Ghost of the Gods - 02 (49 page)

“Lead on,” he said.

“I understand why you took the gun, but why the zone-jammer suits?”

“They’re for you,” said Mark. “I wasn’t lying about the hives and their plans. Those suits may be the only way to keep you alive.”

The power went out and Mark felt the god-machine pouring into him. He immediately began sending memory capsules to Sarah. Within seconds the lights came back and the world was lost as the doors to his mental prison slammed down.

Richard Zuris – Dallas, Texas – March 18, 0002 A.P.

Zuris burst into the remote Prometheus control room with his three guards. He was relieved to see Alexi in command. The room was the very definition of panic. Zuris calmly walked over to his son, trying hard to project composure and control he did not feel.

“Tell me,” he said.

“It started with the Messiah, then the other six followed. The EEG is showing REM-sleep patterns mixed with high brain activity. There should be nothing. They have enough drugs in them to keep an elephant comatose.”

“What does this have to do with the missile attack?”

“I don’t know, Father, but it happened at the same instant.”

An annoying alarm started going on and off at the Messiah’s control station. Within moments all the stations had joined in. The main wall screen showed the neural status on each subject redlining. A network diagram showed the firewalls were at 80 percent bandwidth capacity and climbing.

“It’s broken free,” said Zuris. “God help us!”

“What, Father?”

“The god-machine has hacked through the firewalls. Shut down all access now. Shut down everything!”

“Listen up,” shouted Alexi. “I want all interfaces down. Cut the lines, terminate the subjects. I don’t care, just stop it all now!”

“It’s not working,” shouted one engineer. “No control from here.”

Soon all the engineers were echoing the same panicked calls. Zuris knew they’d lost. The network diagram now showed 100 percent utilization. He slumped into a chair, realizing he’d been manipulated like a pawn. All he’d accomplished was to hand the god-machine a powerful weapon to use against them. He now knew without any question where the missile attack was being launched from.

“Bring up the defense network display,” said Zuris.

“Yes, Father.”

Alexi typed a command and a new display was added. Zuris saw his private defense network was switched on and controlling a small air force of armed drones. Alexi was shouting something about lost drone control and stirring up the engineers. Zuris looked at a surveillance camera on the wall and somehow knew the god-machine was looking back at him. Zuris knew what was coming next. The chess move was obvious. Within seconds the drones begin launching missiles at the top floors of every office building on the Zero-G campus. The control room shook. Power was momentarily lost before emergency backups kicked in. The drones were swinging around for another attack run. Zuris knew it was time to leave. In a daze he stood and gave orders to Alexi.

“Collect the immediate family and go to the airfield. I’ll meet you there.”

“Yes, Father.”

Zuris left the control room. They would evacuate using their supersonic business jet. The jet’s maximum flight envelope was beyond the attack profile of the drones, though he did not expect to be harried. He was doing exactly what the god-machine wanted and had no choice. He thought about staying and impaling himself on a sword, but that was not his way. He was relentless and would never give up. The jet had enough range to fly them anywhere. He would take back what had been stolen from him by the machine.

Mark Freedman – Dallas, Texas – March 18, 0002 A.P.

Mark and Kathy rounded the corner of the stairwell and exited into another hallway. The building, which had seemed empty, was now filled with people stampeding in all directions. It was pure chaos. Another explosion rocked the entire structure. This one was still above them but getting closer. More hallways and more stairs followed.

Packed tightly in the midst of a throng of sweating, terrified bodies, Mark and Kathy were finally shoved as much as stepped through an outside door. Mark was gripping Kathy’s hand as he led her out of the human river of fear. He took a deep breath and felt the god-machine filling him with information through the entangled interface. It was as if he’d awoken from a daze. He felt the presence of several hives not far away, but pushed that problem to the back of his mind.

He heard his shoes crunching on broken glass. They stopped walking at the edge of a massive parking lot. The streetlights were operating and the military had portable lighting going up as well. Many people had been forced to leave without even their coats. An assist showed it was 52 degrees outside. Kathy was shivering. She looked confused to find Mark’s hand holding hers. For a moment she did nothing, then she extricated her fingers from his grip. Mark could feel her emotions warring. He was distracted by an orange glow above him and looked straight up into gigantic, smoldering craters in the side of the tower. It reminded him of a smaller version of 9/11.

“We need to get as far away from this building as we can in case there’s another explosion,” said Mark.

“Maybe I need to get as far away from you as I can,” said Kathy. “And it’s not just personal. You know Zero-G can almost track hybrids by their n-web emissions. Your network signature is as unique as a fingerprint. They’re at the early stages with Prometheus. The tracking is extremely unreliable, but they’ll eventually make it work and once they do, you and your kind are in a lot of trouble.”

“I am so sorry I hurt you,” said Mark.

“Truly, fuck you… Let’s just get out of here.”

They began walking toward the far side of the parking lot, which was bordered by a cement fortification that ran around the entire rim of the campus. Mark had already composed another memory capsule for Sarah. He needed her to know everything about Prometheus in case they didn’t make it. Prometheus
had to be destroyed once the hives’ plans were wrecked. He’d never considered the idea that Prometheus could be used to track hybrids. This project just got worse and worse. From the far end of the parking lot he could see the top third of every building was on fire and slowly crumbling. A memory capsule from Sarah opened in his mind. She had received his earlier message and was on her way. They would arrive in about fifteen hours. Noah was with her and he had become a problem.

Mark instinctively ducked as another explosion erupted from one of the towers. This time he saw what was happening. An assist provided more information. There had been a glowing trail through the air leading directly to the new crater. They were under air to ground missile attack. The assist listed the probability at 100 percent that the missiles were drone-launched.

“Help is coming,” said Mark.

“You mean Sarah,” said Kathy.

“We have no time to waste. We have to get off this campus before the attack is over and this perfect distraction is lost.”

“Let’s hope Zuris is not looking for us right now,” said Kathy.

Mark wondered where Zuris was and got an unexpected assist from his entangle interface. He received a sixty-second montage of real-time surveillance videos from different cameras, along with a map of the campus showing that Zuris was at an airfield boarding his private jet. Mark barely registered a volley of missiles bombarding several of the buildings at once. The only possible explanation for this assist was that the god-machine had access to Zero-G’s intranet. How was this possible? His entangled interface received a network diagram showing n-web data flows going through Prometheus into the Zero-G intranet and from there spilling out onto the Internet. Mark was not surprised by the information. He should have realized this much sooner. He wondered if the god-machine had been censoring his thoughts. He wondered what else might happen now that the machine had fully bridged itself into human cyberspace. This interconnect had obviously been occurring in a limited way for some time. Now the floodgates were wide open.

Mark’s attention was drawn back to the task of escaping as large numbers of Zero-G and USAG security forces arrived. The troops were beginning to corral the thousands of people loitering in the parking lots and lawns. Mark’s heart was beating like a trapped animal as he studied the fortifications surrounding him. Even without a broken hand and torn muscles, there was no hope of scaling that wall.

“We’re trapped” said Mark. “There’s no way out.”

“Oh yes, there is,” said Kathy. “Look!”

Mark turned to see what she was excited about. The gates were opening and security personnel were herding everyone off the campus. Guards were waving people through as fast as they could. No one was checking badges, bags, or anything. Just before the gates, soldiers were handing out military field jackets and bottles of water.

Mark and Kathy were soon in line within 30 feet of the gates and freedom. Guards were yelling at everyone to move faster. Many people were complaining about their cars or personal possessions left behind. Others were shell-shocked. All complaints were falling on unsympathetic ears. Mark and Kathy were hustled through one of several vehicle security checkpoints after receiving extra-large khaki field jackets and a bottle of water each. Remarkably, they had just walked out of prison.

Directly outside the campus was a highway-access road along with the usual stores and restaurants that collected around office parks. Unlike most of the country, many of these establishments were open for business. People were wandering around and forming into small groups in the retail parking lots. Mark and Kathy kept walking. They needed to get as far away from Zero-G as possible.

General McKafferty – Washington, DC – March 18, 0002 A.P.

It was nighttime. The worst things always happened at nighttime when the relief team was all you had. General McKafferty stood in the USNORTHCOM unified combatant command center and was ready to kill with his bare fists. His country was under cyber-attack and he was in command of the response. An overload of information was flowing in from every source. The attackers had breached Secure-Net and seemed to be probing anything with a microprocessor in it. Every piece of networked iron could already be compromised. A cryptic e-mail that read
Disconnect = KZ
had arrived from the hackers. The e-mail was delivered to the classified secure inbox of every high-ranking military officer, cabinet secretary, agency head, and POTUS himself. Word had come down that NSA and CIA systems were thoroughly compromised as well. The government no longer had control over its network assets. Moments ago the NSA had reported spy satellites were being retasked by the hackers. McKafferty had enough. Going dark was a last resort—almost a retreat—but he had no choice. Lost assets were piling up faster than they could count them.

“Take down all outside access now,” he ordered.

His order was picked up by the second in command, a senior military intelligence officer, Colonel Koffman. McKafferty soon heard frantic typing and muttering, which was not a good sign.

“Sir, no response!” said Colonel Koffman.

“What?”

“Sir, the intruder has reprogrammed all firewalls, routers, switches, and everything else with a password. We’re locked out. Fail-safes are not responding. We’ll need to do manual cutoffs at every entry point.”

“So do it.”

“Sir, this attack is coming from everywhere, including inside Secure-Net itself. There are thousands of entry points into Secure-Net, not counting all the microwave and sat backup links. Over the past decade we continuously added redundancy all across the country to guarantee uninterrupted access through our firewalls so that we could not be cut off by an attack. It will take hours to pull all the manual fail-safes.”

“So get the hell on it now!”

“Yes, sir.”

A few minutes later Colonel Koffman reported back. McKafferty lit a cigarette in the no-smoking area as the intelligence officer explained everything that was known. Koffman kept glancing at McKafferty’s cigarette. The general took out his pack and offered a nail. Koffman gratefully accepted and lit up.

“The enemy has locked us out of all admin control functions, and they’re continuing to probe,” said Colonel Koffman. “They have not restricted our access to status from network hardware or even normal asset operations. I am not sure why they haven’t locked us out completely. The only explanation is that they wanted to delay our discovery that we were locked out of command and control. The only good news is, we still have coms and sat data. We just can’t point the eyes in the sky where we want and have to assume all coms are being monitored.”

“So everything is compromised?” said McKafferty.

“Yes, sir, everything.”

Voices on the floor began shouting back and forth. Koffman’s face grew grim as he listened to his headset. On the center screen in the cluster of big screens, a map showing drone locations was thrown up. McKafferty thought some of the locations seemed wrong.

“Sir, we have reports coming in from airbases across the country. They’re all reporting AWOL drones.”

“Get some assets up there and start shooting ’em down. I want CAPS around all major assets and get me some headgear.”

“Yes, sir.”

As McKafferty listened to what was happening, it became clear every drone was lost. Manual backup radar systems that were unaffected by the attack were tracking threats and verifying current flight vectors for all UAVs they could acquire. That accounted, however, for less than half of what was in the air. The rest were too stealthy to find. The map on the big screen showed every known UAV vectoring in on Dallas.

“Why kill Dallas?” muttered McKafferty.

He was helpless to stop it. He didn’t see how shooting down less than half the drones was going to help a whole lot and they’d be lucky to get that many… and worse, Dallas could be a diversion.

One of the big screens in the cluster had been disconnected from the network and cabled to a secured backup computer sitting on a cart. Data on the newly secured screen showed teams of soldiers en route to a hopelessly large number of hardened network entry points around the country. Their mission was to manually cut every line necessary to isolate the attack. McKafferty’s aide, who was in charge of fielding all incoming calls for the general, had just disconnected from a conference call with NSA. The aide looked pale.

“Sir,” said the aide.

“Go on,” grumbled McKafferty. He knew this was not going to be good.