Freedom™

by Daniel Suarez

  “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 p
arameter the local tax ID of thousands of Daemon-i nfected 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?”