“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 parameter 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.