Freedom (40 page)

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. . . .

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.

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. . . .”

“
M
ajor, 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.

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.