Freedom TM

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 burningwreckage, 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 functionusing 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,