Freedom (46 page)

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?”

“You found Dr. Philips?”

“He’s fine. What’s the latest news?”

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.”

Sebeck saw an object zip toward him through D-Space and land in his HUD list. He opened it and sucked in a breath.

“Jon, we need to send forces to those labs first—before the researchers can destroy the evidence. Those girls are in serious danger.”

“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.”

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.”