Don’t lecture me about treason!”

BCM: “Everybody calm down. Let’s stop throwing the T-word around. One man’s treason is another man’s patriotism.”

FBI: “How do you figure that?”

BCM: “The nation is under attack, and here we are arguing. We need to put our heads together.”

NSA (glaring at him): “Yes. The United States is under attack. The question is by whom?”

They all sat in bristling silence for several moments.

BCM: “Certainly you don’t intend to stop us from defending our property? Or from maintaining public order?”

FBI: “Who is behind the covert terror operations in the Midwest?”

BCM: “Does it really matter?”

DIA (looking to NSA director): “We need to declare a national emergency and mobilize whatever National Guard troops and equipment not already deployed overseas.”

BCM: “You have a serious problem, gentlemen. Without immediate financial support, the U.S. dollar will collapse—precipitating the complete insolvency of the U.S. government. Picture Russia. Argentina.”

NSA: “This is treason.”

BCM: “A multinational corporation can’t commit treason. My clients have no obligation to America. Risk must be hedged.”

NSA: “Get the treasury secretary on—”

BCM: “Your government can create all the money it wants, but it will be worthless here and abroad. Without outside intervention the U.S. government will soon be a hollow shell.”

There was silence for several moments.

NSA: “What do they want?”

BCM: “They need Army Regulation 500-3 amended to include private military contractors. And then they expect it to be invoked.”

DIA: “You expect us to suspend the Constitution? Are you insane?”

BCM: “You’re to stay out of the way while they deal with the Daemon. If you do so, global financial institutions will support the dollar—of course, there will need to be economic and social reforms put in place first to ensure a return to fiscal discipline.”

The government half of the table looked like they were pondering violence.

DIA: “Why are you doing this?”

BCM: “My clients are simply defending their property—they own the genes being stolen by the Daemon’s operatives. They own the networks and software it has compromised. They own the global brands it has undermined. Representative government doesn’t have the will to defeat this threat.”

DIA (to the NSA director): “Have him arrested!”

The BCM representative gestured to the phone near the NSA director’s chair.

BCM: “It’s your call. Try to arrest our people. Try to have the military interfere with our security operations. I think you’ll find that no one in your government has the stomach for it. We are not the enemy of America.”

NSA: “I don’t know what you are. But some people in government still take seriously their oath to uphold the Constitution.”

The NSA director picked up the phone and started dialing.

Chapter 24: // Green Desert

Jon Ross moved through the crowd that had gathered around a soup kitchen. Grim-looking, recently middle-class refugees surged toward the queues. He could see the isolated D-Space call-outs of darknet members keeping order.

“Form four lines! Four lines, please!”

Ross stood up on the bumper of an abandoned car and gazed across a vast tent city, accumulated like so much plaque at the confluence of two interstate highways outside of Des Moines, Iowa. It was actually a mixed tent/car/RV city. He estimated several thousand makeshift campsites. There was music, the buzz of voices, dogs barking, and the shouts of children playing in the maze of humanity. The acrid smell of people cooking over magazine-and-newspaper fires filled the air.

Ross searched for a path through the crowd and noticed a current of people flowing along a makeshift lane. He headed toward it, inching his way through a mass of people. He caught most of a conversation at the end of a soup kitchen line as he edged past. . . .

“Where were you headed?”

“We were trying to reach Ohio—my sister’s in Columbus—but the bastards privatized the interstate. The tolls are insane.”

“We couldn’t afford gas. I’ve been trying to trade my truck for a motorcycle. You know anybody who has one?”

“No, sorry. . . .”

Ross reached the pathway and started passing individual camps—recent arrivals to homelessness. People with Infinitis and Lexus sedans. Furniture piled into the backs of expensive, crew-cab pickup trucks. A few people even had living room sets with sofas and matching chairs set up beneath tarps. Others used high-end camping gear meant for a trip to the lake. Still others sat, looking dazed and lost, in well-appointed camping trailers and motor homes. An economic hurricane had passed through these people’s lives, and they were still in shock.

Ross did see one burgeoning business rising out of the ashes of consumer culture. Several heavily armed men were standing atop a container truck as brokers at the open doorway haggled with refugees. A banner hanging along the side read: WE BUY WATCHES AND JEWELRY. Ross had seen them in every tent city—hustlers repatriating luxury items for sale back to Asian markets, where the real money was. High-value items worth their shipping weight.

Meanwhile, the bulky stuff—the plasma-screen televisions and furniture—was all winding up in piles, sold cheap to be stripped of metals and fabrics, and wood. Already trash was accumulating into mounds—some of it burning.

Ross finally reached the edge of a darknet medical clinic. A cluster of call-outs hovered there in D-Space. He did a quick search and suddenly his target flashed—a second-level Horticulturalist named Hank_19.

In a few moments Ross approached a weathered but hardy-looking man in his forties wearing a baseball cap, jeans, and a work shirt. He was lowering boxes off the back of a thirty-year-old stake bed truck into the waiting hands of clinic workers.

Ross waved, and Hank_19 waved back.

“You still headed to Greeley?”

“Yeah, just as soon as we drop off these supplies.”

“I appreciate the ride. Gas shortages have made traveling difficult.” Ross joined the crew off-loading and in a few minutes they had cleared the truck bed. Hank_19 wiped his brow and hopped off the tailgate. “Damn it’s hot.” He extended his calloused hand. “Henry Fossen. Call me Hank.”

Ross shook his hand. “You don’t go in for darknet handles, I take it.”

“My father gave me my name, and I intend to use it. I would’ve just selected the handle ‘Hank,’ but eighteen Hanks already beat me to it. You got a real name?”

“Jon.”

“All right, Jon no-last-name.” He looked up at Ross’s call-out. “I guess a twelfth-level Rogue’s gotta be secretive. What the hell’s a ‘Rogue’ do on the darknet, anyway?” He slammed the tailgate closed. “I thought rogues were bad guys.”

Ross laughed. “In the darknet we’re more like scouts. We infiltrate systems and facilities, and we detect threats to the network. Move about unseen, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, reconnaissance.”

“You could say that.”

“My boy’s in a recon regiment overseas.”

“I hope he comes home safe.”

“So do I. And I hope we get this economic mess sorted out before then.” He glanced up at Ross’s call-out again. “Well, you’ve got a four-and-a-half-star reputation on a three K base—which means you must be doing something right. Hop in.”

Fossen whistled to two younger men cradling scoped AR-15 rifles. They wore tactical gear and body armor—fourth-level Fighters with Scandinavian-sounding network handles. They had been busy talking to a young nurse at the aid station. They nodded to Fossen and came running, hopping up into the cargo bed.

Ross got into the cab with Fossen, and they were soon easing the old Ford stake bed through the tent city crowd.

Ross gestured to the truck. “Biodiesel?”

“No. Dimethyl ether. They split the water in Greeley with wind turbine electricity and add the hydrogen to something to create hydrocarbons. Makes a pretty good diesel fuel. I still don’t quite understand it. I had no idea half this stuff existed until a few months ago.”

“So, the guards . . . are you expecting trouble?”

He shook his head. “No. The town council requires armed escorts down to the city. A lot of desperate folks out here. But there’s a darknet recruiting station to the right. Hopefully it’ll get people sorted out in the next few months.”

Ross looked over to see a series of motor homes resembling bookmobiles. Dozens of call-outs clustered around them. Lines of civilians were waiting to be interviewed by the automated recruiting bot of the Daemon—what was known as The Voice. Ross had gone through a similar process, just not with such a crowd.

“This is just the first wave, I think. A lot more people are about to fall out of the old economy.”

“You think so?” Fossen brought the truck slowly through the crowd, people making way. He nodded to them genially. “I mean, how could we let this happen here in America?”

“It’s no accident. I’ve seen it before in other countries. It’s all about control. The powerful scaring people into submission.”

Fossen nodded. “I’ve had some experience with that. Just not on this scale.”

“This is nothing. The real shock is coming. Believe me.”

Fossen gestured to the tent city out the window. “This isn’t the real shock?”

“No. It’ll be much, much worse. They’ll try to psychologically traumatize the public into accepting a new social order.”

“And you know this because . . . ?”

“Firsthand experience.”

Fossen raised his eyebrows. “I can tell you’re going to be a barrel of fun on the way.”

After a few minutes Fossen finally brought them out of the crowd. As the old Ford picked up speed, the cab got much noisier, especially with the windows open, and they drove for a while without talking.

Eventually Fossen turned to his passenger, shouting, “So what brings a rogue to Greeley?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“They in trouble?”

Ross shook his head. “No. I got word a few days ago that an old friend I thought was dead is actually alive.”

“That’s good news. Does he know you’re coming?”

“He moves around. He’s hard to get in touch with.”

“Maybe I’ve heard of him. What’s his name?”

“The Unnamed One.”

“That’s his name? ‘Unnamed One’?”

“You might know him better by his real name: Detective Pete Sebeck.”

Fossen just frowned. “The Daemon hoax guy? He’s not really dead?”

“You didn’t see the news feeds on his quest?”

“I don’t read news feeds much. Not enough time in the day lately. How do you know he’s in Greeley?”

“I’ve seen feed reports that say he’s in the area.”

“That’s new to me, but like I said, I don’t read the feeds much.” Fossen seemed to be pondering something. “I’m no expert, but can’t you just search for his coordinates if you know his handle?”

“He keeps them unlisted—I suspect because of all the press he’s been getting. A lot of people are following his quest.”

“So he’s on a quest—as in, heroic journey and all that?”

“They say he’s searching for something called the Cloud Gate. A portal that may unlock a higher level of the darknet.”

“Well, best of luck to him.”

“Apparently he’s also been appearing in places where paramilitary units have been operating—helping to develop a smart mob-alert system.”

“Well, we haven’t had any of that stuff occur near us. It’s been in Nebraska and Kansas mostly.”

Ross looked at the landscape and rows of abandoned houses with FOR SALE signs in suburban subdivisions. “They’re still foreclosing on houses out here?”

“No. I think people are just abandoning them. Off to find work or public relief facilities. Driving is no longer an option for most people, and there’s nothing to live on out here.”

“Is anyone swallowing the ‘illegals gone wild’ story?”

“I don’t know. I think people would have noticed armed gangs if they really existed.”

“Oh, they exist. They’re just not what the media claims.”

“Then what are they?”

“Paramilitary units. Terror squads.”

Fossen just gave him a look. “I think we would have noticed that, too.”

“Not if they move at night by helicopter.”

“Helicopter?”

Ross nodded. “They fly in low and fast. Drop in teams, advance on foot, then ex-fil by chopper. They’ve hung people. Burned houses. On television the next day you usually hear how gang violence is behind it. Senators calling for martial law. And checkpoints.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been tracking their movements for the last several months.”

Fossen just gave Ross a sideways look. “Are you pulling my leg?”

Ross pointed to Fossen’s call-out. “You joined the darknet recently.”

“Yeah. My daughter convinced me. She’s really something.”

“You have a farm?”

“Fifth generation—a ‘horticulturalist’ now, I guess. My daughter has made a lot of positive changes to our operation. You should come by and see it.”

“I’d like that.”

“Jenna’s rising fast in the Greeley holon. She’s leading two projects now—a biodiversity initiative and an education program.”

“You must be proud.”

“I’m proud of both my kids. Life is starting to make sense again for us. I just hope we can get other folks on the new economy in time.”

Fossen turned the old truck onto a county road and soon they were heading out into a veritable ocean of green corn plants stretching unbroken to the horizon. This road was even louder in the old truck, so Ross just watched the landscape roll by.

They occasionally passed through small, downscale towns. Ross was able to spot them at a distance not by their church steeples but by the local grain elevators—invariably a row of concrete tubes a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet tall looming like missile silos at the end of Main Street.

Between the towns they passed several abandoned farmhouses, crumbling in the prairie. The clapboard ruins were choked with bushes and collapsing in on themselves.

Ross shouted over the engine. “That doesn’t look recent. Why all the empty houses?”

Fossen leaned close. “Been happening for decades. Farms had to get big or go out of business. Market forces. The population of this county has dropped about a third in the last fifteen years or so. It’s coming back now, though.”

He slowed the truck down, and they turned this time onto a gravel road that was ramrod straight. They were traveling slower now, and it was much easier to talk.

“The fields look healthy.”

Fossen waved him off. “Those plants have as much to do with agriculture as a weight lifter on steroids has to do with physical fitness. See that?” He pointed out tiny plastic signs spaced ten yards apart running along the edges of the fields near the road. The signs stretched into the distance and all bore the image of a green leaf with a single dewdrop dripping from the tip. The text HALPERIN ORGANIX—MITROVEN 336 was written in a bold sans serif font beneath the logo. The signs looked cheerful, healthy, and inviting. “They’re all clones designed to maximize kernel production. In fact, ninety-eight percent of the crops grown in this country a century ago are now extinct.

“This is just a big green desert. You’d starve to death out here. This corn is inedible—it’s just starch; it needs to be processed in an industrial stomach, with acids and chemicals, to break it down into processed food additives. We’re up to our eyeballs in corn here in Iowa and we can’t even feed ourselves.”

“I gather that’s the plan.”

Fossen nodded. “Damned right. Big business was screwing over farmers in the 1890s, too, and my grandfather’s father didn’t put up with it back then, either. There was an uprising. You might not think it, but it was always the farmers who raised hell in this country. They worked for themselves, were self-reliant, and weren’t about to take shit from anybody. But then some clever bastard figured out how to make crops inedible. My family’s been doing industrial farming for forty years and all it produces is debt, pollution, and water shortages. It ruins the land and the people on it.”

Ross nodded to the uniform fields out the window. “You think these other farmers will change?”

“They’ll have no choice. Gas is, what—eighteen bucks a gallon now? Industrial farming and the global supply chain gobble up fossil fuel.” He peeled off each item with his fingers. “Natural gas in the fertilizers, petroleum-based pesticides, fuel for the tractors, more fuel for transport to food processors, fuel to process the raw crops into food additives, then to manufacture them into products, and then to transport the products across the country or world to be consumed—thirteen hundred miles on average.”

“What made you finally change?”

Fossen stopped for a moment then laughed. “When I started educating myself on why farming no longer made sense. We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It’s a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We’re basically paying for corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live.”

They continued down the gravel road, sending up a cloud of white dust behind them. The road curved up toward a slight rise on the horizon. They came over it, and a dramatic shift in the scenery occurred.

Now, in the fields on either side was a patchwork of crops and fences, along with rows of saplings, the occasional chicken coop, and a few cows grazing in a meadow. It was, in fact, the first sizeable area of prairie grass Ross had seen in many miles.

Before long Hank slowed the truck and came to a halt at the intersection with a paved road. He pointed to their right. “Greeley’s down that way about a quarter mile.”

Ross could see a wooden sign alongside the road. It read WELCOME TO GREELEY with Rotary Club and Kiwanis Club badges bolted just below. Above that, floating in D-Space, glowed a virtual sign that read: Iowa’s first darknet community. Ross knew it meant that all of the town’s civic functions and officials were darknet-based. Judging from the widespread construction going on in the countryside, they might have been the most advanced, too.

“Our place is up ahead a few miles. You interested in a tour, or should I take you straight into Greeley?”

Ross nodded across the road. “I’d love to get a tour.”

Hank nodded and brought them across the road and down the gravel lane beyond. After a few minutes Ross saw barns, outbuildings, a traditional farmhouse, and a new-looking prefab house among some trees up ahead. There were also a couple of shipping containers and a few modern turbines turning in the breeze a ways off.

Fossen nodded to the view. “This is ours.”

Fossen turned into the farm’s long gravel driveway. There was an ornate D-Space 3-D object in the shape of a cornucopia bursting with vegetables and fruits hanging above the entrance. It was labeled Fossen Farm.

Dogs with D-Space call-outs above them ran out, barking to greet the truck. Two of them were black Labs named Blackjack and Licorice, and the third was a Golden Retriever named Hurley.

Ross smiled. “That’s clever.”

“Well, they’re always getting into trouble. This way we know where they are.” He stopped the truck near the barn, and the Fighters in back quickly hopped out.

Ross looked around just as a woman called from the porch of the white clapboard farmhouse. She was a stout-looking woman in her forties or fifties in work clothes and a garden hat. She had no call-out or HUD glasses. “Everything go okay at the clinic?”

Hank nodded. “The crowd’s getting bigger.” He took off his own hat and gestured to Ross. “Lynn, this is Jon. Jon, this is my wife, Lynn.”

“Oh.” She extended her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Jon.”

“Likewise.”

“I’m giving Jon a ride into Greeley, but I thought I’d give him the tour.”

“Well, don’t bore him to death. You know how you get. Let us know if you need anything, Jon.”

“Thanks, ma’am. I . . . are you a member of the darknet, too?”

“Not my thing. I’m not into all that social network mumbo jumbo.”

Fossen pointed toward a group of half a dozen people not far off—men and women of various ages and ethnicities at the edge of a large vegetable garden. They all had D-Space call-outs above them and were focused on a young woman talking.

Fossen waved. “There’s my daughter, Jenna.” The young woman waved back.

“Lovely girl. Who are the others?”

“She’s teaching hybridization and genetics to some newbs. Part of her civic reqs.”

Mrs. Fossen frowned. “I wish you wouldn’t call them that, Hank. They’re students.”

“My wife teaches in the middle school in Greeley.” He jabbed his thumb. “Here, let me show you the big project we’ve been working on.”

They walked over to a fence line with the dogs following them, tails wagging. Ross petted Hurley on the head as he gazed around.

There were a few more people out in the fields doing chores, and they all had D-Space call-outs. “You’ve got a really nice place here.”

“Yeah, thanks to Jenna and the other students it’s really coming along. We’re one of the most sustainable farms in the county. Which isn’t saying much.” Fossen led them up to the fence and looked out to several acres of grain and other plants, waving in the breeze. “We use a mix of crops and animals to recharge fertility. Here, we’ve planted beans with wheat and a little mustard to fix nitrogen without resorting to chemicals.” Fossen kneeled down and pulled up a handful of soil, letting it drain through his fingers. “We’ve been farming this land for five generations. I need to fix the damage I did to it. We’ve been relying on artificial fertilizers for a long time. It’ll take a few years to get where it should be, but it’ll come around.”

He stood and pointed to the distant cows. “We’re raising the animals on grass—not corn. We put in a good blend of natural prairie grasses. Big bluestem, foxtail, needlegrass, switchgrass. It grows naturally here on the prairie, so it’s turning solar power into beef—no fossil fuels necessary. And we rotate animals through the fields. Chickens follow the cows out to pasture, picking bug larvae out of the manure and eating bugs and worms from the broken turf left behind by the cattle. The chicken dung, in turn, makes the field fertile for crops. It’s all an integrated, sustainable system.”

Ross leaned on a fence and nodded. “It does look more like a farm than the other ones did.”

Fossen nodded to the edge of the property. “Got two ten-kilowatt wind turbines and some flywheel batteries to store the power. Every other darknet farm in this holon is working for the same thing. Regional energy and food independence. We rely on Greeley for our critical manufactured goods—printed electronics, micro-manufactured precision equipment, tools, software. They, in turn, rely on us, along with other farms, to provide their food and raw materials. It’s a symbiotic relationship. We need each other.”

Ross felt the breeze and looked out over the sunny, bustling farm. “I’ve been so caught up in this fight, I sometimes forget what the end goal is.”

Fossen nodded. “I know what that’s like.” They started to walk back toward the house. “You’re staying in Greeley?”

“Yeah, I have a room at a motel in town.”

Fossen slapped Ross on the back. “Well, hell, when was the last time you had a home-cooked meal?”

Ross grimaced. “Probably fifteen years.”

Chapter 25: // Black Ops

Hank Fossen lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the gentle breathing of his wife, Lynn, next to him and the ticking of the clock in the hall. He wondered where his son, Dennis, was at that exact moment. Was he on some mountaintop observation post? Convoy escort? They hadn’t heard from him in nearly a month, which usually meant he’d been posted to a remote observation post.

What would his son make of all the changes on their farm? And in town? Dennis had never shown any interest in staying close to home. Although, who could blame him? Fossen had drilled into his kids at an early age that they were going to college and getting white-collar jobs. The day his son sat him down and explained that he was joining the military so they wouldn’t have to borrow money for school . . . well, Fossen felt both shame and pride at the same time. Shame that his son had to make such a choice, and pride that he had.

Fossen prayed for his son’s safety—even though he wasn’t very religious, he tended to become so on certain occasions.

The dogs started barking outside. Fossen knew the pattern. If it was a raccoon, a skunk, or an opossum, they’d be run off pretty quick. Stray dogs were another matter, but his dogs were in a fenced enclosure. They’d be safe.

The barking didn’t subside, though.

Fossen sat up in bed. All the exterior lights were off. And the motion detector lights near the barn hadn’t come on either. Strange. But the dogs were going crazy. Certainly the hired hands and students in the prefab unit must have heard this racket. He threw off the covers and listened more intently. There was movement downstairs. Creaking of boards on the staircase.

Was it Jenna? The dogs wouldn’t be going crazy.

Adrenaline spread through his bloodstream like warm water, and he slipped off the bed. He reached underneath it for the pump Remington shotgun.

The barking of the dogs suddenly stopped. Silence.

Then he heard a terrified scream in the hallway. “Daddy!”

He just started to get to his feet with the shotgun when the bedroom door kicked in and a blinding white light pierced his eyes. He felt something hard and blunt slam him in the stomach and he doubled over. He couldn’t get any breath in his lungs.

He heard his wife screaming as the shotgun was yanked out of his hands. People thundered around his bedroom shouting in some foreign language.

“La pamant! La pamant!”

“Acum! Fa-o, acum!”

Still sucking for breath and blinded by the lights, Fossen heard struggling and breaking glass. He was then thrown to the ground by powerful hands.

Paramilitaries. The word kept going through his mind.

He’d been told Greeley had developed an early warning system. But then—he hadn’t been linked to the darknet while he was sleeping. He didn’t know anyone who did that.

He heard more screaming in the house. And he finally found breath to speak. “Jenna! Lynn!”

The powerful hands pulled his arms behind his back and he felt a zip tie cinched tightly around his wrists. He’d just begun to get his vision back as someone strapped duct tape across his mouth and pulled a hood over his head.

He heard muffled screaming and shouting now. He was hauled up painfully by his arms and dragged, he assumed, out of the room. He felt his feet thudding down the stairs and across the living room, and suddenly he felt the night air on his legs and arms. He was dressed only in boxers and an undershirt. It was a warm summer night.

He could hear crying and whimpering, and suddenly the hood was pulled from his head. He was shocked by what he saw.

Dozens of heavily armed men in black ski masks, jeans, and casual shirts surrounded them in the moonlight. They had AK-47 assault rifles slung across their chests and wore body armor over their clothing, along with vests of spare clips. Night vision goggles covered their eyes.

They had gathered their captives in the yard behind the farmhouse, and Fossen could see his wife and daughter, as well as three hired hands and the four visiting students in their underwear or pajamas, kneeling, bound and gagged on the grass nearby. Only Fossen was still standing among all the men. Behind them, he could see the still forms of his dogs, Blackjack, Licorice, and Hurley, lying on the dirt of their pen. Dead.

A tall, thickly built masked man stood in front of Fossen and rested his weapon in the crook of his arm. He spoke with a thick accent.

“Mr. Fossen. You have lovely farm.” He reached down and, laughing, grabbed Jenna by her hair. “And lovely daughter.”

The other men laughed.

Fossen struggled to speak—to beg them to leave his family be. To take only him. But the duct tape over his mouth prevented it. He struggled with all he had against his bonds.

The big man grabbed Fossen’s face in a viselike hand. He pointed to one of his compatriots, who tossed one end of a rope up over a thick branch of the old oak in their backyard. At the other end of the rope was a noose.

Another man held a digital video camera in the moonlight, taping the action.

Fossen’s wife let out a muted scream from behind her duct tape gag, and Fossen continued to struggle against his restraints and the arms holding him fast. They put the noose around his neck, and again he heard the others trying to shout from behind their gags. Fossen could see his wife in anguish as men behind her held her face up, smacking her and pointing in Fossen’s direction—shouting, “Uite! Uite!”

Other men were trying to cut the pajamas off his daughter as she struggled. The rope was cinched firmly around Fossen’s jaw, and Big Man was in Fossen’s face again, laughing through his mask, his night vision goggles looking buglike in the darkness.

Then a welcome sound came from somewhere out in the night—the angry shouts of hundreds of people approaching through the fields—the rattle of weapons and equipment as they approached underlined their angry shouts. Big Man made several hand motions and his men spread out, concealing themselves behind vehicles, trees, and walls. They all focused on the darkness with their night vision goggles, whispering. . . .

“A se vedea ceva?”

“Nu, şefule.”

“Nimic.”

The massive crowd was approaching from somewhere out in the darkened fields. Fossen stood on his tiptoes, the noose cinched tightly around his neck. He didn’t dare turn to look.

Big Man motioned abruptly, and his band of raiders fled into the night—disappearing in the opposite direction from the advancing mob. They didn’t fire a shot, apparently hoping they could slip away unseen. Leaving their victims behind.

Fossen could hold his precarious balance no more. He fell to the side and was greatly relieved when the rope, no longer being held by anyone, simply unwound as he collapsed to the ground.

He tried to get a glimpse of the approaching mob, which was almost upon them now. But suddenly there was complete silence. Fossen rolled over to look for his wife and daughter and could see a shadowy form dressed head-to-toe in black kneeling over them, swiftly cutting their bonds. Their rescuer handed a knife to one of the students, then moved over to Fossen, drawing yet another knife.

Fossen could now see the man clearly. He wore some sort of formfitting black body armor with a hood and what appeared to be advanced night vision goggles over his face. Weapons and equipment were secured in pouches integrated into the suit.

The man turned Fossen over and tore the duct tape off his mouth with a sting. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Thank god you got here in time.” Fossen could see his wife and daughter hugging each other, crying. The students and farmhands were also embracing in relief.

The man cut Fossen’s bonds then pulled off his own hood and night vision gear.

“Jon!” Fossen smiled and grabbed his arm. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“We can’t stay here, Hank. Townspeople are on the way, but the death squad might return.”

Fossen looked around for the large crowd he’d heard moments before but saw no one. “I thought they were here already.”

“They will be soon.”

“But I just heard them.”

Jon pointed at a device affixed to his forearm. “Hypersonic sound projector. I created the impression of an approaching mob.” He looked up. “We should get to cover.”

“Jesus Christ! It’s only you?”

Suddenly they heard automatic weapon fire crackling in the distant fields. The students and farmhands ran for cover along with Fossen’s wife and daughter.

Jon put his night vision goggles back on and nodded to himself. “Cover your eyes, folks . . .”

“What . . . why?”

In answer the fields erupted in mind-blasting bursts of light and skin-crawling eruptions of sound that seemed to be tearing apart reality.

Fossen turned away and covered his ears. “My god, what is that?”

“Sensory assault. You might feel some nausea. Battle armor is synchronized to cancel out the effects.” Jon helped Fossen get to his feet.

The gunfire had stopped.

“Then we’re safe?”

Jon nodded toward the darkness. “We’ve got friends close at hand, now. I see call-outs approaching.”

“Hank!”

Fossen turned to see his old friend, Sheriff Dave Westfield, at the front of a dozen armed townspeople from Greeley, all of whom wore HUD glasses. They were running up from the darkness behind them. “God, am I glad to see you guys.”

They lowered their weapons as they arrived. “Well, don’t thank us. Thank Jon. He’s the one who detected these bastards and sent out the alarm.”

Fossen looked at his wife and daughter, then back to Jon. “I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

“That dinner was plenty.”

“Look . . .”

The crowd turned to see a group of darknet fighters coming out of the night from the direction the paramilitaries fled. The fighters were led by a darknet soldier in full composite body armor and enclosed helmet. He had an electronic pistol in one hand, and was guiding a dazed-looking prisoner with the other. Fossen knew at a glance that the prisoner was the Big Man who had tried to hang him.

The townspeople cheered and clapped as the party came in from the darkness. Jon pulled off his night vision glasses again.

The heaviliy armored soldier passed his prisoner into the custody of the sheriff. Then he just stood nodding to himself as he beheld Jon. He twisted his helmet to remove it, revealing a vaguely familiar face and a shaved head. He smiled and laughed hard as he grabbed Jon into a backslapping hug. “I can’t believe it! Jon Ross!”

“It’s been a long time, Pete. I’m glad you’re still alive.”

They exchanged world-weary looks. “Likewise.”

“How’s your quest going?”

“It’s hard to tell.”

He turned and shouted, “Price!”

A voice in the darkness answered. “Yes, Sergeant.”

“Make sure this prisoner gets brain-scanned. Let’s find out who sent him.”

As Fossen, the sheriff, and the others looked on, Jon and the bald-headed soldier walked off. “There’s a lot we need to talk about, Jon. . . .”

Chapter 26: // Privacy Policy

It had been twenty-one years since Stanislav Ibanescu had worn the uniform of the Securitate, but he had never stopped making a living as a soldier. The world over, war was a growth business, and he knew he’d never go unemployed like his brothers. And earlier in the evening he had thought that no one back home would have believed that he was invading America. It had all been a dream come true.

But that was three hours ago and a long drive down dark roads into unknown captivity. Who these people were who held him was anyone’s guess—but they sure didn’t seem like a ragtag group of terrorists.

He considered the night’s events. The op had gone off without a hitch, and they were about to kill the target subject and leave. But a counterstrike team had assaulted them out of nowhere. The look-outs hadn’t reported a thing. In fact, Ibanescu hadn’t seen more than half a dozen of his men since they’d been captured.

Were they U.S. Army? Socom units? They were supposed to have free rein in this area. That’s what they’d been told by their contact, but it must have been a setup. Now he knew half his men were either dead or wounded, and the other half had been divided up and trundled off to god knew where. Now the tables had turned, and men who looked like science-fiction convention warriors in plastic armor and full headgear with mother-of-pearl faceplates were marching him down a white hallway glowing with light. Ibanescu was strapped to a backboard—even his head had been completely immobilized, and he knew what was coming next was torture. They were going to waterboard him, like he’d heard the Americans did. He was just hoping that this was a professional crew—one reachable by logic. One not doing this for kicks. He could then clear up this mistake. Because that was what it must be. Perhaps they were a local unit—one that hadn’t been informed. One thing was sure: this was going to cost extra. In any event, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d received at the hands of the Chechens.

The two armored soldiers brought Ibanescu into a strange chamber filled with what looked to be medical scanning equipment—like some sort of MRI or CAT scan equipment—cold and efficient. And even though he didn’t see anything around that could be used to torture him, he didn’t imagine it was far away.

Mercifully, he didn’t see any place where they could waterboard him without getting some expensive equipment wet.

The guards lifted the backboard holding their prisoner up onto a platform beneath the scanning equipment, and then lashed the board to the scanner bed.

Here we go.

He was suddenly sliding with the whir of electric motors, moving deeper into the scanning machine. Were they perhaps checking him for injuries? That seemed odd.

The backboard jerked to a stop, and Ibanescu soon heard the telltale sound of MRI magnets hammering, chirping, and pinging for one or two minutes. He’d gone through this before in Switzerland after a head injury while skiing.

As the scanning continued, a soothing female voice came to his ears, speaking English. Inbanescu knew some English, and he was able to decipher it.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It was an oddly synthetic-sounding voice. He decided to pretend he didn’t understand and just kept staring up at the interior of the scanning machine.

“Yes. You do understand me.”

They were bluffing. He felt certain.

“Is English your primary language?” A pause. “No. It isn’t. Let’s find your primary language.”

This was strange. It definitely sounded like an artificial voice. Like something he might hear from a credit card or airline customer service line. Very strange. He wondered if this was some sort of automated interrogation system. Leave it to the Americans.

The soothing female voice spoke in a dozen different languages, waiting five or six seconds between each. Ibanescu didn’t understand any of them, although he thought he could detect French and German. Also Czech. Eventually she came to Rumanian. . . .

“Is your native language Rumanian?”

He was damned if he was going to answer. He just lay there like a statue.

Her voice responded differently this time. “Yes. You are Rumanian, aren’t you?”

He frowned. How the hell . . . ?

The rest of her words came to him in slightly stilted, synthetic-voiced Rumanian. “This machine is a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. It monitors the blood activity in your brain to identify patterns of deception, recognition, and emotion—such as fear or anger. You will be unable to evade my inquiries. So please relax and enjoy your interrogation.”

Ibanescu just frowned at the machine around him.

“Please speak your full name and place of birth.”

Were they serious? He wasn’t about to tell them anything. He just lay there silently.

“It appears you are either unable or unwilling to respond.”

Suddenly a map of the globe was projected onto the ceiling of the scanning chamber. It looked a lot like a Web mapping program, with the globe spinning slowly in space. The map zoomed in on Rumania as the globe stopped spinning.

“Where were you born?”

Asking again wasn’t going to help. It did feel comforting to see the map of his homeland, however. It was a detailed, physical map, showing the mountains and lakes. He could see a dot on the map for his hometown of Piteşti, northwest of Bucureşti.

Before he knew it, the view of the map centered on Piteşti.

Holy shit. Was this system tracking his eyes? Did it sense that he was focusing on Piteşti? What an idiot he was to fall for that! The map was zooming in now to a full-screen satellite view of Piteşti. He shut his eyes.

“You are from Piteşti, aren’t you?” There was a pause during which Ibanescu clenched his eyes tightly. “Yes, you are. This is where you were born, isn’t it? Do you still have family there?” A pause. “Yes. You do.”

He was starting to lose his mind. How was this hellish machine discovering these things? It was obviously reading his neural activity or something. This was a nightmare.

“I have access to records from this . . . nation state. Let’s discover who you are. Does your last name begin with an . . . A?”

Ibanescu realized that closing his eyes wasn’t going to help. He opened them again and just stared at the detailed aerial view of his hometown. This was insane. He was being processed by a machine that was sucking the information through his ears.

“Does your name begin with B? C? D? E? . . .” And on it went.

He just stared in numb disbelief as the machine finally came to “I” and then halted. It asked again. “I?” A pause. “Good. Now the second letter. Is it A? B?” Another pause. “B? Good. Now the third letter . . .”

And so it continued with relentless precision until it had teased Ibanescu’s name from his mind. It finally said in a stilted, machine mispronunciation, “Mr. Ibanescu, what is your legal first name?”

A series of names scrolled slowly across the ceiling in front of him, but he no longer tried to close his eyes. What was the point? He knew it would simply speak the letters into his ears—which was even more excruciating.

Sure enough, as the list scrolled down through the S’s and centered on “Stanislav,” the scroll slowed. Then stopped. “Stanislav” was highlighted in bold. “Stanislav Ibanescu. Is this your legal name?”

He knew there would be a pause, followed by the inevitable, “Yes. This is your legal name. Are you Stanislav Ibanescu of Trivale bloc 25A?”

Now he did close his eyes. This machine had in a matter of ten minutes completely identified him. It now knew who his family was, his history, everything. What a nightmare technology was. Then he thought, If we had had this technology in the Securitate, we would never have fallen from power. Whoever was doing this was someone he wanted to be part of. These people were winners.

Just when you think America is finished . . .

Now he was looking at his official state identification photo, his employment history, and his military history. It showed that he was currently employed by Alexandru International Solutions. His most recent tax copayments were from his employer, and this system seemed to have access to all of it.

“Were you sent here by your current employer . . . Alexandru International Solutions?” There was a pause. “Yes, you were.” Another pause. “Did your job responsibilities include perpetrating acts of violence against unarmed civilians?” Another pause. “Yes. It did.” Yet another pause. “The financial resources of . . . Alexandru International Solutions . . . have just been deleted.”

He tried to shake his head in disbelief, but couldn’t even manage that in the viselike grip of the head restraints.

“Now let’s determine your social network. What is the primary means you use to contact your handler? Is it e-mail?” A pause. “No. Is it phone?” A pause. “Yes. By phone. What is the first digit of your contact’s phone number? Is it 1... 2... ?”

Ibanescu sighed deeply. His career, if not his life, was over. He stared intently ahead.

“I would like application. Yes? Is this the word? Application?”

Chapter 27: // Reunion

Pete Sebeck and Jon Ross sat in an outdoor cafe on Greeley, Iowa’s Main Street. Around their table sat another half-dozen people, various locals who had been following Sebeck’s quest on the darknet feeds, as well as his recent exploits against paramilitaries. Introductions were long over, as was the meal, and the group was now talking animatedly. On the far side of the table, Laney Price was debating with an online gaming economist named Modius, while their hosts laughed uproariously. Today, Price’s T-shirt read: “What would Roy Merritt do?”

Sebeck sipped his espresso and chuckled. He turned to Ross. “Laney’s kept me sane. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

“I guess it was luck of the draw that the Daemon selected him to revive you.”

Sebeck grew somber. “My past life seems like a thousand years ago, Jon.”

“I know the feeling.”

“I think about my wife and my son every day, but contacting them would only put them in danger. And what would I say?” Sebeck raised his hands dramatically. “ ‘I’m not a mass murderer and by the way, the Daemon is real’ ?”

Ross had no response.

Sebeck leaned back in his seat. “So there I was in federal prison and imagine how I felt when they told me you were an imposter all that time we were working together on the Sobol murder case.”

Ross grimaced. “Yes, you probably wanted to strangle me.”

“I thought you’d framed me, Jon.” He took another sip of his espresso. “So what do I call you now?” He pointed up at Ross’s call-out. “It’s not really ‘Rakh,’ is it?”

“No.”

“What the hell does ‘Rakh’ mean, anyway?”

“It’s Russian. Look, one advantage of the darknet is that no one needs to know who you were. Because they know who you are.”

Sebeck gestured up to Ross’s darknet reputation score. “Meaning you’re someone people can rely on.”

Ross nodded. “That’s what matters, isn’t it?”

Sebeck pondered the question. “Well, you sure were right about Sobol in those early days. We should have listened to you.”

“Should you have?” Ross gestured to the bustling small town around them.

Unlike many Midwestern towns, Greeley appeared to be undergoing a renaissance. Main Street was lined with recently renovated brick storefronts and micro-manufacturing shops with their roll-top doors opened to reveal machinists and customers poking at D-Space objects, negotiating and ordering 3-D plans off the darknet. CNC milling machines hummed in the workshops beyond.

In the street dozens of young adults, young families, and even middle-aged folks with call-outs over their heads walked, clicking on one another’s data, interacting in multiple dimensions as though it were a natural extension of reality. Already second nature.

It reminded Sebeck of something Riley said to him months ago in New Mexico about social interactions where race and gender didn’t matter. They were all members of the network here, and Sebeck had found himself increasingly looking at people’s call-outs to really know who they were. Reputation mattered more than physical appearance, and he was shocked at how quickly his brain had made that transition. Everyone had the same color call-out in the darknet.

Sebeck dialed down the number of layers he was looking at and reduced the range of his D-Space vision to prevent call-out overload. He wondered how long it had been going on like this. Judging by the scaffolding and ongoing construction, it hadn’t been long. Most of these folks were probably new arrivals from suburbs and cities. Or perhaps returning from suburbs and cities.

Ross was watching the people of the small town, too. “Given what we both now know—it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it was for better or for worse. If society continues to come apart, who’s to say this won’t wind up saving lives and civil society?”

“So, what made you finally decide to join the darknet?”

“Have you ever heard of a sorcerer named Loki?”

Sebeck shook his head.

“He’s possibly the most powerful Daemon operative alive. He nearly killed me. He killed just about everyone I worked with.”

“And that convinced you to join the darknet? I’d expect the opposite reaction.”

“If this new network is going to have a future, it can’t be ruled by bloodthirsty sociopaths like Loki. And there was another person on that task force—a man they call The Major—who made me realize the existing order is even worse.”

Sebeck nodded. “I’ve heard of The Major. Hell, people are looking all over for that guy. He’s the one who shot Roy Merritt—the Burning Man.”

“I knew Roy. I worked with him. He’s the one who got me onto the government team. We were both betrayed by The Major.”

Sebeck raised his eyebrows. “So you’ve got some powerful enemies.”

“Here’s what I’m worried about, Pete: the darknet is an encrypted wireless mesh network—constantly changing—but it’s got to have some elements that tie it together, and I’m worried that some very advanced minds are working on a means to hack into the Daemon and take control of it.”

“You think that’s possible?”

He nodded. “This new spring of freedom might be short-lived if that’s the case. And I’ve lived through false springs before.”

“So this Major guy is . . .”

“Part of a financial system that rules behind the scenes. They seem to know the global economy is faltering, and they view the Daemon as a way to retain control. Darknet news feeds are recording a rise in violent repression around the world—focused on resilient darknet communities. They don’t want people to be like this. . . .” He gestured to the town.

“You mean self-reliant.”

“Exactly. Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What your Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.”

“Laney calls it ‘neofeudalism.’ ”

Price’s voice rose across the table. “And it’s happening already, Sergeant. Mark my words.”

Ross turned to Price. “What do you mean, Laney?”

“See, in medieval Europe a mounted knight in armor could defeat almost any number of peasants.” He jabbed a fork in Ross’s direction. “The modern elite warrior is much the same—they can mow down mass conscripted armies with superior technology. So what happens when small elite forces can overwhelm citizen forces of almost any size? We return to feudalism—landless serfs and a permanent ruling class. Just look at the fortified upscale neighborhoods now being built with their own private security forces. It’s neofeudalism, man.”

Ross turned back to Sebeck.

Sebeck shook his head. “I’ll never understand how we let this happen.”

“Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you—not just once every few years on things you haven’t got a chance in hell of affecting.”

Sebeck finished the last of his espresso. “Look, I can see distributed democracy working in holons like this, but can we really run an entire civilization off something that was essentially a gaming engine?”

“Can you name anything else that’s as battle tested? It’s been attacked nine ways to Sunday by every leet hacker on the planet. Sobol basically used an army of teen gamers to beta test the operating system for a new civilization. I guess all those hours gaming weren’t a waste of time, after all.”

Price laughed. “Right on, man.”

Sebeck glanced at the Scale of Themis at the center of his HUD display. Locally, power was leaning a bit to the left—widely distributed. “Jon, humor me: look at the Scale of Themis.”

“Okay.” Ross started clicking on D-Space objects. “What about it?”

“I’ve been noticing this. Dial it back to look at the global distribution of darknet power.”

Ross did so, and Sebeck already knew what he was seeing; the Scale of Themis had moved dramatically to the right—nearly three-quarters of the way. It meant that darknet power in much of the world was concentrated in relatively few hands.

“Is this really an improvement over what we have now? You’ll find the reputation ranking per level is below average also—two stars out of five. So there’s a concentration of power among people of questionable character.”

Ross confirmed this with a few clicks and stared at the objects in D-Space. “The darknet is still new in many places—and being taken up first by misfits and outsiders—like most new frontiers. That was the case here in the beginning as well—just look at Loki’s reputation score.”

“But let’s not just drink the Kool-Aid here. We should always be asking ourselves if—”

“Excuse me. I don’t mean to bother you. . . .”

Sebeck looked up to see a man in his early thirties, with his wife and their infant in a stroller. The man’s call-out identified him as Prescott3, his wife as Linah. “Sorry to interrupt you, but I couldn’t help notice your quest icon. Are you Pete Sebeck?”

Sebeck nodded.

“I’ve been following your quest for months. It’s an honor to have you here in Greeley. I wonder if we could get a picture with you?”

Sebeck could see the man was a sixth-level Architect with a three-star reputation score. He looked back down at the man himself, and suddenly realized how the world had changed. “Sure. Happy to.”

“Oh, that’s so nice of you. Here. . . .” He picked up his infant and extended him for Sebeck to hold in his lap. Sebeck accepted the child uncertainly—it had been a long time since he’d held an infant. As he looked down at the child, he couldn’t help but think of his own son, Chris. Sebeck had barely been seventeen when he became a father.

The parents moved in on either side of Sebeck’s chair. “I want to have this picture to show Aaron when he grows up.”

Ross was standing now looking at the four of them, aiming his HUD glasses. Sebeck remembered that most HUD glasses had built-in cameras. It was the source of all the many millions of photos and videos people were uploading to the darknet—the eyes of this distributed society.

“Smile. . . .”

Everyone smiled.

Ross then slid the virtual photo across D-Space over to the parents, and then he slid a copy over to Sebeck as well.

The parents were cooing as they collected their son. “That looks great. Thank you so much, Rakh. Detective Sebeck. The very best of luck on your quest—for all our sakes.”

The parents started moving off, the father holding his son in his arms.

Ross watched them go. “Let’s talk about this quest of yours.”

“What about it? The Thread has been leading me in a circle around the town of Greeley for a week now. There’s something here I’m supposed to be doing or getting or understanding—and I’m not.”

“Do you think the Cloud Gate is here in Greeley?”

Sebeck shook his head. “The gate is supposed to appear after humanity justifies its freedom to the Daemon—not before.”

“And Sobol gave you no indication how we were supposed to justify our freedom?”

“No. He was annoyingly vague.”

Ross pondered the question. “This Thread has been leading you to events—not places? Correct?”

“Yeah. For the last seven months Price and I have found ourselves at the center of just about every major change now under way. I’ve seen the rise of the new power infrastructure, the new economy, the new fMRI legal system—you name it. That’s how my reputation grew so fast. We just always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.”

“Well, then we do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Something big is about to happen in Greeley.”

Chapter 28: // Sky Ranch

Natalie Philips shared the Cessna Citation III business jet with only one other passenger as it flew high above . . . well, somewhere. The destination was classified. In the absence of reading materials or a laptop, she had difficulty keeping her thoughts from wandering. She wasn’t even permitted a pad of paper or a pen. So instead she used her prodigious memory to recall her exploit code line by line—searching for flaws.

The interior of the plane was roomy and reasonably comfortable, but there was no easy way for her not to be in view of the other passenger. He was a disheveled man in his sixties with unruly gray hair, a sizable belly, a cheap suit, and a wide, striped tie in a careless knot. He smelled of alcohol from the moment he got on the plane. He was staring into space—or so Philips had thought.

“You mind if we turn that on?”

Philips looked up at him and then toward the front of the cabin where a flat-panel television screen was set into the bulkhead. “I don’t think we can get television. It’s probably for video.”

The man sighed and got to his feet, grabbing a remote from a low table. “I saw the HD satellite antenna on the fuselage. They always want to know what the media is saying. If we’re gonna be here for a while . . .”

He clicked the television on, and it was already set to a news channel. On-screen newscaster Anji Anderson was talking, while behind her video played of masked gunmen looting a shop in a town somewhere in Kansas. The Chiron read, “Illegals on a Rampage.”

Anderson’s voice came through clearly even over the jet engine noise,”. . . another night of violence. Armed gangs of men—believed to be undocumented laborers and drug dealers. Local residents have taken up arms in defense of their property, but the problem seems to be growing ever worse as the economy continues to crumble.”

The guy sighed, nodding to himself. “You gotta hand it to ’em.” He looked at his watch then continued clicking through the channels. . . .

News followed by news, and all of it showing mayhem in the streets of middle America. One of the graphics bore the title “Rape Counseling Center” in bold letters, followed by addresses and phone numbers in several states. He kept clicking—cartoons, a shopping channel, and more disturbing newscasts.

“Can we just watch one thing, please?”

“So, why’d they call you down?”

Philips turned to him. “I don’t discuss my work.”

He smirked. “I used to be like that.”

“Well, I’m still like that.”

He muted the television as burning houses filled the screen, and put the remote down. “Too bad they don’t have a bar on this thing. I could really use a drink.”

Philips tried to ignore him.

“Name’s Rob, by the way. You are?”

Philips just looked at his extended hand. “Rob, no offense, but we’re not intended to socialize. There’s a serious crisis under way. I suggest you use this time to concentrate on what you’ll do about it.”

“Ah.” He retracted his hand. “So you already accepted an offer, then.”

Philips felt suddenly irritated. “I didn’t accept anything. I’ve been loaned to Weyburn Labs from a government agency.”

“And that’s how it goes.” He sat down across from her. “I was in government work. But after a while you just . . .” He looked around the cabin. “Christ, I could use a drink!”

She said nothing and tried to return her focus to her remembered code.

“You know, I did tours in some real shithole dictatorships, let me tell you. We helped build a huge commercial empire overseas. Hell, we were facing down communism in those days. A lot of questionable things were done to contain the Soviets. We installed a lot of dictators who were business-friendly. But we didn’t give much thought to what would happen after.”

“I don’t think you should be talking about this, Rob.”

“Why not? I’ve got nothing to lose anymore. Did you ever feel like that?”

She just stared at him.

“Do you know why it was possible for the Krasnaya mafiya—the Russian mafia—to spring up, fully formed, organized, and financed so soon after the fall of the USSR? Didn’t you ever wonder where those guys came from?”

Philips considered it and realized she hadn’t.

“The intelligence sector. The KGB. Those guys were spread around the world. They had covert communications, bank accounts, and knowledge to move and launder money. They had useful skills like eavesdropping, weapons, assassination, and they had incentive—lots of enemies.

“After the Cold War, some of our own guys didn’t come home either. They helped to keep in place the system built overseas to hold back communism, and it became the system we’re all a part of now.”

“Are you referring to a conspiracy to betray the United States?”

Rob shook his head. “Betraying America doesn’t require a conspiracy. That’s what Sobol figured out. It’s why he was able to hack into it. The free market is just a system of positive and negative reinforcement with a few interchangeable fixers to maintain it. The sole purpose of that system is to maximize profit. For whom the returns are made is irrelevant. Those who make the profits might turn around and become great philanthropists—who knows? Who cares? Because there’s always another set of investors who want in. Who want to work the split-second fluctuations of the markets to get very rich, very fast. They might not ever know what’s done in their name. That was the secret Sobol knew. And what he did was create a new system that leveraged a broader human will. That’s what freaks these guys out. The Daemon is the first true threat they’ve faced.”

“But what they do overseas has no legal authority here in the States.”

He stared at her for a moment—then laughed. “International trade agreements are equivalent to constitutional amendments. They’re the ‘supreme law of the land’ according to article four, paragraph two. That means we must meet foreign trade obligations or face reforms—and I’ve seen firsthand what those reforms do. They create a have and have-not society. The rich are bunkering down. It’s not a conspiracy, just a reaction to a process set in motion. You don’t even have to know what the goal is. That’s why systems work—because they don’t rely on individuals.”

They sat for a few moments in silence, listening to the drone of the plane’s engines.

“If this is what you believe, why are you on this flight?”

He shrugged. “Eventually, you come to realize it’s inevitable. What’s about to happen can’t be stopped.”

Philips stepped from the jet into withering humidity and a merciless prairie sun. She looked across a stretch of sun-bleached tarmac—fear turning her feet to lead.

Two dozen heavily armed soldiers in MTV body armor patterned in universal camouflage, Kevlar helmets, and ballistic goggles stood in ranks, cradling M4A1 rifles with full SOPMOD hardware. They just stared, face-forward, without acknowledging her existence.

Philips walked toward the reception committee.

At first she couldn’t tell what division or corps the soldiers belonged to, but as she came within thirty feet she could make out a nondescript logo above their breast pockets—where an American GI’s last name would normally go. It read simply: “KMSI.” She knew it well; Korr Military Solutions, Inc.—the private military arm of its parent, Korr Security International.

She glanced around the airfield. A modern control tower with a rotating radar dish stood above an American flag drooping lazily in the torpid heat. Beyond stood hangars and row after row of gleaming aircraft—Bombardiers, Gulfstream Vs, a mammoth Boeing Business Jet. A couple billion dollars in private aircraft. In the distance, she could see squads of soldiers marching double-time toward distant hangars from the belly of an unmarked C-17 cargo aircraft. Hundreds of soldiers were in her field of view. A corporate army. What the hell was this place?

Suddenly a nearby non-com shouted in a hoarse voice, “Pochodem vchod! Zrýchlené vpred!” and the soldiers responded in unison with a guttural “Hah!” and began to march off double-time.

Philips watched as the troops moved in formation across the tarmac, toward a distant, taxiing transport plane. For a moment she wasn’t sure what to do next.

But the soldier’s departure revealed a square-jawed man in a sweat-soaked shirt and a photographer’s vest moving briskly toward her. A KMSI photo ID badge wagged on his lapel as he walked, and he was completely absorbed in flipping through papers in a dispatch case. He finally looked up to reveal mirrored sunglasses and smiled broadly. “Dr. Philips, Clint Boynton, Sky Ranch Services.” He offered his hand.

Philips just glared at him. “What is this place, Boynton?”

He started flipping through folders in the dispatch case again. “I’ve got that here.”

“I don’t think you have to look in there to tell me where we are.”

“An undisclosed location.” He pulled a thick Mylar envelope from the case. It was stamped “Top Secret” in four places. He handed it to her. “The decision to bring you here was made at the highest level.”

“The White House is involved?”

Boynton laughed, then apparently realized Philips was serious.

She took the envelope from him and felt the weight of it. There was a thick report inside. In her experience a document this heavy meant somebody had just spent several hundred million dollars.

Boynton pointed. “I’m told you’ll find answers to your questions in there. There’s a cover letter.”

She sighed and ripped the seal on the envelope, pulling out the contents. There was a thick bound report inside entitled “Project Exorcist,” with an attached letter, addressed to her. It was on Pentagon stationery. “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” As she had been told, she was being loaned out to Weyburn Labs—for Operation Exorcist. She maintained a poker face.

“I’ve been instructed to—”

Philips just interrupted him with one upheld hand, then started flipping through the fifty-page bound report at great speed.

“Doctor?”

Philips ignored him and continued flipping pages. In half a minute she’d reached the last page. She looked up again. “Very, very interesting . . .”

Boynton pointed at it in disbelief. “You just read that?”

“Only the useful parts. Some of the estimates are overly optimistic, but still . . .”

Boynton snapped his dispatch case shut. “In any event, you’re now part of the Weyburn Labs team.” He looked at his watch.

“We’ve got a forty-mile drive ahead of us, Doctor, and time is tight.”

“We’re going to this Sky Ranch?”

“You’re already on the ranch, and we won’t be leaving it.” He raised his arm and curled the four fingers of his hand.

Several vehicles emerged from a nearby hangar: a rose-colored Mercedes Maybach limousine followed by a couple of Chevy Sub-urbans with blacked-out windows.

The Maybach rolled to a stop in front of Philips and Boynton. The passenger door bore a family crest, as though it was some Renaissance coach and four horses. The crest was a riot of cattle, rifles, and oil derricks.

She’d seen it once in a library book when she was a child. Great American Families. “The Aubrey coat of arms.”

Boynton smiled. “I’m impressed, Doctor. The Aubreys no longer own an interest in the property, but the holding company still uses their coat of arms as a logo.”

Philips nodded. “They owned the largest contiguous parcel of private land in the United States. 784,393 acres. Larger than the state of Rhode Island.”

Boynton grinned. “If we play Trivial Pursuit, can I be on your team? In all fairness, it’s more like two million—not that anyone would know.” He motioned for her to approach the waiting limousine.

“Why such a large piece of land?”

“Privacy. We’re seventy-five miles from the nearest town. The outer perimeter is ten miles from where you’re standing and ringed with the latest seismic sensors and cameras. The sky is swept by radar, and we’ve got a battalion of crack troops in garrison—including an artillery section. The Daemon would have difficulty sneaking up on us out here.”

Philips nodded.

Soldiers wielding what looked to be metal detection or radio frequency wands emerged from the Suburban and approached Philips. Other soldiers moved to take her luggage.

“What’s this?”

“Necessary, I’m afraid. No outside electronic devices or weapons of any kind are permitted on the ranch. The Daemon is cunning and the secrecy of this operation is vital. Your understanding is greatly appreciated.”

She had left her phone and laptop back in Maryland, but they riffled through her purse and carry-on bag with gusto.

They also started scanning her body.

In moments, they detected her watch and the silver amulet on a chain around her neck. They scanned both closely then nodded to Boynton that they were okay.

A soldier now strapped a small gray plastic bracelet around her wrist. He fastened it into place with a rivet gun and ran tests on it with an electronic device.

Philips looked at it. “You’re strapping a transponder on me?”

A soldier snapped a digital photograph of her.

Boynton held up his hands reassuringly. “RFID tag for tracking purposes. Don’t try to remove it.” He pointed to the one on his own wrist. “It’s your identity while on the ranch. It’ll send an alert if it’s tampered with. Sensors at the entrances to most buildings will go into alarm if you enter without one. Likewise if you enter restricted areas. And alarms are responded to with lethal force. These RFID tags let the troops know that you’re friendly, and we’ve got quite a few snipers out there—so please wear it at all times.”

Boynton opened the door to the first limousine and gestured for Philips to get inside.

She lingered at the open car door. “Why is the airfield so far from the house?”

“The FAA restricted the airspace within a twenty-mile radius of the mansion.”

Philips nodded. “I guess after 9/11 you can’t be too careful.”

Boynton looked confused.

“Planes as weapons.”

Boynton thought for a moment, then nodded. “Oh, right.” He gestured again for Philips to get inside the car. “If you please . . .”

She got inside.

The drive to the main house was a blur of grass and scrublands. For all the signs warning of cattle and the dozens of cattle guards they rumbled over, Philips never saw one. Instead she saw military units and anti-aircraft missile batteries.

Even though she remembered every word of what she’d read of the Aubreys, she was still stunned at the sight of their mansion. After World War II they’d purchased an English manor house from one of the grand estates of central England—one that had gone bankrupt as the British Empire started to collapse. They’d had the house dismantled stone by stone and reassembled here in south Texas. A hundred-room neoclassical mansion done in solid granite blocks, replete with acres of ornamental gardens and statuary.

It was as if Philips had just rolled up to Castle Howard in Regency-period England. The cobblestone courtyard in front circled around a massive Italian fountain, blasting water thirty feet in the air from a dozen cherubic lips—with a muscular stallion rearing up over it all. It looked as though the Aubreys had sacked Europe. For all Philips knew, they had.

Linked to the back of the house by a covered causeway was what looked to be a sizable modern conference facility, done in smoked glass and granite.

The Maybach stopped under the shadow of twin marble stair-cases rolling out from the massive front door of the house. Philips stepped from the limousine as a valet in a red livery coat held the door for her.

Boynton had exited the Suburban and walked past them. “This way, Doctor.”

Philips followed Boynton through a maze of ornately furnished hallways dotted with armed guards. With every room they entered, she heard a beep as radio frequency sensors along the doorways logged her movements.

They passed people in impeccable suits and diverse military uniforms walking in groups of two or three, all hurrying off somewhere.

“So you have more than KMSI troops on this project?”

Boynton nodded absently. “We’ve had to gather several dozen corporate military providers to deliver the needed manpower. Not to mention the expertise.”

Philips followed Boynton into the center of an echoing ballroom and was dumbstruck at its size. It was dotted with sets of ornate furniture on islands of carpet and bustled with activity. People of various ethnic extractions, either military or smartly attired civilians, moved in and out, talking in hushed tones in English, Mandarin, Arab, Tagalog, Russian, and several other languages she didn’t recognize. The ceiling was easily forty feet high. Philips craned her neck to look up at the murals. She had visited Versailles once, before joining the NSA, but the Sun King’s palace exuded a neutered magnificence. This palace was still alive with authority.

“Doctor.”

Philips turned to see Boynton gesturing to a rich damask divan. She hadn’t noticed him moving on without her. She caught up.

“Please have a seat. You’ll be called soon.” He nodded toward a distant buffet table with uniformed staff. “Feel free to have a bite. I hear the quail is excellent. Hunted locally.”

“Thank you, no.”

Boynton raced off, checking his watch, and Philips sat on the sofa. Her eyes swept the walls, taking in the dozens of massive paintings. They seemed like a cross between royal portraits and roadside billboards, depicting eighteenth-century battles from the Continent, landscapes, and portraits of nineteenth-century railroad barons leaning on walking sticks. Their gold-leaf frames were so ornate they looked like collections of medieval weaponry, dipped in gold paint and glued together.

Philips glanced around at the knots of people talking softly and in earnest. Military officers nodded and pointed at satellite photographs—all in the open. What was this place? It was the NSA without internal security and with a decorating budget gone out of control.

Philips leaned back and recalled the details she’d just read of Operation Exorcist. The complete, simultaneous extermination of the Daemon from critical data centers throughout the world. A Daemon-blocker patch, capable of interdicting the self-destruct signal on infected networks. An ambitious plan, but notably not one that destroyed the Daemon—one that simply blocked the Daemon from destroying selected targets.

The question was how she’d be able to use their resources to carry out her own plan: to destroy the Daemon.

Philips was dozing an hour later when a booming voice nearby suddenly shook her awake. A tall, loose-jowled Texan in his sixties wearing a bespoke suit was slapping a nearby Chinese statesman on the back and speaking with a powerful Southern drawl. “How ya’ll settlin’ in? They treatin’ ya a’right, Genr’l Zhang?” He smiled broadly and broke into Mandarin. “Ni hao ma? Wo feichang gaoxing you jihui gen nin hezuo.” He smiled and shook the man’s hand.

The Armani-suited “general” nodded back grimly and exchanged a firm handshake just a shade removed from an arm-wrestling match.

“Mr. Johnston, health to your family.”

Philips caught Johnston’s eye. “Excuse me, Genr’l.” He strode toward Philips, turning his powerful voice on her. “Dr. Philips. Why don’t you come on in here for a chat?” He grabbed a uniformed servant by the arm, but kept his eyes on Philips. “You want something? Coffee? Tea?”

“Nothing for me. Excuse me, have we been introduced?”

“Damn me, we haven’t.” He extended his hand and nearly crushed hers with it. “Aldous Morris Johnston; I’m fortunate to be senior legal counsel for several companies backing Operation Exorcist.” He turned to the servant. “Get us a pot of coffee and some finger sandwiches in here.”

“Sir, no offense intended, but time is wasting. The news I saw coming in was quite dire. When can I meet with the Weyburn Labs team?”

“Doctor, that’s what we’re here to talk about.” A nearby door opened, and several suited men could be seen rushing about inside. A security man in a navy blazer and gray slacks held the door. An earphone wire ran down into his collar.

Johnston was leading Philips along. “Now that you’re part of the team, we want to get your input on the overall direction of the effort.”

They moved into a sitting room warmly furnished with more human-scale sofas and chairs and wall-to-wall carpet. The security man closed the door and stood, hands clasped in front of him. Paperwork was everywhere on the coffee tables, and several suited men were tapping furiously on laptop keyboards. A bank of towering windows filled the far wall and bathed the room in diffuse light. The frames were arched into gothic points but the glass was smoked—keeping out much of the daytime heat. Beyond the windows lay vast grasslands dotted with horses.

“It’s something, isn’t it? Our group owns it all as far as the eye can see.”

Philips nodded at the view. “Including the sky, apparently.”

He didn’t seem to notice. “It’s a rare joy on horseback—especially at dawn.”

Johnston patted a large upholstered chair. Philips bristled at this potential display of social rank and sexism combined—but realized she was being childish and sat where invited. Johnston sat on the arm of a nearby sofa. Someone shoved a bone china cup and saucer into her hand, and a servant in a dinner jacket and white gloves poured steaming coffee from a silver pot.

Johnston gestured toward three other men sitting nearby—lots of symmetrically graying temples and impeccable tailoring on display. “Dr. Philips, this is Greg Lawson, Adam Elsberg, Martin Sylpannic.”

They nodded in turn as people came and went from various doors in the background.

“Are you gentlemen with Weyburn Labs?”

Johnston laughed. “No, no, Doctor. They’re with one of our Houston-based firms. They’re here to represent the interests of key partners.”

Philips placed the coffee cup on a nearby table. “Gentlemen, why am I sitting here? I need to speak with the Weyburn Labs team. Events are unfolding in the streets right now. Action needs to be taken.”

“Understood, understood.” Johnston nodded, while the other men looked questioningly toward him. “But first we want to hear your thoughts, Doctor. Did you have a chance to read the briefing paper on the way in from the airfield?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

“I think there are weaknesses. First, this Daemon-blocker mentioned in the report—I don’t see how you can insinuate it into all infected networks. Especially in the timeframe indicated. Not to mention the risk of storming all these data centers simultaneously around the globe.”

One of the trio of Johnston’s aides was furiously tapping at a keyboard as she spoke.

Philips stopped for a moment. “Look, I’ve had more than a few difficulties working with private industry against the Daemon in the past. I need to know who is—”

Johnston nodded genially. “Yes, I know there was some unpleasantness—that some of our representatives might have taken wrongful actions.”

“Wrongful actions? My DOD liaison shot key group members, and destroyed our task force headquarters with demolition charges—killing everyone and destroying all our work. That’s more than a little unpleasant.”

“I understand, Doctor. But this is a war. And in war mistakes are made. It’s whether we learn from those mistakes that spells the difference between victory and defeat. We’ve tightened up the chain of command. You weren’t aware of it at the time, but the Daemon Task Force was just a pilot project. A proof of concept. And thanks to you, a successful one. Operation Exorcist is the result—a multibillion-dollar effort. It will take all of government and private industry resources to defeat the Daemon. We truly need your help.”

Philips still eyed Johnston. She figured acquiescing too quickly would seem suspect. “What about The Major?”

“He’s no longer on the project.”

“But neither is he in Leavenworth.”

“The Major needs to be kept on a short leash, but we need all hands right now, Doctor.”

“He murdered special agent Roy Merritt.”

“Understood, but nothing about this situation is personal. This is national security, and Deputy Director Fulbright assures me that you’re familiar with making leadership decisions. We think you have a bright future in the private sector, Dr. Philips. We see leadership potential in you.”

She paused as long as she thought necessary to make it appear that she was wrestling with her conscience. In actuality she was wrestling against the desire to spit into his face. “Who’s calling the shots?”

“Joint public-private advisory committee. Sounds bad, I know. But doesn’t matter—they’re back in Washington and we’re all out here. I want to hear your thoughts.”

“Who came up with the Daemon-blocker?”

“Weyburn Labs folks. Some Chinese fella.”

“The code sample in the report—it bears a disturbing similarity to some of the API calls I discovered in the IP beacon. Those API calls are not safe.”

Elsberg responded. “You needn’t worry, Doctor—”

“Don’t tell me what to worry about.”

Johnston motioned for her to calm down.

Elsberg continued. “They didn’t use the Daemon’s API. We all know it’s a trap, Doctor. Weyburn reverse-engineered the Destroy function. They found that it’s susceptible to what I believe is called a . . . a buffer overrun, and they developed a countermeasure. A ‘vaccine, ’ if you will, against the Daemon’s data-destruct command.”

“And this works?”

“It’s still in testing, but the tests were very encouraging.”

“How do you know your test case is realistic?”

“We didn’t use a test case.”

“You mean you tested on real companies?”

Johnston nodded. “Owner’s prerogative, Doctor. Sever a gangrenous limb to save the patient.”

Lawson put his two cents in. “We were hoping to have you perform a review of the Weyburn Labs code, Dr. Philips. To ensure that only code in line with the spec is present.”

“You mean you don’t trust them?”

“This is mission-critical, Doctor. There can’t be any slipups. The more trusted, expert eyes that see it, the better. We were hoping you’d be willing to help.”

“Why wasn’t I briefed and then asked to come on board—instead of being packed off on a plane with almost no warning?”

He grimaced. “I know you must feel poorly used, but again, it’s national security and couldn’t be helped.”

“And my lab facilities?”

“We’ve got everything you need. You’ve got a blank check, Doctor. Any expert in the world—you need ’em, we’ll find ’em. Any resource, we’ll get it for you. Just ask.”

“I’ll have access to all the data this time? For real?”

“You’ll have full access to our research, and vice versa. We won’t micromanage you. We’ve got some sharp people, though, Doctor: Litka Stupovich, Inra Singh . . .” Looking to Lawson. “What’s that other gal’s name?”

“Xu Li?”

“Right, Dr. Li—a Taiwanese, I believe.”

Philips nodded appreciatively. Top private industry crypto folks—some previously with the Soviet government—but world-class experts nonetheless. Philips considered the chance to work with a truly international team. It was an unheard-of opportunity for someone who rarely got to leave Fort Meade. An NSA-lifer with umbra-level clearance. She almost wished it weren’t an evil plot.

“I’m surprised at the degree of government and private industry cooperation. It’s certainly a sign of how seriously this issue is being taken.”

Johnston laughed a booming laugh. “My gawd, Doctor, this Sobol fella’s got us over a barrel. That’s for sure. We’ve got a saying in South Texas: ‘Common enemies make for uncommon friends.’ ”

Philips sat back in the chair, thinking. “I’d like to discuss this with Deputy Director Fulbright.”

Johnston grimaced. “Well, Deputy Director Fulbright doesn’t report to me, Doctor, but we’ll request a conference call if it’ll put your mind at ease.”

“I’d like to make the call.”

Johnston appraised her for a moment then nodded. “I understand. You’re careful. I respect that more than you know—especially now. I’ll arrange with Fulbright’s office for them to expect your call, Doctor. And we’ll get you access to a secure line. Won’t be until tomorrow, I expect. I hope this won’t prevent you from commencing review of Weyburn’s code. Time is, as you say, of the essence.”

Philips considered this then nodded. “I see no problem with that.”

Johnston smiled and extended his hand. “Excellent, Dr. Philips. We’re glad to have your assistance. We’ll get you settled in your new quarters. I think you’ll like them very much, and I’ll have some Weyburn folks come by and collect you. Whatever you need, you just ask. Hell, don’t hold back. Give it to us straight. If we don’t already make it, we’ll buy it.”

Johnston and his colleagues stood, signaling the end of the meeting. Philips stood also, and Johnston once again grabbed her hand in a crushing handshake.

“Doctor, welcome aboard. We look forward to much success together.”

She nodded. “Thank you, gentlemen.”

With that, they turned to meet their next appointment as they shunted Philips out a side door.

Chapter 29: // Scorched Earth

The Major stepped off the rear loading ramp of a C-130 transport plane and onto the tarmac of a deactivated U.S. Army airfield near the town of Rolla in northern Missouri. It was hot and humid. Three uniformed KMSI soldiers stood ready to greet him with sharp salutes—the center one stepping forward, extending his thick paw.

The Major knew him well—a towering, powerfully built South African, handpicked for this operation. They’d fought in more insurgency campaigns and covert wars in more countries than The Major cared to remember.

“Major. Everything is in order, sir.”

“Colonel Andriessen.” The Major shook his hand. To the uninitiated it no doubt seemed odd to hear a colonel giving deference to a major—but The Major’s nom de guerre was just that. He had long ago outstripped his last formal rank.

“Your undergarments are showing, sir.” He pointed.

The Major glanced back into the cargo hold at the closest of ten identical pallets covered in green canvas tarps. A corner clasp had broken during landing, revealing the bricks of twenty-dollar bills beneath, wrapped in cellophane. One hundred and eighty million dollars a pallet—one point eight billion dollars in all.

The Major nodded. “Get some forklifts out here.” He started them walking briskly toward a white Toyota Land Cruiser waiting nearby.

“Shall we cover it first, Major?”

“Don’t bother. It won’t be valuable for much longer.” He turned to the Colonel. “So get the payments out to the strike teams soon.”

“Yes, sir.”

A driver in KMSI BDUs was standing next to the Land Cruiser. He opened the rear door and saluted. “Welcome to Missouri, sir.”

The Major ignored him and got in, the Colonel right behind him.

As they drove across the airfield The Major could see three C-130 cargo aircraft parked near hangars, either loading or unloading equipment with forklifts. It was hard to tell the way logistics teams were milling about and pointing instead of actually doing something. Soldiers. Private or government issue, they were always bitching about something.

There were also scattered squads of heavily armed men in civilian clothes standing around near civilian vehicles. He’d much rather they stayed under cover, but it was tough to keep these guys in hangars on a hot summer day like this. It was probably over a hundred inside those metal buildings. With a seat-of-the-pants operation like this, best to let the mercs cool off.

Before long the Land Cruiser pulled up to a tired-looking brick administration building done in art deco style. Some of the windows were boarded up, but there were several generator trailers nearby with thick black cables running out the edges of the front door—which was propped open. Two guards with Masada rifles stood in the entryway in full body armor—the KMSI logo on their breast pockets.

They saluted The Major as he walked into a musty-smelling hallway, the Colonel leading the way.

“Ag, you caught me just coming back from an inspection on those Slovak bastards. They got shot up pretty good. We’re missing a few.”

The Colonel brought them down the vandalized but recently patched hallway, gesturing to the far end. “We’re back here. Not much to look at.”

They passed several sets of uniformed guards, and each office they passed was filled with command staff and lots and lots of laptops, radios, and satellite phones. Officers were busy orchestrating the movements of strike teams and making sure all necessary materiel was arriving as and when needed.

“Did they ever find that Loki fella who kept messin’ with your schedule?”

The Major shook his head. “He’s still MIA, but it’s too late for him to stop this—even if he has any power left.”

In a few moments they reached the end of the corridor and entered what was most likely the old base commander’s office, replete with a secretarial anteroom. There, a uniformed male assistant was pecking away at a laptop, while two high-strung-looking men in immaculate casual business attire stood up from folding chairs the moment the hulking South African colonel stepped through the door.

The first of these men had on an expensive-looking, large-faced chronometer and an impressive tan to go with it. He extended his hand to Andriessen. “Colonel Andriessen, I’m Nathan Sanborn, chief executive officer and chairman of Halperin Organix.” He offered his embossed business card and pointed to the other man, who carried a small black attaché case. “This is Sanjay Venkatachalapthy, our senior counsel.”

The Colonel laughed. “Ag, you’re bloody joking, right? This kefir’s got more name than a German viscount.” He looked to his assistant. “Corporal, are we letting anyone into my office now? How did these men find me?”

“Colonel, these gentlemen are well-connected in Washington.”

Sanborn interjected himself. “Look, I’ve been speaking with General Horvath and Admiral Collins—I think there’s a grave misunderstanding, gentlemen. I’ve been trying to get someone on the phone or to reply in e-mail for a week now, and I don’t appreciate having my calls dodged.” He gestured to the office. “Can we speak in private, please?”

The Colonel looked to The Major. The Major didn’t budge or respond.

The Colonel turned back to Sanborn. “We’ve got urgent business to attend to, Mr. Sanborn. Everyone here is cleared top secret. Everyone but you.”

Sanborn looked like he considered getting angry, but decided against it. With one more glance around he threw up his hands. “All right then. I’ve been given to understand that the blatant patent infringement being perpetrated against my firm is being used as a pretext for what can only be described as a paramilitary police action.”

“It’s not your concern, Mr. Sanborn.”

“No. That’s where you’re wrong—and by the way, I’m not entirely comprehending why you’re South African. Why is a South African in charge of what’s going on here? This is Missouri, not Capetown, Colonel Andriessen.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a racist, Mr. Sanborn. We Africans have had a long struggle against such prejudice.” The Colonel chuckled and looked at The Major.

Sanborn fumed.

The Colonel continued. “The global economy provides for a efficient competition. You of all people should appreciate that.”

“So what I’m not understanding is whether this is a government operation or—what is going on here?”

“Get on your fancy jet and leave, Mr. Sanborn.”

Sanborn got into the Colonel’s face—or at least his neck, given the Colonel’s height. “I’m not some pipsqueak you can push around, Colonel. I’ve got a thirty-billion-dollar company and a fiduciary responsibility to defend both its brand and its reputation.” He gestured to the nearby lawyer. “Both of which we fully intend to protect.”

“So you’re going to sic your lawyers on us then, Nate? Is that it? Every syllable of Mr. Venk-kachanky-whatever here?”

“I am deadly serious, Colonel. We have significant influence in Washington.”

The Major looked at his watch. “We’ve got a timeline to meet, Colonel.”

Sanborn pointed. “Who the hell is this guy?”

The Colonel interposed himself. “Surely this conversation can wait, Nate.”

“No. It cannot wait. Our investigators tell us that there are armored cars coming in by rail. There are military helicopters without markings being stationed at retired air bases like this across the Midwest. I’ve been watching the news—watching what’s been going on out here. This is insane. This is America, not some crack-pot dictatorship. People in government have told us that a justification is being made for these operations in defense of intellectual property held by Halperin, and I’m here to tell you that yes, we do have claims, and we are mounting lawsuits, but legal action is the course to resolve this problem. This is not a police matter—or whatever the hell you’re making it into. I’m telling you that what you’re doing is not authorized by us in defense of our business interests.”

The Major pushed the Colonel out of the way and got right back into Sanborn’s face. “Not authorized? Listen, you Ivy League prick, you don’t determine what is and isn’t authorized. Halperin isn’t your company, it’s the investors’ company. The last time I checked you didn’t found it. You’re not even a scientist. You’re just a trained business monkey that someone hired to crank an organ handle. So get back on our company jet like a good little monkey before someone sells you off for medical experiments.”

Sanborn’s face had gone from tanned to burning red as The Major’s fearsome visage got up close and personal—like a drill sergeant in basic training. Sanborn stepped back a pace. “I’m not a person who gets treated like this. You are making a mistake. I don’t know who you are, but your career is over. No one speaks to me like that.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“You have not—”

“OUT!”

Several armed KMSI soldiers suddenly appeared in the doorway, and the Colonel nodded toward Sanborn and his silent, Indian attorney. The guards made way and Sanborn led the way. “You haven’t heard the last of me.”

The Major said nothing, but only shut the office door behind them and proceeded toward the Colonel’s office. He stopped in the doorway and turned around.

Andriessen raised his eyebrows inquisitively.

“Colonel. Mr. Sanborn was ambushed by domestic insurgents on his way back home. Insurgents who were no doubt enraged at the lawsuits that he’s mounting against darknet communities throughout the Midwest. I’ll see that a psyops officer contacts your people for the proper news spin on his untimely death to ensure maximum usefulness to ongoing operations.”

The Colonel nodded. “It’s a bloody tragedy. Mr. Sanborn will be missed.” He nodded to his assistant, who picked up the phone.

The Major entered the office, let the Colonel enter, and then closed the door behind them. The Major looked the place over as an aging air conditioner labored to keep the place cool in the stifling Midwestern heat. There wasn’t even a computer or a map in the place.

The Major sat down on the edge of the desk. “Rules of Engagement for darknet communities are as follows: kill everyone you find, burn every structure, and destroy every vehicle. Without exception. The knowledge and equipment that makes these communities work must be eradicated. The cultural memory that they ever existed must be erased. Is that understood?”

The Colonel nodded, poker-faced. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t forget storm cellars and culverts. Any hiding place.” The Colonel nodded solemnly.

“As for tactics, the irregular forces will prevent civilians from escaping, while your forces move through town destroying everything in their path. Psyops units will be filming as needed. It’s important that they get some footage that resembles an operation to dislodge an insurgent occupation. I expect the residents will oblige us by resisting with force, but if not, your men should facilitate that imagery.”

“That’s a formal objective?”

“It is. One other thing, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m sending a special unit into one of the target areas. It’s a detachment out of Weyburn Labs. No one may inspect their equipment. Their mission is classified and reports directly to me. It takes priority over any other objective. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal clear, sir. I’ll make sure the men understand. What target is your team being sent to?”

“Greeley, Iowa.”

Chapter 30: // Quarantine

Pete Sebeck stood in a fabrication shop in Greeley, Iowa, watching a selective laser sintering machine print a tractor part out of metal powder. The car-sized machine used laser-generated heat to fuse the powder into a metal solid based on a digital 3-D model. The proprietor of the shop, a thirteenth-level Fabricator named Hedly, monitored the process through a tinted window.

Sebeck stood behind him listening to Diving Bruce, an “Ozzie” eleventh-level Entrepreneur, who’d come all the way from Melbourne to see what was going on in towns like Greeley. Sebeck found himself in more and more of these demonstrations as he and Price scoured the town for some idea of why the Thread brought them here.

The Australian talked with passionate intensity. “When the Daemon infected our networks, I saw it for what it was, yes? A bloody opportunity.”

Sebeck raised his eyebrows. “Even though it was stealing from you?”

“Stealing? Yes, but it was a wake-up call, too. It changed the game for everyone, didn’t it? Not just me. I realized I couldn’t have long supply chains. It would punish me—and my competitors—for doing that. That’s a level playing field. The Destroy function it installed in our network is like a hand grenade pin that anyone can pull—a ticking clock forcing us to migrate to a more sustainable, less complex system. And besides . . .” He gestured to the machines around them. “This is the future. It makes no bloody sense to transport parts thousands of miles. Creating them to-order like this from raw materials—metal powders or Arboform granules—that’s the market, mate. There are other machines that can produce circuitry from printed, flexible material. It’s a bloody third Industrial Revolution, isn’t it?”

Sebeck saw Jon Ross approaching from the shop’s open-bay entrance. Ross passed a D-Space object to Sebeck and nearby Laney Price. It appeared as an aerial photo floating next to them.

Bruce was still talking, apparently unable to see their private layer. “I’m no bloody tree-hugger. I have no intention of living in an effing yurt and milking cows each morning. Just look up at that colossal energy whore in the sky and tell me there’s an energy shortage. The sun uses up more energy in a second than mankind has used in all its history. We just need to get at it.” He ticked off items on his hands. “Solar carpet—replacing expensive platinum catalysts with metal oxides—gallium solar paint—copper indium gallium selenide—”

“Sergeant . . .” Price frowned as he examined the aerial photo.

“Excuse us, Bruce. I think something’s come up.”

Bruce extended his hand and shook Sebeck’s and Price’s enthusiastically. “Brilliant! Best of luck on your quest, and don’t forget if any darknet reporter asks you, we’re going to be replicating this shop in Queensland come December. Cheers, mate!”

Price pulled Sebeck away and they joined up with Ross near the doorway.

Sebeck shrugged. “What’s going on?”

Ross jabbed at the photo that was following them around in D-Space. “Just look. They’re encircling us.”

“Who is?”

“Serious people.”

Sebeck studied the image. “Where did you get this?”

We have two security drones orbiting this county, and we’ve come under aerial surveillance ourselves.”

“What am I looking at?”

“Let’s find a more private place to talk.” Ross motioned for them to follow. They exited the micro-fabrication shop and moved along the crowded sidewalk. Everyone looked busy on some private errand, but even as they walked, they could see news was traveling quickly through the townspeople. Photos, videos, and messages were flying through the darknet.

Ross stopped in mid-sidewalk. “News travels fast.”

Sebeck could see the feed alert appear in his HUD display: Greeley Blockaded by Security Forces. It was a highest priority alert, quickly getting upvoted. He knew that soon the system would automatically put someone in charge of dealing with it. “We’ve been surrounded?” He more closely examined the virtual photo floating in D-Space.

Ross pointed at creeks, rivers, and roads at the edge of the county. “Three-mile radius. They’re setting up checkpoints on all roads, and they’ve got unmanned surveillance drones watching the terrain. They’re cutting power lines, communications—all connection to the outside world. And we’re not the only ones. . . .”

Ross presented a digital map of the Midwestern U.S. “There are news feeds reporting similar blockades of towns in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana. . . . It’s a carefully orchestrated campaign to isolate darknet communities.”

Sebeck studied the map. “And we’re at the center of it.”

Ross tilted his head. “So we are.” He looked up. “Does that mean the Daemon had advance notice of this?”

“You mean because the Thread was keeping me here?”

Price shook his head sadly. “Dude, why the hell wouldn’t it just warn us? Now we’re trapped here—surrounded by . . . ?” He looked to Ross.

“Corporate military would be my guess.”

Sebeck was at a loss. “But they can’t just—”

“Check your history, Pete. This wouldn’t be the first time corporate combinations attacked people in the United States. Based on the brain scans of that so-called insurgent you brought in, and the scans of others captured elsewhere, it looks like we’re facing a who’s who of mercenary companies that have supported repressive regimes around the world.” Ross was clicking on D-Space, examining feeds and quickly reading. “Here’s a high-rep journo with pictures of armored cars coming in by train, at night under tarpaulins. Light attack helicopters . . .”

Sebeck leaned in to look. “How can they get away with this? Where the hell is the U.S. military? Where is the government?”

Price leaned in as well. “Check out the media blitz they’ve been putting on nonstop. ‘Anarchy in rural America’—the economy spiraling downward. They’re making people desperate for security.”

Sebeck pondered their situation. “We need the National Guard.”

Ross shook his head. “I don’t think we can count on government intervention to help us, Pete. Something’s going on behind the scenes. Something we can’t see.”

Price threw up his hands. “So what does that mean? Internment camps? Worse?”

Sebeck sat down on a nearby public bench and put his head in his hands. “So they cut the power, but we still have electricity because we’ve been using local sources.”

“Right.”

“And we still have communications with one another and the outside world because we’re using a wireless mesh network.”

“Yes—although, I imagine they’ll have electronic warfare people trying to locate and destroy all the nodes on our perimeter as soon as possible.”

Price interjected. “But the factions outside the quarantine will keep throwing down more to keep us connected. And infrastructure defense factions will get involved in this at some point.”

Sebeck sat up straight. “Yes, but my point is that the darknet gives us some resilience. We’re not reliant on those things—they know that—so why are they bothering to cut them off?”

Ross shrugged. “There are still a lot of people in this region who aren’t on the darknet. Those folks have been plunged back into the Stone Age by this—no power, no cell service, no Internet. These guys want to control the message coming out of this region. The general public can’t read darknet news feeds. They won’t hear the truth, so it’ll be like this never happened.”

Price sat down next to Sebeck. “Just the official story. Which will no doubt be of the valiant private security forces containing looting and anarchy in the Midwest.”

They all stared at one another.

Price crossed his arms. “We are fucked, man!”

“We’ll be all right, Laney. We’ve been in tighter spots before.” Price narrowed his eyes at him. “No we haven’t!”

Just then Sebeck sat up straight, and stared in complete astonishment.

Both Ross and Price noticed the look on his face.

Ross asked first. “What’s wrong, Pete?”

“The Thread is back.”

Price concentrated as if he could see it by squinting. “Why now?”

Ross considered the question. “It must be linked to this news event. Maybe that’s what you were here for?”

Price shrugged. “Well, it’s not like we have much of a choice. Where’s it leading us, Sergeant?”

Sebeck pointed at the horizon. “Straight through enemy lines.”

In the predawn of a moonless night, Sebeck, Price, and Ross moved along the edge of a field. A chorus of frogs and crickets filled the stillness. Sebeck wore his suit of ceramic-composite armor and enclosed helmet. He held a multibarreled electronic pistol with a suppressor attached and scanned the path ahead with white phosphor night vision. He then signaled it was clear.

Sebeck lifted his visor as Price and Ross ran up and knelt next to him. “I still say this is a mistake, Jon. These townspeople are going to need all the help they can get.”

“Pete, the Thread was what brought you here in the first place, and if what Sobol said was true, then recent events have redirected it.”

“But it could wait. I could stay here and help fight first.”

“Do you really think you’re going to make a difference here?”

They exchanged grave looks in the dim light.

“You’re staying.”

Ross nodded. “I don’t have a high quest to complete. It would be wrong for me to go. Besides, the town will badly need my surveillance drones.”

They just looked at one another.

Ross grabbed Sebeck’s armored shoulder. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

Price and Sebeck didn’t look convinced.

“Personally, I don’t envy you for having to slip through the blockade. I have your coordinates on my listing now, so I’ll know when you’re clear. Be careful. And good luck.”

They shook hands and slapped backs. And then Sebeck and Price moved along in the darkness again—Sebeck following the Thread as it led down into a tree-shrouded creek bed and into the night.

Chapter 31: // Extermination

Henry Fossen looked up from cleaning a rifle barrel as the wail of tornado sirens pierced the night. He stood up and glanced at his watch: 3:42 A.M.

He dropped the barrel onto a cloth on the kitchen table and vaulted up the back stairs, shouting. “Lynn! Jenna! We’ve got to go! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

As he ran down the upstairs hall, Jenna was already exiting her bedroom, dressed and clutching a backpack. She looked rattled. “They’re moving in, Dad.”

“Who says?”

“I just read it on the town alert feed. There are soldiers headed this way right now.” She shook her head in incomprehension. “How could this be happening?”

Fossen’s wife, Lynn, appeared in their doorway holding a case as well. He grabbed her by the shoulders. “We’ve got to go, hon. I’ve got my things downstairs. Let’s move!”

He brought them down through the kitchen, where he rolled up the cloth containing pieces of the Korean War-era, M1 Garand rifle he’d been cleaning—the one his father had given him. He also grabbed a sealed can of 30.06 ammunition dated from 1958.

“C’mon, out the door!”

As his wife and daughter headed out the mudroom door, he took one last look at the family house, then turned off the lights and joined them out in the drive near the garage. It was still dark out, but as Fossen and his family got into the crew-cab pickup, they could hear the rattling of distant machine-gun fire.

Lynn covered her mouth. “God help us. . . .” She looked at her daughter.

Jenna looked back at them both, slowly shaking her head. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. . . .” Tears started flowing. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to—”

“Jenna, let’s not even talk like that.”

Both of them got in and he rapidly had them moving down the long gravel driveway. “Jenna, I need you to give me some idea where these people are. Are there reports of them between us and downtown Greeley?”

She wiped her tears and started clicking on D-Space as Fossen drove at high speed down to the road.

“If we move quickly, we’ll be fine. They’re coming in from the east and south. . . .” She paused. “But there’s also another force reported coming in from north and west.”

“Yes, all right, but we can make it to town?”

“Yes.”

Fossen glanced to them both. “We’re going to be all right. We’ll get to the storm cellars at the elementary school just like we planned. We’re going to be all right.”

As he looked down the road, he could see the lights of Greeley just a few miles ahead. There was thunder in the distance and the lights suddenly went black.

At the sound of tornado sirens Ross sat up in the motel bed and reached for his HUD glasses on the nightstand. He tried to turn on the lights, but they didn’t work. A glance at the digital alarm clock confirmed that the power was out.

So much for local power generation.

He threw on his black Nomex flight suit and computer belt as the system logged him on. The sirens were winding down now, and he could see hundreds of darknet call-outs beyond the walls and hear the voice of Floyd_2, an ex-army officer that the darknet had automatically selected as civil defense commander, based on his reputation score and skill set. His voice came in over the public comm channel in mid-speech. . . .

“—need everybody to those storm shelters. Security drones show helicopters and a light armored force converging on Greeley from all four compass directions. Everyone, please get to the middle school storm cellars. Ex-military folks and hunters, you have your assignments. We’ve only got a few minutes. I’m going to project the location of the choppers onto layer six, and I want all tagged enemy objects placed on that layer, too.”

Four bright red call-outs appeared some ways off to the east, identified as Helo 1, 2, and 3.

Floyd_2 paused. “Everyone move quickly but calmly to the middle school storm shelters. You can see the video surveillance overlays on layer five. It looks like these people are heavily armed. We’ve got summons in for infrastructure defense and equipment, but it looks like there are a lot of darknet towns under attack tonight. So I think we’re on our own for the time being. Let’s look out for one another now.”

Ross could hear the voices of people outside moving through the darkness. The hushed voices of parents. The worried, high-pitched voices of children.

Then Floyd_2’s sudden urgent shout over the channel. “Incoming!”

An explosion tore a hole in the air nearby. Its shockwave hit the front of the motel like a solid object, blasting out one of Ross’s windows and shaking the whole building. Ross hit the floor and pulled blankets down on top of himself from the bed as glass continued to rain down. A layer of previously unseen dust had lifted off of everything and hovered in the room as a choking cloud. There was another explosion somewhat farther away that made Ross realize his ears were ringing. Dogs were howling and car alarms had gone off throughout the town.

The second explosion was followed by the crackling of distant gunfire in an indeterminate direction. Possibly every direction. Ross peered up at the jagged edges of the front window with its imitation, snap-on window frames. He could see guttering orange light and shadows across the street. Flames. But the sky between the curtains looked tinged with its own glow. Possibly dawn—or more flames farther off.

Ross listened in the darkness of his room to the gunfire, between which he could hear people screaming. And now the sound of helicopters. Not the deep, booming thump of Bell Rangers that he remembered from Building Twenty-Nine. No, these choppers had a high-pitched buzz to them that was soon followed by the sound of ripping fabric. Then more screams.

He could see the call-outs of dozens of nearby operatives racing past beyond the walls. Obviously headed for the middle school. He could hear their voices over the public darknet comm channel as well, and a series of jagged lines adorned each call-out as they spoke. It was like a surreal first-person game.

[Beavertail]: “Three Helos coming in from the east. They’re using miniguns!”

[Yardil]: “Thanks for the fucking news flash, Darrol!”

[Floyd_2]: “Cut useless chatter, Yardil!”

[Knockwurst]: “ASVs coming in across the fields. East and west. Half a mile off.”

[Needleman]: “I’m on the west side. What’s an ASV?”

[Knockwurst]: “M1117. Armored car. Gun platform.”

[Needleman]: “Holy shit, I’m pulling back to B-twelve.”

[Vorpal]: “Sniper fire at the barricades on the thirty-eight. North and south. We’ve got casualties!”

[Beavertail]: “Get stragglers into the storm shelters. We’ve got snipers on the east and south sides. They’re taking up positions in the abandoned cars on the edge of town.

[Vorpal]: “I knew we should have moved those fucking things!”

None of it sounded good. Before Ross was fully dressed there was a pounding on his motel room door. Through the wall he could see a call-out that read OohRah. It was Sheriff Dave Westfield, a recent member and second-level Constable. He had also been a marine in his youth.

“Rakh! You okay?”

Ross grabbed his things and opened the door. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

OohRah held an M16 rifle. “The feed says we’re being hit with Hellfire missiles. It’s time to get to the middle school.”

Ross could see that the building across the road was engulfed in flames. It had been a machine shop—one of the local fab labs. A family lived on the second floor. Now there was no second floor, only a ground floor with doors and windows belching flames.

The sound of a helicopter was approaching.

OohRah rushed into Ross’s room. “The feed says the missiles are coming from a gray Cessna 208 Grand Caravan that left a decommissioned army airfield north of St. Louis.” The tearing sound was heard again. Then the chopper passed low overhead.

Ross leaned out the motel room door to look up into the sky.

The barest glow of dawn showed on the eastern horizon, and an AH6 Little Bird helicopter raced low along Main Street, its twin miniguns blazing. Tracer rounds streamed from them like orange lasers. He could see the phosphorus-coated bullets ricocheting in a shower of sparks into the predawn sky farther to the west—over by the American Legion Hall. There was more shouting and gunfire as a second chopper zipped overhead, launching rockets.

“Jesus Christ!” Ross ducked back into the motel room. “No markings on them.”

“We saw the photos of those rail yards. But I don’t think it really sunk in.”

The rockets exploded in a series of deafening booms. It was followed by a large volume of gunfire erupting from the western edge of town. It sounded like a couple hundred people were involved in an intense firefight—an odd assemblage of large- and small-caliber weapons crackling like green pine in a fire. The sounds of women and children screaming among the refugees and the shadows of dozens of people racing past the open motel room doorway gave a sense of rising panic.

OohRah rushed to the doorway and shouted, “Get out of the street! Get out of the street! Come in here!”

He ushered a dozen people inside, men, women, and children—people of all ages. Carrying backpacks and suitcases.

One woman kept screaming at Ross, “What’s going on? What’s going on?” These people weren’t darknet operatives, so they appeared to have no idea what was happening.

OohRah grabbed the woman by the shoulders. “Get ahold of yourself. We’re going to get you to a storm shelter.”

One of the other refugees pulled her back into the group, where she quickly broke down sobbing.

“Let’s get these folks to the middle school.”

Ross was already busy flipping through an array of D-Space street cameras in his HUD view. Most of the town’s public cameras were still functioning. They showed a series of buildings ablaze and bodies, or parts of them, in the streets. People were rushing around retrieving wounded. Others were firing out toward the edge of town at attackers Ross knew must be there. “Looks like the route to the middle school is still clear. Here . . .” He slid the prepared camera layer over to OohRah.

“Thanks. So we’ve still got network power, anyway.”

Ross nodded. “The bank was hit, but they’ve got ultrawideband transmitters and fuel cells in the vault. It’s pretty thick concrete.”

OohRah was already looking out the doorway and motioning people to follow. “Let’s go, folks! Follow me!”

A dozen frightened people ran after him. Ross brought up the rear, sprinting beneath the porch roof along a line of motel room doors. Some of the doors were open, but he didn’t see anyone inside the rooms. Another chopper zipped overhead startlingly low and fast, guns braapping down the street. Empty shell casings rained down in a jingling cascade of brass that bounced in all directions.

Ross looked out at the call-outs ahead of him. He could see lots of names he didn’t recognize, and he heard frantic voices over the comm lines.

[Barkely_A]:We’ve got wounded over here! We don’t have anything to stop these armored cars.

[Creasy]: Jack, about two dozen infantry coming through Courtney’s field.

[BullMoose]: Near the propane yard?

[Creasy]: Ten-four.

Ross reached up and dialed down the volume on nearby chatter not directed to him. OohRah brought the civilians down an alley behind Main Street. It was cluttered with Dumpsters, pallets, and cars that had been idled by gas prices. As they crossed to the next block, they saw a car burning in the middle of Main Street. The car’s side and fenders were riddled with bullet or shrapnel holes. The silhouette of a person was still sitting in the front seat, enveloped in fire. Someone with the call-out DoctorSocks raced past the flames, and then headed off into the night.

Another huge explosion ripped the dawn air, and Ross turned to see what he suspected was the propane yard going up in a roiling fireball a couple hundred yards away. Metal and wood debris spun into the air in a wide arc. Ross ducked around behind the nearest building.

“Up ahead!”

The sheriff brought them across the street to the arched granite-and-brick entryway of the Eisenhower Middle School. Mercifully, the steps led down to a cellar door lined with sandbags and away from prowling choppers.

Ross stopped in the entryway and let the others go in. He stood next to farmers with assault rifles as they watched the skies.

One of the other volunteers, a thirtyish, heavyset operative named Farmster in a Halperin Seed hat, pointed to Ross and grabbed a scoped AR-15 rifle from a table just inside the doorway. “You know how to use this?”

“I’m better with an AK.”

“An AK?”

Ross shrugged. “Russian army.”

That brought out gales of laughter amid the distant gunfire.

“Well, I’ll be damned. I never thought I’d be handing a gun to a Ruskie to shoot up the town with.”

The guy fished through the pile of weapons and came up with a scuffed AK-47. He also grabbed a satchel into which he stuffed several thirty-round clips. “We can’t let them reach this school.”

Ross looked up at the choppers crisscrossing the sky in the distance and realized that this was just the beginning.

In the darkness Sebeck and Price peered at an abandoned, crumbling farmhouse from the shelter of a creek bank. The new Thread led directly toward a weathered barn behind it. The entire place was choked with weeds and bushes.

The sound of frogs and crickets filled the night, but miles behind them they heard loud explosions and the zipping sound of helicopter miniguns.

Price gazed back over his shoulder as the horizon flashed and flickered. “They’re really getting pounded back there, Sergeant. Whatever we’re supposed to find better be worth it.”

Sebeck nodded. He’d been surprised they made it past the blockade, but then, whatever powered the Thread might have been able to create a path . . . somehow. He’d seen the Daemon do stranger things.

“Stay here.”

“No problem.”

Sebeck climbed up from the creek, and started moving through the tall grass, electronic pistol at the ready. He kept scanning the darkness for trouble but made it the couple hundred feet to the barn door without incident.

The glowing Thread proceeded right through the twin doors. Sebeck looked down and noticed fairly fresh tire tracks in the mud. He nodded to himself. Whatever the next segment was leading him to was apparently inside, and recently arrived.

Sebeck pulled open the right barn door partway. Stealth was not an option because it sagged on its hinges. He peeked in and noticed a dark late-model panel van with dealer plates. The Thread continued straight through the closed back doors of the van itself.

Sebeck scanned the interior of the barn and saw nothing except old stalls, a workbench, and piles of rusting equipment on either side of the van. Above he could see stars through the gaping holes in the barn roof.

He moved inside and came up to the shiny van doors. No sounds came from inside. He held the pistol in one hand, stepped aside, and tried the handle. It clicked open. He slowly pulled it open, peering in with the pistol aimed and ready.

“It’s you.”

“Me?” Sebeck stared at an oddly dressed man sitting on a folding chair in the cargo bay of the van. Mirrored sunglasses and a balaclava obscured the man’s face, and he wore a camouflage outfit with knee pads and body armor. Before him he held what looked to be a transparent video panel or glass screen through which he was viewing Sebeck. It gave the effect of carrying a huge set of spectacles in front of him. The Thread led right to the tip of a wand he was clutching in his gloved right hand. A nearby call-out identified him as PangSoi, a first-level Weaver with a two-point-five rep score on a base of three.

Sebeck was puzzled. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

“I’m PangSoi.”

“I can see that.” Sebeck clicked his pistol into its holster and opened his visor. “But why the hell did the Thread lead me to you? And cause me to leave all those people to get attacked?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“You’re not a high-level, high-rep operative—you’re a weaver-trainee for chrissake. And what’s with the panel?”

PangSoi gazed at him, following Sebeck as he shifted on his feet.

“Why are you doing that?” Sebeck noticed wires running down from the panel to a large box draped in black fabric. It sat next to PangSoi’s chair like an end table and gurgled from some tiny motor.

“We must hurry.”

“What the hell . . . ?” Sebeck flipped up the fabric covering the box and came face-to-face with the severed head of a young Asian woman wearing HUD glasses—bolted into a metal frame. Her dead eyes looked forward, the lids pinned back. Tubes ran into her neck and wires into her HUD glasses. A tiny pump was burbling on a frame. “Oh my god. . . .”

Suddenly what felt like an entire football team tackled him from behind. He felt rough gloved hands prying at his face, but the van he was pressed against kept him from falling down. “You son of a bitch!” He pushed his open helmet visor against the van door to close it, and the weight of several people pulled him backward, where he fell onto the muddy floor. Several strong bodies piled onto him shouting, “Get him! Hold him!”

Sebeck spoke the keywords to electrify the surface of his armor. The tangle of men fell off him yelping, as he rolled free and stood.

Now he could see that he faced half a dozen commandos in full tactical gear. Some of them carried beanbag guns and Tasers. Clearly, they hadn’t expected Sebeck’s Armor of the Warrior—the gift of a faction supporting Sebeck’s quest.

He eyed them through his mirrored faceplate. “I could say I don’t want to hurt you guys, but I’d be lying. . . .”

He turned and jumped up into the back of the van, past the severed head of the young woman in the box. The soldiers pursued him. Sebeck grabbed the ghoulish PangSoi and drew his electronic pistol. “She was practically a child, you sick . . .” He fired a short burst into the man’s chest and watched him fall.

Price.

Sebeck suddenly saw Price being dragged in through the barn doorway—a gun held to his head.

“Detective Sebeck! We’ll kill him if you don’t put the gun down and come out peacefully!” The man had a vaguely Asian accent, but like the others his face was covered.

Sebeck kicked both of the panel van doors open to get a clear view of the situation.

Price looked very muddy and very irritated.

“Laney, they’re hired guns here to capture us. They’re not gonna kill us. We’re both too important to them.”

“Oh for chrissake, Sergeant . . .”

“They somehow figured out a way to hack into my quest Thread. No, there’s something big going down.” Sebeck noticed a row of several plastic ten-gallon jugs of gasoline in the cargo bay. “I guess with gasoline so expensive and hard to find, you guys planned ahead. Smart.”

The man with the gun pressed it into Price’s temple. “Don’t do anything you can’t undo, Sergeant!”

Sebeck grabbed a magnesium flare from his suit belt. “You gonna tell your commander you killed an irreplaceable prisoner because I fucked with your van?” He sparked the flare. “I don’t think so.”

He dropped the flare onto the gasoline jugs and jumped from the van as everyone ran for their lives.

Sebeck was clear of the barn doors by the time the gasoline flared up and filled the entire barn with a rolling fireball that lit up the night, destroying the van and all the hellish things in it.

The moment he came out of the barn he was faced by several dozen commandos charging at him from several directions simultaneously, trying to knock him down. He emptied his pistol at them, wounding several, but he got struck from the side and slammed into the mud. Someone stepped on his weapon hand, pinning it to the ground, and then two men aimed fire-extinguisher-like devices at him, spraying thick white foam all over his legs and arms.

One of them shouted, “Why didn’t you use the foam to begin with, asshole?”

“It’s impossible to clean up!”

The white gooey material quickly turned rock hard—trapping Sebeck in place. Then they knelt around him and twisted to pull his helmet off.

“You bastards, I’m going to—”

Something struck him on the back of the head, and he blacked out.

Chapter 32: // The Burning Man

Jon Ross stared with a deep sense of dread at the two messages that had just now popped up in his HUD listing:

Chunky Monkey—logged off 08:39:36

Unnamed_1—logged off 08:40:33

Ross had added Sebeck and Price into his friends list so he was alerted to changes in their network statuses. He’d been checking the progress of their call-outs across the county every few minutes. They’d gotten through enemy lines, but their call-outs disappeared a mile or so later.

He let out a deep breath and held his head in his hands, unable to conceive of a scenario where this wasn’t bad news.

It was mid-morning and the situation in Greeley had become dire. The sun was up now, and it was another burning-hot day. Almost all the outlying farms had been burned to the ground; columns of black smoke striped the horizon. Likewise, the homes on the edge of town were being razed.

Ross knew that darknet video of this event would get out to the Web sooner or later. He wondered what people in the outside world were going to make of it. But then it occurred to him that he’d seen a hundred hours of footage showing violent conflicts in various parts of the world. What would the world think? Probably that America had finally lost its mind. But otherwise things would continue as they always had.

In the brief lulls in the fighting, Ross had used his HUD display to follow the unfolding farce that was mainstream news coverage. They were apparently being “liberated” from an insurgent occupation. Someone had created a darknet feed of mainstream news beyond the blackout.

Ross and a group of forty or fifty other men and women had spent much of the morning moving the ample numbers of abandoned cars from the fields in town to create blockades around the downtown perimeter, while the mercenaries busied themselves razing outlying areas. He also helped fill sandbags that were apparently intended for floods and packed them outside the walls of the middle school.

One mercy was that the helicopters had gone away some hours ago and not returned. The Cessna with Hellfire missiles had also flown off. They’d either gone to re-arm or had finished their role.

Luckily the mercenaries had not seemed to care about the unmanned surveillance drones Ross had brought with him. Neither had they been able to jam darknet radio communications. Ultrawideband was proving quite resilient. But then, the mercenaries appeared more interested in killing everyone than jamming their radios.

The chattering of gunfire punctuated by the louder cracks of hunting rifles filled the air. Ross leaned out from behind a masonry support pillar, looking both ways down Greeley’s empty Main Street.

It was littered with broken glass, debris. A burning car stood in the middle of the road at the end of the block. Bullet holes had chipped the concrete and bricks, and several of the buildings on Main Street were already burning from rocket and missile attacks. Beyond that was a wall of roiling black smoke and flames. Burning houses. Every few moments he heard another deafening boom, and debris would fly hundreds of feet into the air.

They were destroying the town block by block.

Ross looked to the center of the road where a fenced green with a World War II memorial and benches stood. The street ran around it to either side. The memorial was a tall granite obelisk with a thick square base about the width and height of a man and was flanked by defunct cannons plugged with concrete.

Ross could see OohRah and Hank_19’s call-outs behind it. He clicked on their call-outs and spoke into the comm channel. “Hank! You guys need me?”

OohRah’s call-out flashed as he replied.

[OohRah]: “We could use another set of eyes behind us. Come on over. Move quick and stay low. We’ve been sniped.”

Ross took another glance and ran to the center of the street at a crouch. He hopped the low iron fence at the edge of the green, and dove behind the monument, using the smaller Vietnam memorial nearby to provide cover from the opposite direction.

Hank and the sheriff nodded to him.

Ross brought his AK-47 to bear, watching their flank. “Where are they?”

The sheriff was pushing rounds into a spare clip while Hank kept watch down Main Street. “Pick a direction and start walking. You’ll find ’em soon enough.”

Fossen nodded. “Crazed gang members to the east, professional military to the west.”

“Or so the costumes tell us. . . .”

Ross examined the memorial stone. “This should be good cover.”

The sheriff shook his head. “Not from a grenade it won’t be. We can’t let them get close in.”

Another ear-stabbing boom sounded from the east end of town. “What the hell are they doing?” Ross brought up a D-Space video panel that showed an overhead view from a surveillance drone. He could clearly see the line of advance and the wasteland the private contractors were leaving behind them.

The sheriff ground his teeth. “They’re tossing demo charges into houses. Shooting flamethrowers into cellar windows. Burning everything.”

Ross could clearly see it when viewed from above. Then the drone flew into a cloud of smoke and the image was lost. He nodded behind him. “What happens when they reach the middle school? There must be six hundred people in there.”

The sheriff peered through his M16 scope over the rim of the memorial. “We’ll either have to stop them from reaching it or die trying. Everyone else is digging in, too.”

Hank_19 kneeled down and nodded grimly to Ross. “My wife and daughter are in there. I don’t care about losing the farm. You can always rebuild buildings, but . . .”

Ross tapped him. “If you need to go back and be with them, I’ll understand.” Ross looked to the sheriff.

The sheriff nodded.

Fossen shook his head. “No. If we just hold out, we might still have a chance. Look at the darknet feeds. My daughter says they’re going haywire. These attacks here in the Midwest are a threat to the whole network. I’ll bet no single thing has ever been upvoted this high.” He looked to Ross. “The world is watching what happens here.”

The sheriff shrugged. “So what? So what if everyone cares? What does that do for us? The situation we’re in isn’t going to be solved by angry posts and best fucking wishes. Public outrage has never stopped these bastards.”

Fossen looked determined. “Jon, we’re just second-level. What can a twelfth-level Rogue do that could help us?”

Jon cleared his throat. “I can get into and out of places and networks without being detected, but in this type of situation . . .”

There was suddenly a deafening explosion that broke the last of the windows along Main Street.

They all ducked down, but peered over the rim of the memorial to watch the far end of the street. An M1117 armored vehicle flanked by twenty or thirty well-equipped soldiers on foot suddenly rounded the corner. The ASV swiveled its top turret and fired grenades into the upper-story windows. The walls and windows erupted with flames and flying debris.

A camera crew in helmets and body armor rounded the corner as well, filming the action as soldiers fired grenade launchers into the doors of shops on either side and raced through the openings while their comrades raked the walls and streets with gunfire.

Tracer bullets whined past and Ross and the others ducked down as stone fragments rained down on them. Metal whined into the sky.

“Jesus Christ!”

“I see the propaganda unit is here to film our saviors in action.”

Fossen crawled on his belly to look down the side street. “They’re coming down the next block, too.”

There were more explosions in the buildings down the street. Ross snuck a quick glance to see the ASV turret and its coaxial machine gun focused in their direction. The rest of the soldiers were nowhere in sight.

The sheriff stuffed newly reloaded clips into pouches on his web harness. “These fuckers seem to know what they’re doing. They’re following the number-one rule of street fighting.”

“What’s that?”

“Stay out of the goddamned street. They’re blasting through walls and destroying the buildings behind them as they go.”

Suddenly the ASV rolled forward, firing indiscriminately. Then a colossally loud explosion echoed across the town and they could hear masonry walls collapsing and wood snapping as a whole building avalanched into the street. The ASV’s diesel engine was still advancing.

The sheriff clenched his gloved fist. “Fuck it. We’ve got to do something. We can’t just lay here.”

Ross could now see more troops coming in from the next block as he stole a glance over the Vietnam memorial Fossen was hiding behind. “Heads down, Hank. About twenty more and an ASV on that side.”

“Time to fight.” The sheriff crawled over toward Fossen. “Let’s hit the second group while they cross the street.” He took a breath. “Ready?”

Ross nodded.

Fossen nodded as well.

“On three. Two. One . . .”

They leaned around and over the edges of the solid-rock memorial and opened fire at a squad of mercenaries running across the street about a hundred meters away.

Ross fired his AK in semi-auto mode trying to focus on a line of men dressed in black body armor and tactical gear. The soldiers immediately scattered and hit the deck. At over a football field away, it was hard to tell if any of them got hit or just dove for cover.

But moments after they opened fire, the turret of the ASV escorting them swiveled in their direction and opened up with a .50-caliber machine gun.

All three of them ducked down and hugged the ground as powerful, high-velocity rounds slammed into the back of the stone memorial, eating away at the far side. Ross felt the sting of stone chips like needles on his exposed skin.

Then loud explosions erupted on the far side of the larger, World War II memorial next to them—grenades impacting with deafening concussion. Then stopped just as abruptly.

The sheriff crawled to the far side of the green, pulling a metal canister from this harness. “Far side of the street! Behind the bank columns!”

Hundreds of rounds of small-arms fire raked their position in addition to .50-caliber bullets.

The sheriff shouted over the roar. “When I pop the smoke, give it a few moments, then . . .” He jabbed his thumb toward the bank. He pulled the pin and tossed the canister over the fence halfway between both enemy forces. After a few moments, billowing clouds of white smoke began to rise—immediately raising hails of gunfire that whipped the air above them.

The sheriff led the way, rolling over the low, cosmetic fence around the green. Ross and Fossen did likewise, and followed as the sheriff half-slid and half-crawled toward the steps of the bank across the street.

They were halfway across when they heard grenades exploding among the monuments where they’d just been. Ross could see another one arching in from down the street, blasting the obelisk and toppling it. Machine-gun fire still zipped and sizzled through the air overhead, and then Fossen shouted and toppled onto the asphalt.

Both Ross and the sherriff went back and grabbed him under the armpits, leaving behind his rifle and his HUD glasses as they dragged him to relative safety behind the pillars of the bank building.

Ross reloaded his AK-47 as he stood behind a pillar.

The sheriff reloaded as well. He just shook his head and shouted over the deafening thunder in the street. “They’ve got too much firepower!” He eyed the stone walls and heavy wood door behind them. “I don’t think we’re getting out of this corner!”

“I don’t think they saw us pull back.” Ross looked down at Fossen, who was lying against the back wall, trying to sit up. A pool of blood was expanding around him.

“Damnit!” The sheriff crawled over to Fossen and put down his gun. “Hank, let me see where you’re hit!”

Fossen shook his head. “I’m in trouble, Dave. My guts are on fire.”

A bullet impacted the wall three feet to the right of him and ricocheted around the vestibule.

Fossen didn’t even flinch. “Get back to the school. Look out for Lynn and Jenna.”

The sheriff took off his HUD glasses, too, and looked into Fossen’s eyes. “We’re gonna stay right here. We’re on our own goal line, Hank. You hear me? No room to lose ground.” The sheriff grabbed Hank, and for the first time Ross noticed the dark cloth of the sheriff’s shirt was stained with blood as well.

The sheriff held on to Fossen, stopping him from sliding down the wall. “You remember, when we were kids? You remember the heat lightning? And the creek?”

Fossen nodded weakly.

There was another deafening explosion outside and the sound of shattering glass.

Fossen looked up. “Bury me next to my dad, okay, Dave? And you look out for my girls, okay . . . ?” And then his head slumped and the sheriff held him tightly, sobbing.

Ross still stood with his back to a pillar. Outside he could hear the ASVs moving down the street, troops blasting apart nearby buildings.

The sheriff let his best friend’s body slide to the floor. He left his HUD glasses as he stood with some difficulty. Then he picked up the M16 and came up behind one of the pillars.

“I’m sorry about Hank, Sheriff.”

He just shook his head and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Let me see your wound.”

“Fuck it. That’s not gonna be what kills me today.”

“If we’re going to try and stop them from reaching the school, then it’s pretty much now or never.”

The sheriff nodded and looked at Ross.

They nodded to each other, and then suddenly Ross saw a very strange series of D-Space alerts running through his HUD listing—all highest priority. They indicated the launch of a number of different processes he’d never heard of, but one of which caught his eye: Burning Man Instantiated.

“Wait a minute. . . .”

The sheriff frowned at him. “What?”

Ross was tracking something moving along Main Street—a D-Space call-out unlike any he’d seen before. It was wreathed in flame and bore the name Burning Man, a two-hundredth-level Champion. Ross had never heard of such a level before.

It was coming their way.

“Get your HUD glasses on, Sheriff. Something’s up.”

He looked like he’d had enough games, but he moved out of Ross’s sight, while Ross tried to peek out into the street.

Ross could see two ASVs in the street, drawing fire from other townspeople in nearby buildings. Just then the building across the way detonated in a massive explosion, sending brick, wood, glass, and clouds of dust out into the street.

But through the dust an avatar approached with a confident walk that seemed familiar. It was headed directly for Ross, walking straight through mercenaries and the hull of an intervening ASV like a ghost and emerging from the other side.

The avatar appeared to be dressed in a tactical operations suit, with a bulletproof helmet and mask as well as body armor. He had twin .45 pistols in combat holsters, but was otherwise unarmed. As the avatar came to the foot of the stairs it turned to Ross and flipped up its faceplate.

Roy Merritt nodded to him and spoke in his familiar even tone. “Everything’s going to be okay, sir. I need you to stay calm and tell me where the bad guys are. . . .”

The Major stood in a command-and-control trailer lined with dozens of LCD screens and control boards. Board operators and drone pilots in headsets sat at each station monitoring every aspect of Operation Prairie Fire from above.

The Argus R-7 surveillance blimps were barely eighty feet long, but they could loiter over a theater of operations for up to two weeks using the solar cells covering their upper surface. One of the aerospace firms in their group had developed it and had sold hundreds to dictatorships in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Flying at sixty thousand feet with no telltale contrail, they were all but invisible to the naked eye, and their sensitive long-range cameras could pinpoint and monitor individuals or entire communities, especially when combined with telecommunications and purchasing records. They weren’t invisible to radar or other sensors, but it was the public they were meant to monitor, not military opponents.

On the screens before him, the Argus cameras showed FLIR and color imagery of civilians in darknet communities in several Midwestern states. The forms on-screen were fleeing, fighting, hiding—but in all cases losing as the private military contractors squeezed them ever closer to their final stand.

Standing next to him was the towering South African colonel Andriessen. “Good news from your special unit.”

The Major nodded. “Yes, but they’ve lost their transport.”

Short loud beeps and red lights activated on several control boards.

“And it looks like this will be wrapped up fairly soon as well.”

The Major nodded as the beeping continued to spread along the flight line. Several flight officers pulled off their headsets and started talking urgently with their tech officers. Some LCD screens nearby were no longer showing stable close-up shots of street fighting, but instead showed whirling blurs, then blackness, then blurred lights again.

The Major walked over to a nearby flight officer who was struggling with his controls. “What’s going on? Why have we lost video?”

The officer turned off the alarms and pointed to another screen showing a row of red numbers next to critical measurements. “The temperature readings on our avionics system just red-lined. I think we’ve got a fire onboard.”

The tech officer leaned in. “Our fire suppression system did activate. So, give us a moment. . . .”

The Major looked in both directions down the line of drone pilots. There were red lights flashing on half the boards now.

The Colonel gave him a concerned look.

He started walking down the line, seeing more and more black screens. Temperature readings and pop-up messages reading Fire!

Within a minute virtually all of the control stations were blinking red. The video screens black. What started out as a frenzied chorus of urgent talk had turned into a reading room of technicians flipping through three-ring SOP manuals.

The Major shouted down to the Colonel, still standing where he’d left him. “What the hell’s going on, Colonel?”

The Colonel looked at all the blank screens and said nothing.

“How the fuck can this happen? The Daemon penetrated our encryption somehow and overrode our avionics.” He grabbed a headset sitting on the nearby board and hurled it onto the static-free tile floor with all his might, shattering it into several pieces. “Goddamnit! What is this, fucking amateur hour? I thought we put together the best goddamn electronic countermeasures team possible.”

The Colonel apparently thought it wise to just listen until he was asked a direct question.

The entire line of board operators was now looking up at The Major. They were shut down—blind to a complex multidimensional operation that required close coordination across six states.

The Major burned holes into them with his stare, and then stormed out of the trailer. “Colonel, get these drones back on line or get more.”

“They won’t get here in time.”

“Then get amateur astronomers with binoculars in a fucking Piper Cub—but get me real-time information on my battle space. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Major.”

They were now walking among several large trailers placed within an aircraft hangar—thick bundles of power cables running from each.

A Korr Military Services communications officer stuck his head out of a nearby trailer. “Major! You need to hear this.”

He extended a pair of radio headsets.

“It’s coming over all our encrypted channels.”

The Major hesitated before putting them to his ear. He heard a vaguely familiar voice speaking over the comms. . . .

Ross listened to the booming voice, echoing across the town. It seemed to be coming from the sky and was loud enough to be heard over the sound of nearby machine-gun fire. . . .

“Attention enemy force: you have unlawfully invaded this community. Drop your weapons and surrender and you will not be harmed.”

The gunfire and explosions had paused. There was sudden calm as the voice in the sky spoke again, this time in a foreign language that sounded vaguely Slavic—yet not Russian. It was nonetheless a voice Ross recognized as that of Roy Merritt.

The sheriff meanwhile had his HUD glasses back on and frowned in confusion. “Where is that coming from?”

Ross pointed into the street. “Him.”

They both looked down and saw the Merritt avatar with his hands at the edges of his mouth “shouting” his terms to the entire town.

“But it’s coming from the sky.”

“Hypersonic sound.” On the sheriff’s look, he explained, “High-frequency audio beam projection. I’ll show you later—just listen. . . .”

They could now hear laughter emanating from the private military contractors arrayed around the town, standing behind their ASVs or crouching in nearby buildings.

“You have violated the popular will of a critical mass of the population—which empowers me to take you into custody—by force if necessary.”

A distant shout. “Fuck you!” Followed by gales of automatic weapon fire.

“You have been warned.”

As Ross watched, Merritt’s avatar raised its hands and looked up into the sky—where Ross suddenly saw a grid of numeric D-Space call-outs appear and slowly grow larger. As they did, physical objects came into sight—what could only be described as shimmering mirrored “dots” or tiny spheres coming down from above. It was impossible to say how large they were because he had no scale reference, but from his limited view looking up from between bank pillars, he saw at least five—arrayed in an orderly pattern. Merritt’s avatar lowered his hands, bringing the dots even lower. They appeared to be spinning very fast, shimmering.

The sheriff looked up, too. “What are they?”

Ross clicked on one of the call-outs and read its properties. “Hot mirror . . . faceted high-rotation inertial gyroscope . . . see Fire-Strike. . . .” He clicked a link. “One-hundred-kilowatt solid-state laser . . . infrared.” He looked back at the sheriff. “I think the shit is about to hit the fan. . . .”

A bullet whined past and ricocheted off the wall.

Ross ducked but then heard Merritt speak again. “Network citizens! I need your help to identify the enemy. Aim any D-Space pointing device at enemy units until they throw down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender. You must respect their surrender. You will be scanned for honesty after this is over. Please keep pets and small children indoors. Thank you.”

Ross and the sheriff exchanged puzzled looks, but Ross put down his AK-47 and clicked on his D-Space pointer. It appeared much like a laser dot, but was only visible in D-Space. He cautiously peered out from behind the pillar and aimed his finger at a machine gunner sitting in the turret of the nearest ASV, bringing the dot to bear on the man’s head.

In moments, a discernable beam—like an intense ray of sunlight—shot from the nearest mirror ball and burned through the particle-filled air, becoming invisible by the time it reached the ground. But the soldier leapt up and tore off his helmet screaming and rolled off the turret. Other soldiers looked at him and ran to assist. Ross turned his pointer to them, and each time he brought it to bear, they quickly stopped what they were doing and fled several yards.

“Sheriff, do you know how to use your pointer?”

He was already pulling his haptic glove on. “Hell, everyone does. . . .”

In a few moments other rays of energy were zapping down from above, and the soldiers were scurrying around like ants under a magnifying glass. It didn’t take long for dozens more darknet members behind sandbags and shutters to join in.

Nor did it take long for the mercenaries to focus their gunfire up at the distant mirror balls that were raining down terror upon them. Tracer bullets started spraying skyward. But the devices were apparently more distant than they seemed, or durable. And even though one eventually did falter, wobble, and spin out of control into the streets below. There were many more of them.

In minutes the soldiers were fleeing their positions. Even soldiers in windows weren’t safe—the array of mirror balls always seemed to provide a vector that could zap them. They pulled back into the shadows.

Meanwhile the sheriff showed the intensity of an all-night gamer. “Fry, you bastards!”

The Merritt avatar stood apparently observing the action. “Enemy force, you may not leave this area. You must surrender. If you lay down your weapons and surrender you will not be harmed.”

The remote turrets of the nearest ASV were spraying the buildings as the soldiers retreated by the dozen down the streets—unable to find cover because they’d destroyed every structure between here and the edge of town.

Ross and the sheriff focused on the firing ASV, and they saw many other pointers do likewise—clustered on its engine vents, or big rubber tires. Burning rays of heat fried airborne smoke particles on the way down their target, and before long the engine compartment on the vehicle began to smoke.

The sheriff stared intently at it. “God help you when you get out of that thing, you sons a bitches. . . .”

Now more than a few soldiers were kneeling in various places in the street, their arms raised. Several assault rifles were lying on the pavement. One of the retreating soldiers opened fire on them, cutting several down before they got involved in a firefight among themselves. They, too, were quickly subdued, and to Ross’s amazement, he was soon looking at a staggered array of kneeling mercenaries extending down the street.

The other ASVs in town were roaring back where they came from, soldiers trying to grab on.

Merritt shouted again. “You may not leave. You will be stopped if you try to leave. Surrender!”

There no longer appeared to be any resisting soldiers in view. The enemy was in full retreat. Ross couldn’t help but smile at the apparition of Roy Merritt standing firm in the public square.

Ross turned to the sheriff, who was now leaning back against the pillar.

“About that bleeding. I think I’m gonna need a doctor, after all. . . .”

Chapter 33: // Epic Fail

“Major, something powerful came out of the darknet—something we could not have anticipated.” The Major walked briskly toward a private Gulfstream V jet—one he had recently acquired. A knot of uniformed private military officers followed him.

“This is a colossal intelligence failure, Colonel. I was told these communities had no significant weaponry or defenses, and we developed our force posture from that assessment. Now I’ve got a client who, instead of facing a compliant population after the crash, might be facing a general uprising.”

“Ag, they didn’t have significant weapon systems when the assessment was done.”

“Sobol was devilishly clever. Perhaps too clever. Now we’ll have to come back and bloody carpet bomb these towns from the stratosphere.”

The Major shook his head. “Sobol wasn’t behind this.”

“What do you mean, Major? Of course he was: it’s the Daemon.”

The Major stopped at the foot of the jet stairway. “Roy Merritt has become a folk hero to the darknet community. Why—who the fuck knows? But he has, and that ‘powerful’ system avatar that came out of the darknet today was patterned on Merritt.”

“How do you know this, Major?”

“I have my methods. But suffice it to say, Merritt’s legend—and the video to prove it—is bouncing all over the darknet tonight.”

The Colonel was speechless.

“Let there be no doubt, Colonel: the Daemon is evolving. Sobol apparently provided a mechanism to permit the user population to change it. And it’s that mechanism that’s going to help us bend the Daemon to our purpose.”

“Then, the loss of our forces is . . .”

“Still a colossal fuck-up. Any word on the number of men lost?”

“We’ve lost the entire damned force, sir.”

“And their equipment?”

The Colonel just shook his head.

“Goddamnit. Now we’re going to have to redraft the entire psychological operations program. And reshoot all those news broadcasts we taped—goddamnit to hell!”

“That the entire security force was wiped out by supposed gang-bangers isn’t going to help the privatization sales pitch, sir.”

“All of this can be dealt with. We just need Operation Exorcist to succeed, or all of this will come back to haunt us.”

Sebeck returned to consciousness as he was being dragged across a field by his elbows. It was daylight, so he must have been unconscious for a while. He felt groggy, as though he’d been drugged. His hands were zip-tied behind his back, and tape covered his mouth.

His HUD glasses were long gone. His armored helmet was gone. The crackling of automatic weapon fire could be heard some ways off, punctuated by soldiers speaking into radio headsets.

“Tango. Delta, Zulu. Five, six, three. We are go for extraction. Repeat, go for extraction. Over.”

Sebeck craned his neck back to see what was behind him—but it was too difficult. As they dragged him forward, he passed a dozen mercenary soldiers leering and laughing. The situation was starting to become clear.

His quest was finished. He had failed. The soldiers carried him toward the tailgate of a waiting pickup truck, where they tossed Sebeck into the cargo bay. He landed face-first on the corrugated steel alongside an unconscious Price. He had never been happier to see Price’s puffy red face and flaring nostrils. At least he was still breathing.

The tailgate slammed shut, and the pickup lurched forward. Sebeck tried to turn his face away from the rough, scratched metal of the cargo bed. He managed to turn on his side and saw trees racing past overhead.

Before long the pickup truck was racing down a road so fast that the soldiers on either side of him kept tensing their muscles to deal with the impact of bumps. They occasionally opened fire on unseen targets, but otherwise, Sebeck just listened to the roar of the truck engine.

In a few minutes the truck lurched off the road and moved across quieter ground—grass perhaps. The truck skidded to a stop, and the soldiers piled out. Sebeck was then grabbed by the ankles and yanked off the truck, causing his face and shoulder to hit the ground first. He was dragged across several yards of meadow grass, struggling to get his face out of the dirt. They finally let go of his feet and pulled him up by his elbows again.

As Sebeck looked around, he realized these men didn’t view him as a human being. He was like a piece of meat. An objective. Nothing more.

He could hear another mercenary behind him speaking on a radio. Sebeck couldn’t understand why the soldiers suddenly had radio communications. Didn’t the ultrawideband emanations of the darknet disable other radio communications? He was probably misunderstanding it. Or perhaps the heavyweight defense people were starting to get involved. Someone had invented ultrawideband, after all, and Sebeck didn’t think it was Sobol.

Glancing around he saw there were twenty or thirty soldiers in the field, all dressed as farmers or laborers—some with bandages on their arms and legs, real or faked. They were a mix of races. So their bond was the mission. Or their contract.

A few soldiers approached Sebeck with what looked to be a parachute harness. They roughly grabbed him and wrapped it around his torso. As they worked, he could see two other men unwinding a steel cable from a spool.

One of the soldiers, a Latino with a teardrop tattoo under one eye, grabbed Sebeck’s jaw. “You’re goin’ for a ride, hombre!” He laughed and turned Sebeck so he could see what looked like a weather balloon being lofted skyward, dragging a steel cable up with it. As Sebeck looked farther up into the sky, he could see another elongated, translucent balloon already ascending with a cable beneath it. Just then Sebeck saw Laney Price lifted up and hurtled skyward.

What the hell?

Then a steel cable lifted up off the grass nearby, coming taut just as the harness around Sebeck yanked tight. He suddenly launched up into the air, too, rapidly ascending. Sebeck twisted in the wind, watching the ground recede beneath him. In just a few moments he was hundreds of feet in the air with a view of the distant town of Greeley, still shrouded in columns of black smoke. He could also see torched farmhouses dotting the landscape—a scene of devastation. The only hopeful sign was the variegated landscape of grass, crops, and the saplings of recently planted orchards.

However, as Sebeck kept ascending, rising thousands of feet into the air, his view broadened, and he could see the bigger picture was the larger ocean of corn in which this island of variety was planted. The monoculture of corn stretched from horizon to horizon—and none of those farms were burning.

Sebeck hung there realizing the vastness of his failure. They hadn’t even made a dent in the old system. And here it was carrying them away—to disappear forever.

Sebeck kept rising, listening to the slap of the steel cable against the back of his harness as he swayed in the wind. He wondered why he wasn’t afraid of the height. Between his feet he could see thousands of feet to the broad plain below. He was actually level with the nearby clouds.

Then he heard the roar of approaching aircraft engines. He wriggled his body to turn enough to see—and there, some miles away, he could see the head-on view of what looked to be a C-130 cargo plane, chopping at the wind on a collision course with him. He watched it with silent amazement. No effing way . . .

As the plane approached he could see what looked to be a V-shaped fork extending from the nose of the aircraft and running some ways away from the fuselage. It was collection fork, and, as Sebeck watched, the C-130 headed straight for the balloon. He winced as the plane roared past only fifty feet overhead.

As it did so, the steel catch fork grabbed the balloon, instantly yanking the cable and accelerating Sebeck so violently that he blacked out again.

Chapter 34: // Cold Reality

Pete Sebeck sat strapped to a thick wooden chair in a brightly lit holding cell. The chair was bolted to the concrete floor with L brackets. They’d taken his clothes and left him nude. He felt vulnerable. Helpless.

That was no doubt the purpose.

Just then the steel door of the cell opened and a man he recognized from darknet news feeds entered. It was The Major. In person he was more intimidating—a stern man with buzz-cut hair and a firm jawline. He appeared to be in excellent shape for his fortysomething age, and wore full combat fatigues in a shades-of-gray urban warfare pattern. He carried no weapons, however.

He closed the cell door behind him and examined Sebeck without betraying emotion. No surprise. No irritation. Nothing. “Detective Sebeck.”

“Major.”

The Major narrowed his eyes and dragged a heavy wooden chair across the concrete floor to sit across from Sebeck. “Sergeant, I must say that I’m surprised to find you, of all people, serving the Daemon.”

“I don’t serve the Daemon. Where is Laney Price?”

“Tell me about your quest, Sergeant.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where is Laney?”

“He’s safe nearby—telling us everything about nothing we care about.”

Sebeck stared into The Major’s cold eyes. “What are you doing to him? He doesn’t know anything.”

“Tell me about the quest Sobol gave you. You’re supposed to justify the freedom of humanity, is that it?” The Major studied Sebeck’s bonds. “How is that going so far?”

Sebeck said nothing.

“What are you supposed to accomplish to achieve this quest of yours, Sergeant?”

“When are you people going to leave me alone?”

“Answer the question.”

“Are you with the government?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me!”

“Don’t shout. Shouting will only make you hoarse. And it won’t change anything. A lot of prisoners make that mistake. Now, let’s get back to your quest. How many darknet operatives are tracking the progress of your quest? How many are donating darknet credits toward its success?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb, Sergeant. We’re already creating darknet objects—like the quest thread you followed to us.”

Sebeck stared at the floor.

“We have a complete breakdown of your activities from darknet news feeds, and we know your circle of operatives. You’ve been on quite a journey.”

Sebeck shook his head slowly. “You evil prick . . . you’re carving up young people to—”

“Yes, we’ve infiltrated the darknet, Sergeant. We’re more creative than you imagine. And unlike you, we’ll do whatever’s necessary to win.”

“I’ve seen what you’re capable of.”

The Major looked at his watch. “Belief is malleable. All one has to do to gain access to the darknet is believe in its purpose. The teenage runaways I introduce to the Daemon consider me their dear friend. A friend who rescued them from life as a sex slave in some brothel—one who showed them a world they never dreamed existed. And once they’re in, they become very useful to me.”

“You cut off their heads and hijack their accounts!”

“Soon, we won’t even need to do that.”

“I thought I knew what evil was. But I was wrong.”

The Major just shrugged it off. “I don’t care, Sergeant. There’s no shortage of unwanted people in the world. Now let’s get back to this quest of yours. What happens if you succeed? What Daemon event are you trying to trigger?”

“Fuck you.”

“You won’t answer?”

“I don’t know. That’s the answer. Sobol gave me a quest, and I have no idea how to accomplish it.”

“What about this D-Space Thread you’re following?”

Sebeck realized with a pang of loss that he no longer could see the Thread. He no longer had HUD glasses, and D-Space was invisible to him. “I can’t see it anymore.”

“And what if we brought your HUD glasses? Would you lead us on the path of this Thread?”

“It wasn’t meant for you.”

“If you cooperate, I can give you your old life back. I can undo this curse Sobol cast on you. Make Detective Sebeck live again. Clear his name. Turn him into a hero.”

Sebeck just shook his head. “I’m not the person I was then, and I don’t want to be. I’ve seen the truth now.”

The Major nodded grimly. “Why would you help the same system that took so much from you?”

“This ‘system’ will help people take back control—from bastards like you.”

“ ‘Bastards like me’ serve a purpose. People need order, Sergeant. They need to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe, or everything will fall apart. This miracle of modern civilization doesn’t just happen. It requires careful management by professionals willing to do whatever is necessary to keep things running smoothly. . . .”

“Is that what you tell yourself?”

“It’s the truth, even if you don’t want to hear it.”

Sebeck shook his head. “I don’t have to believe you. I’ve seen the truth with my own eyes. The people don’t need to be protected from themselves.”

The Major glanced at his watch again. “You disappoint me, Sergeant. You really do. I would normally have taken a more patient and deliberate approach with your case, but time is of the essence, and I must be off.” He stood and pulled the chair back along the wall. “And you—along with your DNA—were officially cremated many months ago. We can’t have you popping up and ruining the official story. Not now.” He rapped on the metal door. A portal slid open with a clack. A moment of recognition and then the door opened.

Two beefy soldiers in ski masks with stun sticks and metal whips on their belts entered.

The Major pointed to Sebeck. “Take him and his friend out to the dump at Q-27. Put their bodies through a wood chipper. I don’t want anyone to find a shred of evidence that they ever existed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sebeck glared from his chair. “You motherfucker.”

The Major regarded him. “Look at the bright side, Sergeant. Your quest is over.” He exited as the guards pulled out their stun sticks.

Sebeck rode in the passenger bay of a heavy vehicle. A diesel engine rattling somewhere beyond steel walls. He could feel his hands lashed behind his back as he lay facedown on a hard, cold diamond-plate floor. He was still nude. Road vibration circulated through his bones.

He turned over to see several sets of combat boots nearby and looked up into the masked faces of soldiers with M4A1s slung across their chests. They looked back down menacingly.

The closest of them pointed a gloved hand in Sebeck’s face. “If I get any trouble from you, I’m going to make it painful. You hear me?”

Another soldier on the opposite row of benches kicked Sebeck. “You hear him!”

Sebeck had the wind knocked out of him for a moment. As he got air back into his lungs, he turned to the man. “I’m an American. I’m one of you. Why are you treating me like this?”

“Shut the fuck up, you commie prick!”

He landed another vicious kick to Sebeck’s ribs, sending him rolling.

That’s when Sebeck noticed Laney Price nearby. Price was also nude, and he sat slumped with his back against the front wall of the vehicle. Price was staring into space with unseeing eyes. He rocked back and forth, muttered silently to himself. Sebeck was horrified to see Price’s body. He expected that it would be overweight and just as hairy as the young man’s face and arms, but instead what he saw along Price’s chest, stomach, and legs was a solid mass of burn scars. Sebeck was horrified.

“Laney. Laney!”

One of the soldiers leaned into view. “Tough little fucker, that one.”

Another soldier chimed in. “Yeah, you’re not going to reach him. He knows how to deal with torture. Don’t you, boy? You’re an old hand.” He smacked Price’s head.

Sebeck crawled closer to Price. “Laney.” Price’s eyes remained unseeing as his lips moved in a repeating rhythm. The scars all over his body looked old.

“Curling iron would be my guess.”

Sebeck turned to face the soldier who said it.

Another soldier shook his head. “This fucker had some sick parents.”

Sebeck felt his heart dropping. He remembered Riley’s words to him back at the Laguna reservation: You never asked about Price’s suffering. How could he never have realized? It nearly swallowed him with grief. He looked to Price. “Laney. Listen to me, Laney!”

The vehicle suddenly slowed and lurched into a steep turn.

The lead non-comm stood up and grabbed an overhead handrail. “Let’s finish this and get back in time for chow.” He wrapped a cloth around his nose and mouth, as did the other men.

The vehicle came to a complete stop and the back wall lowered like a drawbridge. Before he could react Sebeck felt himself grabbed by the feet and dragged roughly across the diamond-plate floor. He felt the pain of a dozen small cuts, and then he was unceremoniously dumped onto the dusty ground. All he could smell was the stench of death—so thick that he tasted it as much as smelled it. He heard the squawking and shrieking of birds.

Sebeck sat up and surveyed his surroundings. They’d been traveling in some sort of six-wheeled, armored personnel carrier and arrived at a series of tall wood chip piles—probably from brush clearing at the ranch. Nearby was what looked to be a well-worn wood chipper on a trailer, its chute aimed at the smallest pile of wood chips. Just beyond the blower, crows and buzzards fed noisily on carrion already splayed in a long streak of red-brown covered with chunks of gelatinous meat. They bickered over the scraps.

The whole place reeked of dead flesh. As he glanced around he saw nothing for miles in any direction. It was just flat scrubland.

Sebeck felt Price thrown against him, and as he sat there next to Price in the dust he leaned in once more to look Price in the eyes. He got up close. “Laney! Laney, it’s me, Pete! Talk to me. Please.”

There was a flicker of recognition in Price’s eyes, then they focused on Sebeck.

Sebeck looked around him as a squad of soldiers stared at two others pouring gasoline into the wood chipper’s fuel tank. Another was preparing a video camera with a ghoulish grin on his face.

Sebeck turned back to Price. “Laney, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it ended like this.”

Price’s brow contorted. “It’s not your fault, Sergeant. Sometimes things end badly.”

“I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I know you didn’t have to be here—and now I’ve gone and failed everyone.”

Price shook his head slightly. “Your quest wasn’t about you, Sergeant. It was about how people reacted to it. It was their quest. You’re just carrying the flag.”

Sebeck stopped. The truth of it hit him. It was the effect his quest had on others that was the purpose. He was just an icon. It made his burden suddenly easier to bear.

Just then the wood chipper’s deafening engine roared to life, and the birds lifted off in panic, fleeting shadows against the sun. Two soldiers walked up to Sebeck. One pointed first to Sebeck, then the wood chipper. They both nodded and slung their weapons. They grabbed Sebeck by the elbows and started carrying him to the bloodstained maw of the roaring machine. Sebeck felt primordial fear grip him as he struggled and dug his bare heels into the dirt. “No!”

They dragged him, twisting and shouting.

But then it suddenly became much easier, and he fell to the ground. Oddly, he was also sopping wet. He turned up toward the man carrying him on his right, but saw that the soldier was missing from the waist up. The man’s severed arm still tightly gripped Sebeck. He stared at it in disbelief. It was not the sort of thing a civilized mind readily computed.

Sebeck then realized no one was holding him to his left anymore either, and when he turned he saw his other executioner’s torso had emptied its contents across the dirt. The rest of the man lay farther on.

And now Sebeck noticed that the roar of the wood chipper was punctuated with crackling gunfire and the roar of more powerful engines. He turned to see several unmanned, blade-covered motorcycles wielding twin swords, slashing at the soldiers as they raced past. Already, one of the mercenaries lay on the ground, screaming and legless. Several of the soldiers were in prone positions, firing on the motorcycles to little effect, but then clutching their eyes as green laser light played across their faces. Blinded, they tried to grope their way back to the troop carrier, but got cut down.

One of the guards managed to make it through the open armored car door, but a motorcycle followed him up the ramp and chopped him into sections with a couple swift sword slashes.

Soon their captors lay in pieces on the ground, blood everywhere, and a score of automated motorcycles slammed down hydraulic kickstands and started preening themselves like praying mantises—spinning their sword blades to clean the blood off.

Sebeck looked to Price, who sat in stunned silence, spattered in blood, but otherwise apparently okay. The only sound was the piercing drone of the wood chipper engine. Sebeck glanced around but could see only fallen bodies and pieces of bodies. He crawled on his belly toward Price, who was trying to sit up.

Price shouted. “Are you hit?”

Sebeck shook his head. “No! This is someone else’s blood!”

Just then the pack of unmanned bikes parted to make way for a lone rider in a black helmet and riding suit. He drove directly up to Price and Sebeck and looked down at them. He dismounted his bike, and suddenly all the engines turned off. A gesture of his hand sent a bolt-straight arc of electricity into the wood chipper, killing its engine as well.

As the chipper wound down, the rider removed his helmet and riding gloves revealing an unnerving sight. It was a young man, early twenties, but his eyes had been replaced with black lenses with flat black rims. Wires ran from drill holes in his bruised temples to an enclosure at the base of his neck. All of his fingers appeared to have been replaced with titanium or silver prosthetics, topped by gleaming claws. He moved stiffly, as if in pain.

The rider knelt down in front of them, staring right into Sebeck’s face with his lidless, metallic eyes. An artificial voice, deep and menacing, spoke an inch or so in front of the man’s mouth—without his lips moving. It was apparently hypersonic sound. “Where is The Major?”

Sebeck shook his head. “I don’t know, but I just left him. They took us out here.”

The rider’s expression was unreadable with his metal eyes. He stood and stared at the horizon.

“Thanks for rescuing us. Who are you?”

Price answered. “He’s Loki Stormbringer, Sergeant.” Price leaned close and whispered. “You remember—Jon Ross mentioned him. . . .”

Sebeck did remember. The most powerful sorcerer on the darknet. And almost as ruthless as the Major himself. Sebeck couldn’t help but think they deserved each other. He twisted to reveal his tied hands. “Can you please untie us, Loki?”

Loki gazed at the horizon with his dead eyes. “You should leave this place. Everything here is about to die. . . .”

With that Loki walked to his bike, and started it. His two dozen razorbacks started up as well. Then an even larger swarm of razorbacks swept past—at least a hundred strong—and Loki merged into it. A flock of dozens of microjet aircraft also howled low overhead in close formation. The entire retinue thundered into the distance, back the way the truck had brought Sebeck and Price. Back toward the center of the ranch.

Price nodded. “He’s even scarier in person.”

Sebeck started crawling toward nearby bodies. “We can probably find a knife on one of these.”

“Hey, look.”

Emerging from the edges of the wood chip piles were a couple dozen armed men in Ghillie suits. As they got closer Sebeck realized their poncho-like suits were more than just physical camouflage—they appeared to reflect whatever was on the other side of them. They were translucent.

He could see their telltale HUD glasses. They had electronic multibarrel rifles slung across their chests and gave the thumbs-up sign to Sebeck and Price as they approached.

Several of them watched the horizon and skies as a tall, muscular-looking darknet operative came up to them and flipped up his bulletproof mask to reveal that he was African American. “Are either of you hurt?”

Sebeck shook his head. “No.”

“Are you The Unnamed One and Chunky Monkey?”

Price exhaled deeply. “That’s us, man.”

“I’m Taylor. An operative named Rakh sent us to get you.”

Sebeck nodded. Jon Ross.

He made motions with a gloved hand in D-Space as several other darknet operatives cut Sebeck and Price’s bonds. They also offered canteens to them.

He called to the others, “Morris, let’s get them some clothing and gear!”

“We’re on it.”

Price rubbed his wrists. “That was calling it pretty goddamned close!”

“Loki Stormbringer has gathered an army of machines. He’s going to attack. Many others are going to follow him in.”

“Attack? What attack?”

“We came to stop Operation Exorcist. Unmanned vehicles are opening up the roads. We’re pushing in overland.”

“You’re here for The Major and his men?”

“Yes. Have you seen him?”

Sebeck felt his temper starting to flare. “Yeah, and if you’re going after him, we’re going with you.”

Chapter 35: // Infil

Only on the Texas prairie could a three-thousand-square-foot home be called a bungalow. Natalie Philips’s quarters were located in a cluster of other bungalows, all done in Southwestern style—tiny Alamos of white plastered brick with flat roofs and a cosmetic bell tower. It was part of a subdivision of corporate residences located about a mile from the main house across landscaped grounds with fountains, ornamental gardens, and rows of poplars. Beyond the complex the prairie extended unbroken to the horizon. It was peaceful out here. Actual solitude.

The interiors of the bungalow were first-rate—hardwood planks, adobe walls, and hand-hewn beams. High ceilings, hand-woven rugs, and expensive-looking Southwestern art adorning the walls. The entertainment centers for each bungalow were insane. Seventy-inch plasma televisions with surround-sound stereo systems linked to an impressive music and movie library drawn off of some central server—but no Web access. No outside phone service, only in-house room service. There was a fully stocked bar and a small kitchenette with a microwave, as well as a disproportionately large dining room that could easily seat a dozen people. There was a separate servants’ entrance with a ramp for bringing in carts, connected to concealed servant paths that ran between the homes behind hedges and fences—as though they were modern Mad Ludwigs, unwilling to countenance the serving staff.

Philips sat alone at the dining room table looking at a powerful laptop linked in to the ranch’s expansive network. A laptop they’d given her and which she was certain was riddled with spyware.

Aldous Johnston had named half a dozen world-class cryptanalysts and software scientists working on Operation Exorcist—but she hadn’t actually seen any of them. She’d just been here, waiting. Even though this was supposed to be an emergency, they hadn’t asked her to do a damn thing. She’d left a dozen messages with Johnston’s admin assistant to find out when she’d be able to get an outside line to talk with Deputy Director Fulbright back at the NSA—as they agreed she could—but no one had gotten back to her. All she had was 24/7 access to food, music, and a huge library of movies.

With representative democracy about to be subverted, kicking back and watching television wasn’t high on her priority list. However, she’d turned on the news to give the impression that she was behaving normally. Recent experience had shown that predictable patterns of behavior were more likely to keep the data gods off her back, and she wanted to foster the belief that she could be trusted.

The news was all bad—civil unrest in the Midwest, the dollar had fallen to record lows against the euro and yuan, and stock markets around the world were incredibly volatile, spiking and falling. Chaos.

And the resounding theme of the media blitz was unmistakable: you are not safe—you need security.

Philips listened to the news as she sat at the dining room table examining the plastic RFID bracelet affixed to her wrist. She held it up to the light to try to see through the thin plastic band. Boynton had said it was tamper-resistant, and she assumed this meant it had a wire antenna braided into its length that would be severed if the bracelet were broken. The whole ranch complex was littered with RFID readers—she’d spotted no less than six here in the bungalow. The sudden loss of a signal would undoubtedly put her unique RFID number into alarm and summon security to investigate.

Unless she could slip this digital leash, she wasn’t going to be able to escape or do anything else without their knowledge. It was becoming apparent that she was under house arrest—at least until Operation Exorcist was completed. By then it would be too late. They would have taken over the Daemon and solidified their control.

Philips knew an RFID tag was just a circuit attached to an antenna. It used energy from a radio wave to activate the circuit and broadcast its unique ID on a specific frequency. That’s how it could broadcast its location to Sky Ranch Security without needing a battery.

The ISO 15693 standard common for RFID proximity cards and mobile payment systems meant this bracelet was probably operating at 13.56 MHz—which was a commercial frequency.

Philips had attended conferences where hacker groups demonstrated homemade devices able to harvest and spoof RFID tags at will. The question was whether Philips could build something similar with the materials here in the bungalow. If she could make them think she was home when she wasn’t, she might be able to trip up their plans.

The place was packed with consumer electronics—but not a lot of them wireless. She’d gathered the few wireless devices she had onto the dining room table to examine their FCC labels.

There was the cordless phone handset and its base station—a 1.9 GHz DECT unit. Not much use. Likewise, all of the television and stereo remotes were infrared, not radio based. There was the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi transmitter in the laptop. This was a decidedly more crowded spectrum here on the ranch, but also useless for interacting at 13.56 MHz. Of course, she also had her Acura TL car remote entry key, which she recalled worked somewhere in the 300-400 MHz range, but attached to the same key chain she had her RFID gas payment fob, which she had disassembled to reveal a tiny clear plastic bulb containing a spool of copper wire connected to a small circuit board. It was the proper frequency, but there was a problem: its code was burned into the circuitry at the factory. Unchangeable—at least theoretically. And she had no specialized tools.

Philips looked back up at the cable news playing on the television. Now in addition to the fighting in the Midwest, a series of major Internet outages had begun to “grip the nation”—or so the media claimed. It was being blamed on sabotage. On domestic “terrorists” blowing up critical fiber-optic lines at vulnerable junctions. The very things they were doing to stifle dissent were being used as the justification for making draconian measures permanent. And everywhere was video of smartly attired private security forces rushing to rescue besieged towns, to restore service. How was it possible that they could do all this? How could they possibly get away with it?

Philips sighed in exasperation—but then stopped cold. On the wall next to her a message was spelled out in brilliant red laser light:

Your room is bugged.

The butter knife she was planning on using as a screwdriver dropped from her hand with a clang. The glowing message changed to read:

Open the service door and do not speak.

She turned around.

There at the rear service door stood a man dressed in a black Nomex flight suit, body armor, and utility vest. A balaclava covered his head and advanced-looking night vision goggles covered his eyes. In his gloved hands he held a laser pointing device aimed at Philips’s dining room wall.

She recovered from the shock and walked to the service door. After a moment’s hesitation she opened it.

The intruder ducked past her and closed the door, holding a gloved finger to his lips.

He pulled a wandlike device from his utility harness and started scanning the walls, light fixtures, and furniture with it.

As she watched, Philips listened to the news playing in the background, continuing its litany of financial and social woes. Philips turned up the volume.

Anji Anderson was on screen as part of a panel with other pundits. She spoke authoritatively for someone who had a few short years ago been a lifestyles reporter. “People can’t simply blame others for their plight. They need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, but it appears that some people don’t want to do that. They want to take from others in pursuit of what they call”—air quotes—“ ‘fairness.’ ”

The stranger meanwhile was teasing a small bugging device out of her dining room lamp with tweezers. He held it up for Philips to see, then placed it in one of several chambers in a small metal box.

He continued scanning for bugs as Philips followed him.

It took nearly twenty minutes, but by the time he was done, he had located eight bugs in all—from the bar to the bathroom to the bedroom. The stranger then sat down on a changing bench at the foot of the bed and removed his hood and goggles. Jon Ross sighed in relief and smiled at her. “There we go.”

“Jon! My god . . .” She rushed to hold his face in her hands. There was that slight crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiled that she missed so much. Before she had time to think about it, she was kissing him passionately. After a moment she pulled back to look at him.

He gazed back, and then pulled her close, kissing her harder, longer, and with a strength that almost squeezed the breath from her.

He eventually relaxed his hold. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“How on earth did you find me?”

He tugged on the silver chain around her neck, coming up with the amulet he’d created for her.

She scowled. “You gave me a tracking device? How romantic . . .”

“It’s more an amulet of protection.”

“Protection from what?”

“From Loki—and people like him. I didn’t want his machines harming you.”

She studied the amulet and then turned back to him. Philips pointed to the metal box on the nearby table. “You’re sure they can’t hear us?”

Ross nodded. “Bug Vault. It produces generic sounds of human habitation—footsteps, television, stuff like that. It’ll make them think their bugs are still in place.”

“How the hell did you get past ranch security? This place is surrounded by the best surveillance system money can buy.”

“Yeah, they’re using the latest technology—a Beholder Unified Surveillance System designed by Haverford Systems. State of the art.”

She looked puzzled.

“Let’s just say it has some flaws built in, compliments of the Chinese people.”

She sat down next to him. “I was worried I’d never see you again.” Philips looked at him gravely. “But why would you take such a stupid risk to come here?”

“I came to get you, Nat.”

“What made you think I needed rescuing? This is where I need to be. They’re about to launch Operation Exorcist, and unless I can stop them, they’ll take control of the Daemon.”

He contemplated her words. “The Weyburn Labs people have expanded on the work you and I did at Building Twenty-Nine. They’re starting to crack their way into the Daemon’s darknet. I don’t know how they did it, but they’ve started spoofing people and creating darknet objects. They used it to capture Pete Sebeck, and he’s here on the ranch now.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From Pete Sebeck.”

“Peter Sebeck is alive?”

“Yeah, look, it’s a long story, but Sobol rescued Sebeck from his execution and sent him on a quest to justify humanity’s freedom. The Major just kidnapped Sebeck and brought him here. There’s about to be a serious showdown, Nat, and I need to get you out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Loki Stormbringer is headed this way with an army of machines. There are two dozen darknet factions on his heels. Once Loki’s army is gathered, this whole place will be a war zone.”

“The Loki?” She sat on the arm of a nearby sofa and shook her head. “I can’t leave, Jon.”

“Why not? This isn’t your—”

“Look, you have no idea how happy I am to see you, and I can’t tell you how much it touches me that you risked your life to rescue me. But I can’t go. The plutocrats are planning to execute some sort of cyber warfare attack. Physically storming this ranch won’t stop it. I need to figure out what they’re really up to and stop them. Luckily, I have some clues.” She brought him over to a huge stack of documents on a nearby desk. “They’ve given me tech documentation on Operation Exorcist—but something about it doesn’t make sense.”

“Operation Exorcist?”

“Yes. Remember the Destroy function of the Daemon—the command that destroys all data in a Daemon-infected corporation? Well, they’ve come up with a blocker.”

“How the hell did—?”

“They figured out that if they use a formatstring hack they could inject executable code through the tax ID function parameter. It puts the Destroy function into an infinite loop so that it doesn’t return a value.”

“Meaning the Destroy command won’t be issued . . . making the Daemon harmless to them.”

She nodded.

“Can they really inject it into all the Daemon-infected networks?”

“The Ragnorok module is a Web API. They can invoke the function from anywhere.”

“Jesus . . .”

“They could do it with a script. They’re using the Daemon’s own high availability against it.”

Ross gestured to the piles of technical documents marked “Top Secret.” “But you said something’s not adding up.”

“Yes. I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours examining all this, and it just looks too rosy.”

“A ruse?”

She nodded. “Jon, they’re planning on launching their Daemon-blocker attack from thousands of machines, and then they’re going to send in police and paramilitary strike teams to seize tens of thousands of data centers around the world—all at once. It would easily be the largest covert operation launched in the history of mankind—by several orders of magnitude—and I don’t see how an international operation this size could be kept secret.”

“You mean from the Daemon?”

“I mean from anyone.”

She picked up a sheaf of documents. “So how am I supposed to believe this? It’s not credible.”

“So Operation Exorcist is a lie.”

“Or we don’t know what the real Operation Exorcist is. They’ve basically put me under house arrest here to read through propaganda—so when things go to hell, I can attest to some congressional subcommittee how diligently Weyburn Labs and Korr were working toward defeating the Daemon.”

She threw up her hands. “But I saw armies of corporate soldiers down at the airfield. Something serious is about to go down.”

Ross grimaced. “Darknet news feeds have noticed private security forces moving into position to defend property—office towers, media centers, telecom infrastructure, and utilities. Also high-end gated communities.”

They sat for a few moments contemplating what that meant. The sound of murmuring television voices came from downstairs.

Ross looked at her. “So I can’t convince you to leave?”

“I care about you more than you know, but my duty is here.”

He grinned slightly in respect of her choice, then he moved over to the fifty-inch plasma screen mounted in a hutch in front of the bed. He pulled the television away from the wall on its swivel mount.

“What are you doing?”

He produced a small electronic device from one of his harness pockets, and uncoiled an HDMI cable, which he used to connect the device to the television.

“I’m opening the surveillance system’s back door to other darknet operatives so that they can help us collectively keep an eye on what’s going on here on the ranch. We’ll have a better shot at finding anything important with tens of thousands of people searching with us.” He spoke into D-Space. “Rakh, requesting high-priority Thread: review all camera imagery at Sky Ranch for evidence of complicity in current social disturbances. Publicize findings, ASAP.”

In a few moments, the screen showed an hourglass with a label reading: Number of Respondents. The number rapidly incremented into the thousands, gaining speed by the second.

“So . . . thirteen thousand people are searching the surveillance system for suspicious activity?”

He nodded. “This ranch is on a maximum-priority Thread—we’re all concerned about it. And it doesn’t hurt to have a good reputation score when summoning a smart mob.” He peered at the screen. “Past twenty thousand now.”

She was stunned. “This is amazing.” She closely watched the screen.

Almost immediately a “suspicious” item came up on the screen as a link. It read simply: Broadcast News Set—by dPooley.

“They found something.”

“Thanks, dPooley. . . .” Ross clicked on the video link and brought up a live surveillance feed of a full-sized television sound stage, complete with green screens. The set looked quiet.

“A news studio.”

Ross clicked out to an overhead map of all the cameras in that location, bringing up a 3-D model of the building it was in. “Hang on a second, I have an idea.”

Philips pointed at the overhead map. “Look, they’ve got a satellite farm. This is a complete broadcasting facility.”

Ross brought up another view—this one of the producer’s control room. It showed an array of large screens as well as a window onto the studio beyond. “Do you think they’re creating the news here at the ranch?”

Philips shook her head. “It’s just one studio, and the news is running 24/7 on a dozen channels at once. This has some other purpose.”

“Let’s roll this back in time.”

“We can do that?”

“Yeah. One of the big selling points of the Beholder system was detecting recurring patterns over time—people casing embassies, that sort of thing. It can store huge amounts of video. Here . . .” Ross moved his hands, interacting with invisible controls. “I’m going to run backward to the last time there was activity in this control room.”

The image of the control room stayed relatively unchanged, even though the lighting changed very slightly, indicating a passage of time and voltage fluctuations in the overhead lights. Suddenly the room sprang into life, and there were several people in the control booth. Ross slowed down the rewind and kept rolling it back until there was a hand signal being given to a distant anchor person sitting at the green screen desk. He clicked the video into play mode.

Suddenly audio came through and they could clearly see the computer-enhanced image of the anchor on the central control board screen.

Philips shot a look at Ross. “Anji Anderson!”

He nodded. “So it is. . . .”

“Then she’s here at the ranch.”

On-screen Anderson was delivering the news next to a disturbing graphic with the word “Cybergeddon” in bold, terrifying letters. She was in midsentence. . . .

“—responsible for this unprecedented attack on modern civilization. It appears that a cataclysmic loss of corporate data has occurred. The New York and American Stock Exchanges have been closed, along with most other world stock exchanges. Again, we have no word on whether this happened during the blackout, before the blackout, or just before. But if you’re just now joining us, there has apparently been a cyber attack of unprecedented magnitude against the world electrical grid. Most of North America, Europe, and parts of Asia have been without power for the last seventy-two hours.”

They were showing video of looting and fires looming over downtown areas throughout the world. Some of the scenes were at night.

“These are images of some of the looting and sporadic violence that’s unfolding worldwide. The U.S. government has declared martial law—and there’s talk that perhaps the domestic terrorists in the Midwestern United States were behind the attack. In all, the death toll may number in the tens of thousands. No one knows whether the perpetrators have been apprehended or are still at large. All that’s known is the data of thousands of public companies has been destroyed in what might have been an electromagnetic pulse weapon attack coordinated to cause maximum damage to Western economies. Security forces are securing key facilities and launching humanitarian missions at this hour. Certainly, this is the biggest shock to hit the world since 9/11, and I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that. Let’s pray that someone can help put a stop to—”

Ross clicked the STOP button. He then sent the video out to the darknet, flagged maximum priority. Then he and Philips stared into space for several moments in silence, her hand over her mouth in horror.

Philips spoke first. “They’re going to deliberately invoke the Destroy function against everyone else. And in the chaos, they’ll seize control.”

Philips just held her head in her hands.

“We can still do something, Natalie. People know about this now.” She stood up and walked through a pair of French doors to get some fresh air. There was a patio just off the bedroom on the second floor, and it overlooked the grassy plain leading up to the huge main house in the distance. It was lit up like Cape Canaveral. Baroque music could be heard coming softly from the mansion, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and she could see shadows of party guests moving about on the terraces among ornamental lights.

Ross followed her outside, and they both stood at the railing.

Philips spoke matter-of-factly. “The Weyburn Labs team is preparing to hijack what’s left of the Daemon. They’re going to use it as a means to control people—just like Sobol did. Only this time, for their personal benefit.”

“Nat—”

“Even if we stop their plan, they’ll still seize control of the Daemon.”

The music in the background didn’t match the grimness of their predicament.

Ross gazed at the distant party. “The plutocrat’s ball.”

She nodded. “Celebrating their victory.”

Philips turned to see Ross come up alongside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

She shook her head. “I gave it to them, Jon. We cracked Sobol’s code, and I gave it to the plutocrats. The same API they’ll use as a weapon against the world. How many generations will be reduced to slavery because of me?”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I’m supposed to be able to find the real message in the noise, Jon. That was my gift.”

“You had faith in democracy, Natalie. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Tears started to roll down her face. “Not you, though. You were the smart one. You never had faith in anyone but yourself.”

He grimaced. “You know that’s not true.” He leaned against the stone wall, his back to the distant soiree. His eyes settled on her.

Philips shook her head. “It all seems so clear now. Corporate intrusion into public institutions. Corporate domination of culture and media. It happened in plain view, with us cheering on their success as if it reflected well on us. As if it was us.”

“By now millions of people know the truth. In a couple of hours, we’ll have enough people mobilized to stop them. We can still beat them, Nat.”

She laughed ruefully. “How, Jon? They own everything. They’re not a stupid computer program. They can’t be hacked. And the Daemon can be hacked.”

She felt ashamed imagining the gargantuan social, financial, and commercial networks arrayed against them. Their opponents were so numerous. So powerful. “We can’t beat them.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, the music providing a backdrop.

He sighed. “You always wanted to know my real name.”

She looked up at him in surprise.

“If you want to know my name, I’ll tell you. . . .”

“Jon, I—”

“I am Ivan Borovich. My father was Aleksey Borovich. He died on October fourth, 1993, after Boris Yeltsin dissolved our democratically elected legislature. My father went to defend it, but he was killed when tanks shelled the Russian White House and Yeltsin’s troops stormed in shooting. Media in the West called my father a ‘communist holdout.’ But he laid down his life for democracy. Not for himself—but for me, and my brothers and sisters. And his countrymen.”

Philips moved closer to him as he spoke. “Jon . . .”

“They may beat us, Natalie, but as long as there’s another generation, there will always be hope.”

She kissed him tenderly, forgetting for the moment her anguish and doubt.

Chapter 36: // Downtime

In the Sky Ranch Ops Center, Weyburn Labs network analysts calmly spoke instructions into headsets while the chief operating officer of Korr Military Solutions, General Andrew Connelly, and senior partner, Aldous Johnston, stared at a huge media wall. Television news feeds from every channel in the Western world were tiled along the wall to either side. Live spy satellite imagery from a dozen locations around the globe were tiled on screens all along the bottom row.

But the large central screen was a wonder to behold. Spread across its thirty feet was an awe-inspiring image of Earth—live high-definition video from twenty thousand miles in orbit. The day-night line cut diagonally across the eastern edge of Russia, with North America in a band of daylight that stretched to the Western seaboard of Europe. Most of the Southern Hemisphere lay in darkness. Great swaths of Europe were woven with intricate filaments of light, blending into the glow of metropolitan sprawl. Knotted clumps of light daisy-chained across the landscape. Japan glowed like a tear in a lampshade down in the Pacific.

Connelly could see the lights from the vast night-fishing fleets in the Sea of Japan. The lights of Seoul bringing back fond memories of the DMZ. Beijing, Hong Kong, and Mumbai glittered. Indonesia blazing in the South Seas. Wildfires raging in north central Australia. More traceries of light stretching along the Trans-Siberian rail line into Russia’s heartland. Natural gas burn-off smoldering in the blackness of Siberia.

Connelly felt an adrenaline surge verging on euphoria. What would Napoleon have given for the power he now held? He turned to Johnston.

Johnston nodded solemnly back.

Even he’s hushed by it. They were gods.

Red lights were still flashing on dozens of other sensors. Connelly concentrated on the task at hand.

Suddenly a Klaxon warning sounded. Johnston jumped in his seat. Connelly turned around to face a nearby Korr board operator. “Report to me.”

The board technician was clicking through monitors. Images on the big board changed. He brought up an overhead view of the massive ranch with its concentric rings of fencing. Hundreds of flashing red points arrayed all around the ranch—in a 360-degree arc. “Seismic sensors have gone off on the fence line all around the ranch, sir.”

“Along four hundred miles of perimeter? Unlikely. No one would scatter their forces like that. What are the chances that our security system has been compromised?”

“We’re on it, sir.”

Johnston scowled. “If our security system has been breached, then that might mean Daemon operatives know about our plans.”

“Unlikely. But even if they did, it’s too late to do anything about them. We’re going to move ahead on an accelerated schedule.”

Connelly was motioning to gather subordinates around him, but he spoke to Johnston.

“A Daemon counterattack was anticipated, but much of the darknet’s bandwidth should disappear when we conduct the blackout.”

“What the hell are we waiting for?”

Connelly ignored him and instead barked at the control board operators. “What are we seeing from our surveillance drones on the perimeter? I want live visuals.”

“Yes, sir.”

In a few moments the central screen showed black-and-white infrared imagery of the prairie floor from a few thousand feet. The fence line was clearly visible running into the distance. Nothing unusual. The image jumped to another drone aircraft. Then it flipped to a third. Then a fourth. This one showed a rail spur stretching out to the horizon. The plain was empty.

“Looks clear on the perimeter, sir.”

Connelly nodded. “If false alarms are the worst it can throw at us, then we can manage. Lieutenant, seal the ranch and put the base on high alert. No one enters or leaves as of now. I want Kiowas in the air in a thirty-mile radius, and I want perimeter roads watched closely.”

“Yes, General.”

A piercing air-raid siren slowly wound up to a long mournful wail somewhere outside the bunkerlike building.

Connelly and his assembled staff officers gathered around a plasma-screen table displaying a satellite still image of the ranch. He pointed with a pocket laser light as he spoke. “The seismic sensors along our perimeter have been compromised. Ignore them. However, we can’t rule out that this is the beginning of an attack.

We have six surveillance drones airborne, but since we can no longer trust our perimeter alarms, that gives us too much terrain to cover. Have the garrison pull back to the secondary perimeter and establish kill boxes at the service gates here, here, and here, and at internal ranch road junctions here and here. Keep a garrison at the south airfield.”

“What are the rules of engagement, General?”

“Fire on anything that approaches our lines by land or air.”

“Anything?”

“Let me make this clear: if a horse and buggy filled with orphans and nuns approaches a gate waving a white flag—open fire at four hundred yards and keep firing until those bitches are down. Sobol was devious enough to conceive of the Daemon and devious enough to build it. If his agents get into this compound, they will sabotage our systems and sow confusion in our ranks. That must not be allowed to happen.”

“Do we pursue retreating forces?”

“Don’t get drawn out from our perimeter. Keep your forces concentrated around what matters: the inner perimeter, the airfields, and the power station. Call in an air or artillery strike if you’ve got them on the run.”

“What about the rail spur?”

“We’ll blow the tracks at Snake Bayou if outside rail traffic appears.” He scanned the faces of the gathered officers. A tough bunch of career warriors. Veterans of many secret wars. “You will not be forgiven for allowing the enemy to enter our perimeter. The mission is simple: hold your positions until the tech folks give the all-clear. At that point resistance should stop.” He looked at them all. “Any more questions?”

A one-star frowned at the board. “Who is it we’re expecting?”

“Intelligence reports indicate elements of Daemon militia are en route. They’re going to be lightly armed civilian irregulars—susceptible to electronic countermeasures and disbursement by heavy weapons. However, we all know what happened to Operation Prairie Fire. So we can’t assume anything. The difference this time around is we’re on our home turf.”

Another officer gestured to the map. “What about unmanned vehicles?”

“High likelihood.”

“What about unmanned car bombs?”

“They’ll be easy targets out here in the prairie—particularly for the Bradleys guarding these interchanges, here and here. Instruct the crews to engage with their cannons. I don’t want TOW missiles wasted on Toyotas.”

He paused for any further questions. “You have your orders. Dismissed.”

The officers scattered to the exits. Connelly called to the nearby analysts. “Have you traced the fault in the seismic sensors yet?”

The analysts conferred briefly. One of them looked up. “We’ve lost contact with our aerial drones, General.”

“Where?”

“Northeast sector, near gate two.”

“The north road.” He examined the map. “Have the remaining drones increase their altitude, and scramble a Kiowa chopper to the northern sector. I want aerial imagery ASAP.”

“Roger. ETA roughly twelve minutes on the chopper.”

“Twelve minutes?”

“It’s thirty miles, General.”

“Damnit.” He turned to Johnston. “But we don’t need to outsmart the Daemon. We just need to keep it busy long enough for the techs to cut its claws off.” He pointed to the analysts. “Get me some intelligence about what’s on my perimeter. Send out scout teams if necessary—but get it. In the meantime, let’s keep in close radio contact with the perimeter gate teams.”

Johnston sat in a leather chair at the edge of the video table. The ranch map spread out before him, showing the placement of forces.

“How long until we execute Operation Exorcist, General?”

“Not long now, Mr. Johnston. Not long.”

Korr Military Solutions captain Greg Hollings stood next to his Humvee inside the north gate of Emperor Ranch. Arrayed around him in foxholes on either side of the road his squad lay in ambush, watching the large, wrought-iron estate gates, chained shut fifty yards away. Three concrete highway dividers had been dropped in front of them—blocking the way. A fifteen-foot-high stone perimeter wall on either side of the gate stretched into the darkness in both directions, but Hollings knew it was largely cosmetic and only extended a few hundred yards before yielding to barbed-wire fencing and seismic sensors. Sensors that were all in alarm.

What was to prevent attackers from outflanking them way down the perimeter—coming in from behind and reconnecting with the ranch road miles south? HQ lost a surveillance drone seven or eight miles north of here. Those were his eyes in the sky. It didn’t bode well.

“We’re meat-on-a-stick out here, Chief.”

“Keep it together, Priestly.” Hollings scanned the perimeter with a FLIR scope. He had already ordered the exterior lights on the guardhouse extinguished, plunging the area into darkness. “Give me a status report.”

Lieutenant Priestly spread a map out on the hood of the nearest Humvee. They both flipped down their night vision goggles. “We’ve got a sixty and a Javelin crew in that guardhouse and another here in ambuscade. Two fire teams entrenched alongside with SAWs. Interlocking fire on the gate centerline. Ten sets of Claymores guarding the north road beyond the gate, starting at one hundred yards out and spaced ten yards apart. Motion activated.” He gestured into the darkness right and left. “We’ve got Humvee-mounted M60 teams on both our right and left flanks, a hundred and fifty yards out—at the ends of the gate walls. They’ll serve as artillery spotters.”

“What about Lopez and Tierney?”

“Their vehicles are in reserve. I figure we’ll move ’em wherever they’re needed.”

Hollings nodded. “Face them rearward. I’m concerned we’ll be attacked from behind—these walls don’t go far. The moment we make contact, I want remote fire support. Any word from the Kiowa they sent up?”

“Negative, sir.”

“Goddamnit. I’m blind.” He pointed back at the map. “We do not fall back to the guardhouse—it’s a death trap. Not enough windows, and it looks highly flammable. If we get overrun, we mount up and join MRTP a few clicks south. Understood?”

Priestly nodded as he folded the map.

Hollings surveyed the area. This would not have been his first choice for a defensive position. He’d rather dig in somewhere in the prairie with his men deployed in a ring. They’d be able to see anything coming a long ways off. But here, the broad expanse of a fifteen-foot perimeter wall thirty yards ahead of them blocked their view of the road north—and it was worthless as a defensive position; too tall to fight behind and too thin to stop much. Only two courses thick with no parapet. It was for show only. Like the guardhouse. Apparently, corporate military brass was just as dumb as the government kind.

Hollings looked at the large, log-cabin-style guard building just to the left, inside the gate. It had an overlarge, peaked slate roof with field-stone chimneys and log-cabin walls. Some billionaire’s idea of pioneer style. It blocked his field of fire to the east, and it had no windows on that side. He couldn’t have designed a more useless building if he’d tried. And yet he’d been ordered not to demo it.

This was a civilian security layout. All-out assault wasn’t contemplated. The guardhouse was the largest structure for miles, and was intended as a rest stop for guests and employees starting the thirty-three-mile drive toward the center of the ranch. Restrooms, refreshments, and house phones next to a small parking lot.

And then there was the guard shack outside the gate, used for greeting vehicles as they drove up to the closed gates. More Davy Crockett-style nonsense. A small pedestrian gate beside it lent access to the guard shack from the main building.

“Priestly, we bring any C4?”

“Yeah, some.”

“I want to take down these curtain walls near the gate. It’s just blocking our field of fire.”

“Already asked, sir. Not approved.”

“For chrissakes . . .”

Suddenly a shout from the guardhouse went up, and then along the line. “We’ve got company!”

Silence prevailed for a moment. Then they all heard it. The sound of distant tires wailing on pavement, coming from the darkness of the north road. The noise of many engines also came in on the breeze.

“All right, places ladies! Wait for the claymores, and keep an eye on our flanks!”

The Korr soldiers adjusted their night vision goggles and hunkered down in their foxholes around M249s and M60s. Another readied a Javelin anti-tank rocket launcher. They were all trained professionals here. Steady fingers rested near trigger guards as last-minute radio calls squawked in the blackness.

“There, sir!” Priestly pointed.

Hollings trained a FLIR scope into the darkness through the bars of the wrought-iron gate. He could see them coming—a long line of cars racing in at over a hundred miles per hour, only a half mile out. He didn’t see any end to them. “Vehicles one thousand yards! Coming in fast!”

Gear creaked in the dark as hands clenched around pistol grips and straps were pulled taut.

“Give ’em hell, gentlemen!”

The roar of approaching engines took center stage now, echoing off the outer face of the estate wall. Suddenly a booming wall of sound hit their eardrums—followed by a shower of sparks and flame. Quickly followed by several more sharp explosions and the screeching of metal.

There were hoots in the ranks. “Yeah!”

A flaming, twisted piece of wreckage slammed into the wrought-iron gates, knocking one gate off its hinges and filling the grillwork with fire. Another flaming wreck slammed into the first, toppling the gates completely. They crashed down onto the highway dividers, sounding like a xylophone tumbling down a staircase.

“So much for our gates.” Through the flames Hollings could see that the claymores had taken out another dozen AutoM8s, which were burning in the ditches alongside the road.

But there was now a veritable roar of racing car engines. The flames revealed dozens more cars coming in from the night.

Just then a staccato boom echoed and tracer fire flicked out of the guardhouse—tracer rounds bounced off the distant prairie and metal wreckage. The M60 near Hollings opened up, too, as another sedan plowed through, smashing into the burning wreckage filling the arch and sending the whole pile over the highway dividers. The deafening crash washed over them, flaring into a brilliant fireball as the wreckage cartwheeled into the corner of the guardhouse. Another car blasted through. And another—which tumbled into the ditch alongside the road—partially blocking their field of fire to the gate.

“Jesus H. R. Pufnstuf Christ!”

“Priestly, put some arty on that road!”

“All I’ve got is static, Captain. Comm just went down!”

“Goddamnit, get on the landline in the guardhouse. And bring some fire down!”

Priestly saluted and took off at a run toward the guardhouse. Flames and tracer fire silhouetted him against the surrounding blackness.

Soldiers around Hollings were flipping up their night vision goggles. It was getting bright in the kill zone with all the flames.

A rocket streaked out of the guardhouse window and disappeared through the gate opening. A flash and boom echoed out there. Another rocket raced in from the foxholes and detonated against the stone wall. Rock splinters blasted back, dinging against the Humvee fenders as Hollings ducked down. “Damnit!” He stood back up and had a much better view of the road now. Good thinking. They could build a new fucking wall. . . .

A whole row of SAWs on his right opened up through the new opening—tracers screaming toward the sound of a NASCAR race approaching them out of the darkness to the north. Ricocheting off of unseen targets. Another rocket raced out of the guardhouse. An explosion. The burning wreckage of a car knocked down a section of wall to the left of the gate.

Machine-gun fire rattled from the extreme right and left flanks—out by the ends of the wall.

“Keep on them! Keep firing!”

Several more cars raced into the meat grinder, crashing into the barriers and pitching up. But by now the barriers were partially pushed aside or smashed in two.

He could see Priestly racing through the guardhouse door. The guardhouse was starting to catch fire now. Soldiers raced up, pulling pieces of burning wreckage away from the wall. A Humvee with the .50 caliber on top roared past Hollings and slowed near the wreckage—nudging it from the building.

“Good job, Lopez!”

Lopez waved and opened up with the .50 into the maw of the gate. The deep, slow booming of the .50 was a kettledrum section to the crackling of small arms fire.

Another rocket streaked out of the guardhouse and nailed a car on the approach road.

Hollings looked around at the carnage. Good lord . . . Flaming wreckage littered the prairie. It looked like something from Revelation.

The gunfire was crackling less intently now. Soldiers were changing drum clips. Barrels were smoking hot. Their field of vision was now the radius of light around the flames. Their night vision and FLIR scopes were useless so close to this light and heat.

But the sound of approaching engines only got louder—and there was a deeper one among them. Hollings stood up and shouted. “Truck! Incoming truck!”

Just then another two sedans smashed through the opening, and tracer fire ripped through them. One caught fire and tumbled over the foxhole nearest the road. Shouts and screaming. Nearby soldiers ran to help their trapped comrades.

“Goddamnit!” Hollings could see Priestly rushing out of the guardhouse, waving his weapon over his head. He sprinted down the road toward Hollings’s position among the Humvees.

“Captain! Phone line’s been cut. We have no communications! They must be—”

Just then a steel-plated concrete truck plowed through the wreckage filling the mouth of the gate—sending burning wreckage, concrete dividers, and stone blocks flying. It continued on into Lopez’s Humvee, crashing into it and plowing it through the front wall of the guardhouse. The truck followed, crushing the front wall and collapsing the rest of the structure under the weight of the enormous peaked roof. The nose of the concrete truck was buried under debris. Lopez, his driver, and the guardhouse team were gone.

“Goddamnit!” Hollings cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted. “Fall back to the Humvees! Fall back! Bring the wounded!”

Bullets ricocheted off the cement mixer as it caught fire, but now the gate opening was clear. Two more AutoM8s—domestic sedans—raced through the opening and quickly took fire from retreating soldiers. But the fire wasn’t intense enough to stop them and one locked on to Priestly in the road. Before he could duck into the nearby ditch, it nailed him at sixty miles per hour with a sickening whump and sent his body twirling off into the darkness beyond the flames.

“Lieutenant!” Hollings jumped onto his Humvee’s hood, as the grenade launcher Humvee roared past. “Fuck!”

It fired a burst of grenades at both AutoM8s, ripping off their fenders and roofs—quickly shutting them down.

Hollings jumped off his hood and shouted again. “Fall back!!! Fall back!!!”

Then he heard a howling engine coming up from behind. He turned just in time to see the gleam of a blade in the moonlight. It was the last thing he saw.

Chapter 37: // Logic Bomb

General Connelly ignored the alarms sounding all around him and beheld the central screen again, with its orbital view of Earth. He breathed deeply, savoring this moment.

A nearby analyst interrupted his reverie. “General. I’ve got direct confirmation that we are under attack by darknet factions. Kiowa choppers have been engaged by what appear to be microjet aircraft. We have at least one chopper down. There are thousands of enemy troops moving in from every direction.”

Connelly nodded calmly. To be expected. “It will do them no good. Do we have confirmation that all strike teams are in place and ready?”

“Affirmative, sir. All strike teams in place and ready.”

Connelly kept his eyes on the screen. The world lay before him. “On my mark.”

“Standing by.”

“Commence Operation Exorcist.”

“Commencing Operation Exorcist.”

It was a facet of the modern world that the most important events now occurred unseen by human eyes. They were electronic bits being flipped from one value to another. Connelly knew that somewhere in this command center one of the network analysts was now, with a single keystroke, destroying the data of almost 80 percent of the world’s most powerful corporations. It was a command script that sequentially invoked the Daemon’s Destroy function using as a parameter the local tax ID of thousands of Daemon-infected corporations throughout the world. The net effect was that they were using the Daemon’s own followers to destroy that data along with the backups. Sobol had warned his Daemon would do this if they tried to retake control.

But why wait for the Daemon?

With an encrypted IP beacon beaming out the Daemon’s Ragnorok API to the entire Internet, it was only a matter of time until some other national power or corporate group had access to the Destroy function as well. There was no other choice.

Why not be the first? That’s what finally convinced Connelly to join this effort. Nuclear war was unthinkable—but all-out cyber war was not. They could finally unify the world under a single all-encompassing economic power. One that could achieve miraculous things. Countries didn’t matter anymore. The world was just a big market. It needed to be unified.

At the same moment Weyburn Labs was invoking the destruction of vast amounts of corporate data, they were also running a second script—one that invoked the Destroy function with a malformed parameter. It was all Latin to Connelly, but the big brains in Weyburn Labs had come up with a way to overstuff the Destroy function somehow, putting it into an infinite loop that would prevent it from destroying data, even if Daemon operatives somewhere in the data center tried to invoke it later manually. This malformed command would make these companies—and these companies alone—immune to the Daemon’s wrath. And it was these companies in which they had invested their wealth. It was a mix of corporations that would give them control of nearly every productive commercial activity and the right to rule since they alone had been smart enough to survive “Cybergeddon.” There would be a period of civil chaos in most countries, but they’d already taken steps to physically secure their facilities.

Connelly gazed at the dozens of television monitors showing the news of the world—financial meltdown. Violence in the Midwest. He glanced also at the ranch surveillance screens showing explosions and tracer rounds tearing across the prairie. It was high time for a cleansing fire.

“Got to hand it to the bastards. They’re really giving it their all. I wouldn’t have thought they could organize something like this. Where did they all come from?”

“Looks like the Daemon found a use for all those unsold cars.”

“When this is all over, we’ll need to take out those logistics people. Otherwise they’ll make trouble later.”

A nearby network analyst spoke into a microphone. “We have successfully deployed the Logic Bomb. Tests show the Daemon’s Destroy function is no longer responsive in all protected sites.”

A small cheer went up among the Weyburn Labs team.

Connelly nodded. That was fast. Apparently digital warfare was lightning war. They’d destroyed most of the corporate world in less than a minute. He knew it would plunge the world into a vast depression, but the end result would be worth it. What was the alternative, after all? Surrendering control of the civilized world to an uneducated mob?

He looked back up at the image of Earth on the big board. The view was centered on Western Europe, whose cities still glowed in the darkness.

Connelly imagined his father, the Southern Baptist preacher. What would he think of his son now? Even that hard-hearted bastard would have burst with pride. He would finally have been forced to admit that his son was a success.

“Commence the blackout.”

“Commencing blackouts, sir.”

Suddenly, like hitting knife switches, lights throughout Europe started tripping off—vast stretches of the continent plunged into darkness. Then Japan disappeared into the blackness of the sea. Beijing disappeared. A graphic depiction of the power of the merchant kings lay before Connelly as he beheld Earth. No one had ever fully realized just how much control they held. He trembled slightly with the power at his command. Two billion people had just been returned to the Middle Ages. Nearly a third of the human race. And most of the rest never had electrical power to begin with.

The Daemon was now a tiny shadow of its former self. It never stood a chance.

“Launch the data center strike teams.”

“Strike teams are go! Repeat: strike teams are go!”

The board operators chattered into their headsets, spreading Connelly’s command around the globe in seconds via private satellite networks.

Sebeck and Price had found clothes, body armor, and weapons quickly among the darknet factions moving in from the east. There was a wide diversity of equipment and armaments among the groups. They looked more like a high-tech militia than a true military force, but then they were following in the wake of Loki’s automated army.

Some operatives wore composite armor with full helmets, personalized with band stickers and ironic buttons, others just had hunting rifles.

The crowd drove a random assortment of civilian SUVs and Jeeps. However, they were a sizable force, spreading out toward the horizon in both directions and moving fast across the prairie. Someone had raided dealerships or something because most of these vehicles looked new. With gasoline going for eighteen bucks a gallon, Sebeck guessed there wasn’t much market for them anymore. Examining the call-outs extending over the horizon, Sebeck estimated this group to number in the thousands. The operatives varied in level from the numerous first-level Newbs, such as himself, all the way up to fifteenth- and twentieth-level Operators. There were tech factions, micro-manufacturing factions, logistics factions, and the most formidable groups of all—the infrastructure defense factions. They were the folks in full body armor with darknet electronic weaponry, packs of razorbacks, and flocks of microjets.

Wherever Sebeck went, operatives came up to him and shook his hand—asking to take pictures and pose with him. It was like some sort of macabre convention. Have your picture taken with the Unnamed One. . . .

Immediately after obtaining a loaner pair of HUD glasses and a computer belt, Sebeck opened a link to Jon Ross, finding Rakh’s call-out ten miles west of him—right in the center of Sky Ranch. He was glad to hear his voice over the comm line.

“Jon, thanks for saving our asses. How did you locate us?”

“Loki has eyes everywhere. And other people were looking for you, as well. It’s that quest you’re on.”

“You found Dr. Philips?”

“Yes, and she’s here with me. We’re safe for now. Is Price okay?”

“He’s fine. What’s the latest news?”

“Loki’s smashing through the ranch defenses. He’s got an army of . . . god, thousands of AutoM8s. Four or five hundred razorbacks. He must be spending every power point he has for this.”

Sebeck nodded. “If you saw him, you’d understand why. He looks only half-human. I wouldn’t want to be The Major when Loki catches up with him.”

“Pete, you were right about Weyburn Labs. Smart mobs scanning the surveillance system have discovered their facilities. I won’t show you the worst of it, but here . . .”

Sebeck saw an object zip toward him through D-Space and land in his HUD list. He opened it and sucked in a breath.

“There are dozens of young women still in cells there. It looks like The Major’s people were perfecting darknet identity theft.”

“Jon, we need to send forces to those labs first—before the researchers can destroy the evidence. Those girls are in serious danger.”

“I’ll put the word out.”

“Look, we’re closing in on the inner perimeter. I’m told that we’ll face resistance, if Loki hasn’t wiped them out, so I’m going to get off the line. I’ll need to be heads-up as we go in.”

“Give my best to Laney, and be careful, Pete.”

“You too, Jon. I’ll see you on the other side.”

Sebeck could already see explosions ahead. It looked like artillery airbursts. The thunder of detonations followed a second later. The vehicles were routed around the barrage and moving fast now, bumping across the prairie at fifty or sixty miles an hour. They passed distant burning wreckage riddled with shrapnel holes, broken bodies nearby, but the overwhelming majority of the force moved on—too spread out and moving too fast to be easily targeted by artillery.

The driver of their Jeep pointed ahead and shouted to Sebeck and Price. “We’re going in a mile or so to the south of the ranch roads. There are ambush points with missiles and armored vehicles there. Loki’s forces are taking them out.”

Sebeck nodded. He looked back at Price.

Price stared back. “What?”

“I’m glad you’re okay. I thought we were done for back there.”

“Yeah, well, the day’s not over, man.”

And then it hit.

Out of nowhere the darknet disappeared as Sebeck’s HUD glasses went dead. All of the call-outs around him disappeared as well. “Aw, shit!” He removed his glasses. “No wonder someone was willing to loan these to me. They’re broken.”

He turned back to face Price but was met with a confused stare. Price also removed his HUD glasses. “Oh shit . . .” He tapped the driver, who was frowning himself. “Dude, can you see D-Space?”

The driver looked worried. “No.” He pointed at the nearby vehicles. “Look!”

Sebeck and Price followed the driver’s gaze, and they could see hundreds of darknet operatives removing their HUD glasses and calling out to one another. The column of vehicles wasn’t slowing down yet, but now they were suddenly without a unifying system of control or direction.

They were blind.

Sebeck turned back to Price. “What the hell just happened?”

Price looked lost—as though he’d just lost an old friend. “They’ve somehow knocked out the darknet, Sergeant.”

General Connelly stood next to Aldous Johnston at the central console of the command center. Half the television monitors on the big board were filled with electronic snow. The Great Blackout had begun. The modern world was undergoing a cold reboot.

Johnston pointed at the screen. “So the data centers all still have power?”

Connelly nodded. “Of course. It’s standard for data centers to have battery and backup generators. They can run for as long as they have diesel fuel. Some even have local power generation facilities.”

“Then why the blackout if it doesn’t bring the servers off-line?”

“The blackout isn’t meant to cripple the Daemon, General. We already eliminated it as a threat with the Destroy function calls. No, the blackout is a psyops action. It’s a demarcation between the old order and the new one for the general public. People need to be shocked into accepting their new situation. Revealing just how vulnerable they all are accomplishes that. They will seek protection.”

“But three days without power?”

“Our social psychologists told us the panic should make people eager for strong leadership.”

A nearby board operator looked up. “I’ve got Colonel Richter with a status report on the darknet militias, General.”

“Put him on.”

“Go ahead, Colonel. You’re on speaker.”

A slightly distorted voice came through the speakers. “General, this is Richter. Darknet militias are stopping their advance on a broad front. They appear to have degraded command and control.”

Control room crew chuckled among themselves and clapped. Connelly and Johnston exchanged looks.

The general nodded. “That’s good news, Colonel.” He turned to Johnston. “Apparently the blackout has affected the bandwidth of these local operatives.” He turned back to the speaker. “Once we finish up Operation Exorcist, Colonel, I want you to prepare a counterattack to wipe out these local militias.”

“Understood. Do we take prisoners?”

“No prisoners. Now’s our chance to get these bastards out of the way.”

The line clicked off.

Johnston took a seat nearby. “Which brings up the code injection. Now’s as good a time as any to let the Weyburn folks see if they can control the Daemon.”

General Connelly’s face was unreadable. “Our secondary objective is just that. Let’s achieve the primary objective first.”

“But a modification of the Daemon’s code base needs to happen, General.”

“Once we’ve solidified our beachhead, Mr. Johnston.”

The control board operator looked up, frowning. “General, we’re getting some strange reports back from the data center strike teams.”

Connelly cast a look at Johnston. “We’re not done yet.” He then turned to the board operator. “What sort of reports?”

“There don’t appear to be any people in the target data centers, sir.”

Connelly pointed to the monitors on the big board. “Put up some video, goddamnit. I want eyes.”

Board operators started working switches. Images of the white snow on major news channels and the lull in fighting outside on the ranch grounds were replaced by head-mounted cameras on distant mercenary strike teams. These images were variations on a theme—racks of servers that appeared damned near identical all around the world. The grainy video showed heavily armed soldiers in black body armor and helmets moving through aisle after aisle of computer racks.

The screens showed hundreds of soldiers. There were Asians, Latinos, Africans, and Caucasians—mercenaries from a hundred different global firms. But none of them were finding human targets.

The board operator looked up again. “I think we found something you should see, sir.”

“Put it on this screen.” He pointed to the closest one on the control board.

The board operator nodded and clicked a few switches. Suddenly a grainy video from a soldier’s head-mounted camera appeared there. It showed commandos milling about a fifty-inch plasma television sitting atop a Romanesque pedestal. The television displayed the logo for Daemon Industries, LLC, and the message:

Click to play . . .

Johnston frowned. “What the hell is that?”

The board operator looked up again. “They’re finding them in a lot of the data centers, General.”

On the big board they could see more and more of the small monitors displaying strike teams arriving at the center of each data center and finding a similar plasma-screen television. All of them showed the Daemon Industries, LLC, logo with the message “Click to Play.”

Johnston closely studied the bank of monitors on the wall. Soldiers half a world away were pulling up their masks and giving the all-clear signal. “General, were we expecting to find these?”

Connelly ignored him and spoke to a nearby Weyburn Labs analyst. “Is our data still intact?”

“Well, the Destroy function is still looped for these companies.”

“What about the corporate data, damnit!”

The analyst shrugged. “That’s going to take some time to determine. We’re running on the proven evidence that invoking the Destroy function destroys a given company’s data. Blocking it blocks the destruction sequence.”

“But can’t we just check these servers?”

“It’s hard to tell where code is executing nowadays, sir. With a global blackout in place, we won’t be able to use the public Internet to connect.”

“Jesus Christ.” Connelly studied the screen.

Suddenly sections of the world starting coming back to life on the large center screen that displayed Earth from space. Lights across Europe, Russia, and Asia were clicking back on in sections.

“Goddamnit! Why is the blackout ending? I didn’t order an end to the blackout!”

The board operator looked up. “We’re not doing it, sir.”

“Then who is?”

Just then they could see video on the distant plasma televisions automatically start as the Daemon Industries, LLC, logo was swept away in a colorful animation.

“Bring one of those onto the big board! Now!”

The board operator spoke into his headset and suddenly grainy video of an Asian Korr Military Solutions special forces captain moved into view and saluted into the camera. “Sir!” His image pixelated momentarily by the satellite delay. His voice came through fuzzy with satellite distortion. “Overlord, we’ve secured objective four-thirty-nine.”

“Get the hell out of the way, damnit! Let me see the screen. Have that soldier focus his camera on that television screen!”

The captain dodged out of the way and the helmet cam focused on what looked to be an infomercial already in progress. Cheerful music accompanied a montage of images showing darknet operatives working together. Smiling young faces, wearing HUD glasses, working with fab lab equipment, fiber optics, agriculture, and alternative energy.

“Bring up the sound!”

The distant infomercial music crackled as it filled the speakers in the big command center. The montage faded out and to everyone’s horror dissolved into a familiar face—Matthew Sobol. He was sitting in a wing chair next to a roaring fireplace and looked healthy. Words appeared at the bottom of the screen:

Matthew A. Sobol, Ph.D.

Chairman and CEO, Daemon Industries, LLC

Sobol nodded to the camera as the music came to a close. “Hi. If you’re watching this video, it means you just tried to take over the world. Now, you all know who I was. But until now, I couldn’t be certain who you were. Thankfully, your recent actions helped to clarify things.” He took a moment to place another log on the fire, and he stabbed at the flames with a poker.

Connelly, Johnston, the Weyburn Labs team, and the entire data strike force watched the video playing in every data center in simulcast.

Sobol looked up again after putting the fire poker away. “I knew it would only be a matter of time until you broke into the darknet. No system is completely secure. Of course, you would scour my code for flaws. So I gave you some good ones.” Sobol smiled amiably. “As we sit here, the companies you attempted to harm are perfectly safe. However, the Daemon is deleting your personal and business wealth, and is, in fact, destroying all the data and backup tapes of the companies you sought to protect.”

He held up his hands reassuringly. “Now, please don’t get agitated and head for the doors because it’s already too late. Your greed caused you to concentrate your investments in a very specific way among a handful of companies—companies that someone just tried to defend with a lame-ass formatstring hack—even while the rest of the corporate world was targeted en masse with the Destroy function. That’s what we call an anomaly, and it has a signature that can be detected. The private individuals who were involved in this activity are now known to the Daemon. And what’s more, most of your wealth, the source of all your power, no longer exists. Money, after all, is just data, and yours has been erased.”

Connelly looked up at the network analyst. “Damnit, if the power’s back on, get on the phone with our people and find out if this is just nonsense!”

The network analyst got busy, but a lot of the other people in the room were looking concerned.

Sobol was already talking again on screen. “What’s more, the Daemon will continue to destroy the resources of these individuals wherever they appear—in whatever form. And a log of your recent actions will be submitted to pertinent law enforcement agencies and the companies you were targeting. And as for the people who helped make all this possible? The assistants, lawyers, brokers, programmers, accountants, and security forces? To those people I say: your employers have no money. So do the smart thing—and just walk away.”

The cavorting corporate Muzak returned, along with manic studio audience applause. Sobol waved. “Thanks for invoking this event, and remember, if you’re not playing the game, it’s playing you. Bye-bye now!”

Credits began to roll at double-fast speed.

“Turn it off!”

The screen went black and Connelly looked up at the nearest network analyst. “Well? Can we confirm if our networks are intact? Have our companies been affected?”

The analyst just cast a look at Connelly, then picked up his coat and hurried for the door.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“We don’t work here anymore. And neither do you.”

Connelly turned to Johnston.

Johnston just shook his head. “That’s ridiculous!”

Suddenly one of the board operators turned on the broadcast and cable news stations again, and there, on almost every channel, was Anji Anderson. She was sitting at a conference table. It looked to be surveillance footage as seen from up near the ceiling—but the individual on-screen was unmistakably Anji Anderson, the famous newscaster.

Connelly stared at the screens in confusion. “What the hell is this?”

The board operator was grabbing his coat, too. “It’s playing on every station. Someone hijacked the emergency uplink we were going to use after the blackout. They somehow got footage from the surveillance system.”

Everyone in the control center looked up at the camera pods mounted on the ceiling.

“Good god . . .”

“I advise that you try to escape as best you can, General. We have no secrets anymore.”

Connelly looked back at the live television monitors. On-screen Anji Anderson was nodding, as what looked to be consultants conferred with her.

“—but the change needs to be sold to the American people with a sudden disruption. Otherwise they’ll resist strongly. It needs to be the penultimate event that marks a demarcation between what came before and what must come after. It’s a psychological transition.”

Anderson nodded. “And the blackout does that?”

“Our studies show that a period of general anarchy as brief as forty-eight hours would make the public willing to accept severe changes in exchange for security.”

Another market consultant held up sample graphics on a foam core board. “We’re calling it Cybergeddon.”

“That’s catchy. . . .”

Chapter 38: // Ghost from the Machine

After the darknet came back online, Sebeck got busy examining darknet video streams from the thousands of operatives swarming over the ranch. He grabbed Price and hopped on a pickup truck loaded down with darknet Fighters brandishing automatic weapons. As they drove the final miles past wrecked military equipment and dead mercenaries, Sebeck watched D-Space video clips of Loki’s mechanical army smashing through the defenses. Swarms of his razorbacks, AutoM8s, and microjets were spreading through Sky Ranch’s network of roads, tearing into every soldier or worker they came across. As the private military’s disorder spread and their radio communications disintegrated, the mercenaries retreated back toward the main ranch house, only to encounter a wave of mercenaries going in the other direction—telling tales of bankruptcy and trying to escape the ranch.

But thousands of darknet operatives were storming the ranch from every direction now, breaking into large complexes and warehouses filled with luxury consumer products, barrels of wine, pharmaceuticals, and racks upon racks of spare machinery and parts. As darknet journalists posted their reports, it became increasingly clear that the residents of Sky Ranch were planning on being here for a while. Perhaps waiting out an unfolding chaos they’d helped to cause in the outside world.

Darknet troops had begun accepting the mass surrender of mercenaries from dozens of companies, stripping them of weapons, and taking iris scans and fingerprints. No longer employed, the multinational army of mercs wasn’t up for a fight—especially when it was outnumbered forty to one.

But at the center of the ranch Loki’s machines were still marauding. Razorbacks, AutoM8s, and low-flying microjets were crisscrossing the gardens around the house, parking lots, roads, and kitchens, killing any non-darknet member they found—without exception.

There was sheer terror around the central compound as surrendering household staff members pleaded with darknet operatives—who could not prevent the blood-soaked machines from hacking their captives to death.

Sebeck and Price reached the grounds of the mansion and joined a large crowd of operatives already surrounding it. All eyes were on Loki Stormbringer, as darknet feeds denounced him. People everywhere downvoted him, but Loki’s reputation score already could go no lower. In the broad plaza before the mansion, Loki stared with lifeless eyes from a position on his Ducati street bike. He had formed hundreds of razorbacks into a ring around the main house, where the international financiers with their wives and children had barricaded the ornate doors. Loki appeared to be sensing the world through the eyes of his numberless minions, through their sensors, scouring every inch of this place, every culvert—searching for people in hiding. He seemed ready to tear down every brick of the place until he found The Major. And in the process was apparently going to kill every one of the plutocrats who cowered in the massive house—along with their trophy wives and their pampered offspring. Loki seemed ready to make them all pay.

Sebeck watched a video feed even now when a group of bankers tried to escape to the airfield to board their private jet and resume their lives as if this never happened. But Loki’s distant razorbacks were shown forcing their Bentley off the road, dragging out the screaming occupants, and . . .

Sebeck closed the video inset in his HUD display. He’d seen enough death.

Hundreds of darknet members had gathered around the mansion to watch in dismay as Loki prepared his attack, while women and children held out surrender flags and pleaded for mercy.

Loki’s new booming, synthetic voice tore into the air. “Major! I’m going to kill you—and every man, woman, and child who’s hiding with you!”

The crowd booed, and Loki turned to face them, his voice truly booming now. “What can you do about it? None of this would have happened if not for me! I am the darknet!”

Ross and Philips arrived, apparently using D-Space coordinates to locate Sebeck and Price in the crowd.

Ross shouted over the noise of the razorbacks. “Sergeant! What is Loki doing?”

Sebeck pointed at Doctor Philips. “Jon, get her out of here! Loki’s killing every civilian he finds.”

“It’s okay. . . .” He gestured to the amulet she wore, which gave off a soft D-Space glow. “Amulet of Protection. She’s safe.” Ross regarded the scene of Loki’s swarming razorbacks.

Sebeck turned back toward the mansion. “Loki’s getting ready to kill everyone in the mansion. He’s hunting for The Major.”

“Has anyone seen The Major?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Philips just sucked in a breath at the sight of Loki amid a hundred razorbacks, while still more circled the mansion. “This is what I was afraid of, Jon. ”

Ross, Sebeck, and Price turned to her. Sebeck asked, “Afraid of what?”

“The darknet is no different from any other social system. The powerful ignore the weak. Look at him. . . .” She gestured to Loki.

Sebeck ran his hand over his scalp. “She’s right. You saw the feeds; the plutocrats are bankrupt. We’ve taken back our freedom already—so then why hasn’t my quest been satisfied? Why don’t I see the path to the Cloud Gate?”

Price leaned in. “Do you see your quest Thread, Sergeant?”

Sebeck shook his head. He hadn’t noticed it in all the insanity, but he no longer had a Thread to follow. “No. Which means this is where I need to be. It’s not finished yet.” He looked to Price and the others. “Stay here . . .”

“Sergeant, where are you going?”

Sebeck pushed through the crowd, making his way across the wide plaza that surrounded the house. As he came into view, with his well-known high-quest icon, the crowd roared their approval and parted to let him pass.

He finally reached the line of razorbacks, and as he tried to slip by, they moved to block his path. He knew they couldn’t attack him—he was a member of the darknet—but neither would they let him through.

Loki’s booming voice spoke in the air nearby while Loki watched from a hundred feet away. “What do you think you’re going to do, Sergeant? You’ll never get near me.”

“Whether you like it or not, Loki, you’re one of us.” Sebeck could see the darknet feeds in his HUD display going haywire with news of the defeat of the plutocrats—but also at the rise of Loki. Hundreds of thousands of network members responded as they saw live video of Loki facing down the Unnamed One, and no one able to constrain him.

And then a D-Space light flashed and a familiar form emerged from the network. Roy Merritt’s avatar started walking through the swarms of razorbacks—straight toward Loki. His two-hundredth-level call-out was burning above him. The crowd went completely silent.

Loki just stared, obviously trying to figure out what to do, but still the Merritt avatar walked on.

Merritt’s avatar walked past Sebeck, who stared in shock.

Video of the encounter was being taken by a hundred darknet cameras in the crowd and simulcast throughout the network. The crowd listened closely as Merritt came alongside Loki. Merritt’s voice appeared in the air as well, calm and in control.

“Sir, I need you to stop what you’re doing and come with me.”

Loki looked around to the crowd. “What is this?”

“Sir, a critical mass of network citizens strongly disapproves of what you’re doing. I need you to stop immediately and come with me. It would be much better if you cooperated. Would you do that for me?”

“Fuck you! Roy Merritt . . . you’re a toy, an AI puppet that all these little users have put together.”

“Sir, prosody tells me you’re upset. I came here to help you.”

“Help me? I don’t need help!”

“Please, sir—”

“What are you going to do to me, Roy? You’re a fucking ghost!” Loki turned to the crowd. “No one’s powers can be turned on me. That’s part of the peaceful nature of our new society, isn’t it?” He laughed. “I’ll do what I damned well please!” Loki sent a command that caused his army of razorbacks to surge forward, smashing at the mansion doors.

“You leave me no choice, sir. I’ll need to hold on to these. . . .” Merritt’s avatar reached up its hand and actually pulled the level numbers off of Loki’s call-out—suddenly dropping the numbers down from sixtieth level to merely tenth level. “ . . . until you feel better.”

The Merritt avatar was no longer two-hundredth level—he was now only one-hundred-fifieth level, and it was immediately apparent to all that the Burning Man had sacrificed his own levels to disable some of Loki’s.

Loki watched in mute terror as all of the razorbacks around him and the microjets in the sky suddenly turned and departed. He got off his bike and staggered, finally falling to his knees in the realization of all he’d just lost—and the price he’d paid as well.

Even as people watched, Merritt’s levels started to rise again, as people from around the darknet donated hard-won levels—at a ratio of a thousand to one—to replace those Merritt had tied up.

In just a few moments, Merritt was back to his maximum two hundred levels.

Merritt stood over Loki. “Sir, we all need help from time to time. That’s why there’s more than one of us. . . .”

Loki stared up at an avatar created out of the popular will of millions of people—programmed to react in times of dire need. It was apparently part of the darknet. And what the darknet was evolving to become.

Loki collapsed onto the ground, silently wracked with sobs, his metallic eyes unable to shed tears or look away. The crowd, no longer hostile, gathered around him. A nearby woman placed her hand on his shoulder.

Merritt turned to the crowd. “Everything’s okay here folks. Nothing to see. . . .”

And suddenly Sebeck heard a chime. He looked to see a gold-colored Thread wind away from him, leading north, toward the distant horizon. “Price!”

“I’m right here, man.”

“We need to find our gear. Now.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“No. We’ve got to leave right away.”

“To where?”

Sebeck was already pushing through the crowd. “To the Cloud Gate.”

Chapter 39: // End Game

Pete Sebeck’s final Thread led him north to Houston, and then east toward a once bustling container port at Morgan’s Point, Texas. The glowing, golden line ran toward a massive shipping container facility that lay alongside a stretch of shipping channel named Barbour’s Cut.

In recent days the dollar had slowly begun to rise from its historic low—no doubt in large part from Sobol’s vengeance against the plutocrats. But as Sebeck brought their newly assigned Lincoln Town Car through the vast industrial wasteland and utterly subjugated landscape of Morgan’s Point, he wondered if this place would ever thrive again. The days of ten-thousand-mile supply chains might have gone for good.

He turned to see Laney Price sitting in the front seat next to him, wolfing down chicken nuggets and sipping a jumbo soda. Sebeck just laughed and shook his head.

“What?”

“You have no sense of irony, Laney. Do you know that?”

“I told you, I was hungry.”

“Well, I guess you’ve earned the right to eat crap.”

A female voice came from the backseat. “Leave him alone, Sergeant. Each of us celebrates in our own way.”

“She’s right, Pete.”

Philips turned to Jon Ross. Their look lingered longer than necessary.

Price scowled. “What the hell kind of name is ‘Ivan Borovich,’ anyway? I just got used to calling you Jon.”

“Call me whatever you like, Laney. I won’t be listening anyway.”

Philips leaned against Ross. “I like the name Ivan.”

Price chuckled and spoke in a Russian accent. “Yeah, I’m sure the NSA will like Ivan, too.”

Philips waved him off. “Defending the U.S. government against a hostile takeover should be worth a green card.”

“I don’t know. I hear the requirements are getting tougher.” Sebeck slowed the car. “Here we go. . . .”

“We’re there?”

“No, but I think were running out of land pretty quickly on this peninsula.”

They were now heading down along a wide concrete road apparently made to deal with a high volume of container truck traffic. The traffic seemed much reduced. They had the place mostly to themselves—although a veritable skyline of multicolored shipping containers rose to their left across several lanes of highway.

Philips studied them. “What is the Daemon’s fascination with shipping containers?”

Ross looked as well. “They helped spread the consumer culture virus to every corner of the world. It’s no wonder the Daemon found them useful.”

Sebeck slowed the car again as they came alongside a truck yard, and he turned across the highway to a frontage road.

Price nodded. “A container yard. You’re going to open a container that contains something. Something Sobol sent to himself. Or—”

“Price, would you please? I can’t hear myself think.”

“Then think louder, man.”

Sebeck pulled into a driveway that surprised everyone. As he followed the golden Thread down the narrow lane, they all gazed through the windshield.

Ross looked puzzled. “A cemetery? In the middle of all this?”

Before them stood a rusted metal sign that read MORGAN’S POINT CEMETERY. The parcel was perhaps a couple of acres in size, and stood at the end of a long drive that placed it in the middle of a massive container yard. It was surrounded on three—and very nearly four—sides by towering container stacks. However, the driveway and the cemetery beyond looked green. Trees and shrubs covered the grounds, and a barbed-wire fence separated it from the surrounding shipyard.

Sebeck sighed. “Well, this is where it’s leading me.” He came to a stop in a small, empty parking lot. Everyone got out and glanced around.

“This place is positively surrounded.” Philips gazed up at all the containers looming above them.

Price pointed at the names on the sides of the center container in each wall. In big blue sans serif letters was the word “HORAE” painted along the corrugated steel. “Sergeant. Just like Riley told us.” He turned to Philips. “Doctor, you’ve read some Greek mythology, yes?”

“Yes, quite a bit. In native Greek.”

“Prove to us you are deadly boring: what are the Horae in Greek mythology?”

She shrugged. “They were the three goddesses who controlled orderly life. Daughters of Themis. The word means ‘the correct moment.’ And the earliest mention is in the Iliad, where they appear as keepers of the cloud gates.”

Price just threw up his hands. “Well that’s pretty damned impressive.”

“Is it a code?”

Ross stood alongside her. “Or an arrangement, perhaps. Like tumblers in a lock.”

“You mean these containers need to be arranged precisely like this to unlock something?”

He shrugged. “You tell me, Doctor. You’re the code breaker.”

Sebeck was already walking forward. “It’s no code. It’s symbolism. And as you know by now, Sobol’s worlds are chock-full of symbols.”

Price followed. Ross waited for Philips, and soon they were all walking down a cracked sidewalk toward an ornate, wrought-iron gate. It, too, was somewhat rusted, but the iconography of the gate was unmistakable—three female guardians holding long spears loomed in bas-relief on either side, wreathed in ironwork clouds. The gate was closed.

As Sebeck approached the gate, D-Space avatars of three towering female forms in robes and enclosed, plumed helms materialized from the shadows, holding tall golden spears.

Philips looked puzzled as all three men in the group backed away from the shadows. “What is it?”

Ross held her hand and tapped his HUD glasses. “Female avatars. The Horae, I gather.”

One of them spoke in a booming female voice. “Only the quest-taker may pass through the gates.”

Price held up his hands. “No problemo.”

Ross nodded. “I guess we’ll wait for you here, Sergeant.”

Sebeck glanced to Price as he stood with his hand on the gate.

“You know, Laney, I don’t think I would have made it here without you.”

Price shrugged. “Well, let’s wait to see if it’s good or bad before you go thanking me.”

Sebeck shook his head and entered the gate. It closed and locked behind him with an audible click.

As he continued to follow the golden Thread along the cemetery path, he noticed the graves were widely spaced. It was more like a shady garden—albeit one with colorful shipping containers as a backdrop.

Before long Sebeck’s path brought him to another D-Space apparition: a young, healthy-looking Matthew Sobol, sitting on a stone bench beneath a tree. There was an identical bench across from him.

As Sebeck approached, this younger, healthier Sobol nodded to him in greeting. “Detective. I’m very happy that you’re here.”

Sebeck couldn’t get over how vibrant and healthy Sobol looked, with his tousled hair, khakis, crisp button-down shirt, and suit jacket. He looked the very image of a successful man with his whole life ahead of him.

“Please, join me.” The avatar gestured to the open seat.

Sebeck swept off some leaves and dirt and sat.

“You might be wondering why I look different from the way I will . . . or did . . . earlier.” He sat back in his seat. “It’s because I started here at the end. Where you are now. I have no idea where here is or now is at the moment. But I did know that if I started from the end of the story and moved to the beginning, then the Daemon couldn’t begin unless it was complete. So really, your beginning is my end, and my end is your beginning.”

Sobol gazed directly at Sebeck’s eyes. “When I realized what our world had become, how humanity had become cogs in its own machine, I resolved to do something terrible . . . perhaps one of the worse things ever done. To exploit the automation of our world in order to plant the seed of a new system is reckless and irresponsible. But I didn’t see any other way we would change. Or could change.

“But now that humans have accomplished this quest, and you have arrived to tell me of their success, the question I need to ask you is this: was I right or wrong, Sergeant? Should I destroy the Daemon? Should I undo everything I’ve done? Yes, or no?”

Sebeck felt the shock work through him. He was speechless.

“You of all people would know, Sergeant. Should the Daemon be ended? Yes, or no? I will wait for your answer.”

Sebeck took a deep breath and looked back toward the gate. He could see no one. Just himself and this long-dead genius-madman. He sat recalling the entirety of his journey, from the point he received the Sobol murder case up to this very day. It had been years. He thought of his lost wife, Laura, and their son, Chris. Of his colleagues and friends who were dead or to whom he was now dead. He recalled all the people he had met who were building new lives on the Daemon’s darknet, and all the people who had perished in its birth—and in its defense. A procession of faces came to him. What was society, after all, but a group of people making up rules. At least on the darknet, it was a large group of people making up the rules instead of a small one.

Sobol had waited patiently, but when Sebeck met his gaze again, the avatar repeated the question. “Should I destroy the Daemon, Sergeant?”

Sebeck took a deep breath. Then shook his head. “No.”

“Let me confirm your answer. Should I destroy the Daemon? Yes or no?”

“No.”

There was a flicker in the image, and Sobol looked grimly relieved. He gazed directly at Sebeck again. “You don’t know how much I dream for this to be the ending. There are so many ways for it to end. If you’re really there, Sergeant, good luck to you. Good luck to you all. And don’t be afraid of change. It’s the only thing that can save us.”

Sobol stood, nodded farewell, and walked toward the nearby gardens. In a few moments he vanished into thin air.

Sebeck sat in the garden for an unknowable time by himself, contemplating what had just occurred. Until finally he received an alert in his HUD display. It was from a network handle he was too afraid to recognize. He read it over and over: Chris_Sebeck

After bracing himself, he opened the message and read it slowly . . .

Dad, I sent you this message triggered to open when you’re ready for it. I know the truth, and can’t wait to see you. Your son, Chris.

Sebeck felt the tears come forth from him—coming from some place he thought hadn’t existed in his heart. He had a family. He was a father.

He was going home. . . .

Chapter 40: // Exit Strategy

It had taken over a century for Sky Ranch to evolve from the ancestral home of a wealthy family into the heavily fortified executive retreat and End-Times bunker complex it ultimately became. However, The Major knew these things didn’t happen overnight. They accrued in layers over decades—and so they had secrets.

It was knowing those secrets that set The Major apart from his colleagues. He planned for the worst, and was seldom disappointed. His brand of “black sky thinking” had kept him alive on more than one occasion when all around him had perished. Even now as he looked through a 1960s-era periscope at the cleaned-out storage rooms beyond his secret hiding place, he realized that, once again, paranoia had prevailed.

It had been ten days since Sobol’s Daemon had bankrupted the merchant princes of the world. Ten days since thousands of darknet operatives had scoured the five-star luxury survivalist lodge that was Sky Ranch. They’d cleaned out the warehouses and store-rooms, dismantled the weapon systems, and raided the vaults. They’d gone through the floor plans and databases to find everything there was to find.

But they didn’t see The Major’s Cold War hiding spot on the blueprints. Rumor had it that the room was a tryst location for a philandering banker—built to Cold War bomb shelter standards to mask its true purpose in the books and to muffle loud music. The entrance was concealed to keep out the uninvited.

True story or not, the place looked a lot like the swinging pad of a midcentury banker—long sofas, bar, pool table, and card tables. It was also musty, covered in dust, and unaccountably cold. But it had kept him alive. Living on canned goods gleaned from the storage room outside before he closed himself in, The Major once more checked the periscope. All was quiet.

He’d grown a slight beard over the past few days and wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans pilfered from the nearby laundry. He opened the heavy door and listened. He heard nothing.

He turned up the hood and poked his head out, looking both ways. There was daylight coming through an open fire-exit door at the corner of the room, wagging in the wind. Trash skittered around the floor with each breeze.

Disarray. A good sign.

He shouldered his scoped Masada rifle, then grabbed his day-pack of canned provisions and water in liquor bottles, and took one more precautionary glance before exiting the bomb shelter. He got to the open fire door and peeked through the gap between the hinge and the door.

It was a cloudy day, but he cursed under his breath as he saw what obviously were darknet sentries still moving about on the walkways near the main house. One of them wore the telltale armor of a Daemon champion. They were all carrying darknet weaponry. There was no way he could exit unseen. And night would be no better, since he knew they’d have night vision. In fact, he’d be at a disadvantage.

The Major remained calm. He reached into his pack and produced a pair of quality HUD glasses along with spooled wire that led to an electronic enclosure.

In the closing days of Operation Exorcist, the Weyburn Labs team had made significant progress cracking into the encrypted Daemon darknet. Partial credit was due, of course, to Dr. Natalie Philips for her work at Building Twenty-Nine—where she proved the concept of darknet identity theft. But in order to use this network, they needed to own it. They had been well on their way to doing that—and The Major might soon be again.

His researchers had advanced past the need to keep a darknet operative medically alive in order to spoof them—they’d done better. They digitized the biometric data and created a unit that injected it into the standard darknet HUD glass sensors, replete with pulse sensor. All that was needed to steal a darknet operative’s identity with this system was their biometric data—fingerprints, iris scan, voice.

And The Major had given just that to the lab team.

As he powered up the unit and slipped the glasses on, he became Loki Stormbringer. He suddenly saw the HUD display first-person, instead of on a projection screen, and he saw darknet objects moving in a plane of augmented reality. They were all over the place. This was going to be a very interesting new world.

He walked with purpose out the storeroom door, ignoring the guards, and then kept walking briskly toward the distant guest bungalows. He gauged the houses were two miles away across slightly unkempt gardens and uncut lawns.

He kept his back turned to the guards and just kept walking. As the minutes ticked away and he estimated he was hundreds of yards from the main house, he felt the tension draining from him. He looked up at the sky with his new glasses.

He saw the call-outs of surveillance drones up there, thousands of feet in the sky. But he was one of them now. A member of the darknet. He also had four hundred thousand euros in his bag. It would be much needed since his accounts had all been emptied by Sobol’s Daemon. If only he hadn’t been greedy. But he still had some safe-deposit boxes in Zurich and Dubai.

And he could now steal all the darknet identities he needed. He suddenly frowned at Loki’s reputation score. It looked surprisingly like a half-star out of five. And what was this? It now looked like Loki was only a tenth-level Sorcerer.

What the hell?

No matter. This was only a temporary identity. The sky was the limit now. He was almost to the bungalows, and he could either head out on foot for the power station or try to obtain a vehicle legitimately from the darknet.

He risked a glance behind him, but there was no one in sight any longer. He was more than a mile from the main house.

He kept walking and chuckled to himself. Once he was clear of this place, he knew some hackers who could make very good use of this darknet identity theft technology. Very good use.

“Excuse me, Major.”

The Major stopped cold. The voice came from right behind him.

The Major clicked the safety on his Masada rifle and spun around even as he crouched. Then, in utter astonishment, he slowly came to his feet again.

“It is ‘Ze Major,’ is it not?”

Only a few feet away, impossibly, stood a spectral image of a Nazi officer in a full black trench coat, monocle, and filter cigarette. He looked real, except for the fact he was a ghost. The Major was so stunned he kept the gun aimed at the ghost’s head.

It knew who he was.

“I zought I recognized you.” The apparition tapped his cheek just under the eye. “From your eyes. I can tell zees zings.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “My name is Heinrich Boerner.” He started taking off his leather gloves as he spoke.

Meanwhile, around him, The Major heard a rising whine, like electric motors. He turned to see a line of razorbacks coming over the grass toward him. Why hadn’t he heard them?

“Fuck!” He turned to run and saw another row of razorbacks moving toward him from the bungalows—like lions approaching in deep grass. There were at least a dozen closing in from all directions. He opened fire with the Masada. The bullets whined off the in front cowlings harmlessly, and the machines all unfolded their swords as they advanced across the grass on electrical power.

Soon The Major’s gun was empty. And there right next to him was Boerner, smoking calmly.

Boerner began to remove his heavy leather coat. “Your guns are qvite useless, Major. Zis is an unstoppable event. Struggle vill only prolong ze inefitable.”

Now the razorbacks were all around The Major—trapping him in a circle of swords.

The razorback nearest Boerner raised one sword, and Boerner hung his leather jacket upon it. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and grinned at The Major.

“I do so enjoy my vork. . . .”