Chapter 33: // Epic Fail

Central_news.com

Insurgent Reprisals Against Civilians—In a disturbing development, terrorists in Midwestern states have taken to burning entire towns in retaliation for resistance by hometown militias. Officials speaking on condition of anonymity were confident that martial law would be expanded to bordering states to halt the spread of the fighting, and that private security forces would be given an expanded role.

“Major, something powerful came out of the darknet—something we could not have anticipated.” The Major walked briskly toward a private Gulfstream V jet—one he had recently acquired. A knot of uniformed private military officers followed him.

“This is a colossal intelligence failure, Colonel. I was told these communities had no significant weaponry or defenses, and we developed our force posture from that assessment. Now I’ve got a client who, instead of facing a compliant population after the crash, might be facing a general uprising.”

“Ag, they didn’t have significant weapon systems when the assessment was done.”

“Sobol was devilishly clever. Perhaps too clever. Now we’ll have to come back and bloody carpet bomb these towns from the stratosphere.”

The Major shook his head. “Sobol wasn’t behind this.”

“What do you mean, Major? Of course he was: it’s the Daemon.”

The Major stopped at the foot of the jet stairway. “Roy Merritt has become a folk hero to the darknet community. Why—who the fuck knows? But he has, and that ‘powerful’ system avatar that came out of the darknet today was patterned on Merritt.”

“How do you know this, Major?”

“I have my methods. But suffice it to say, Merritt’s legend—and the video to prove it—is bouncing all over the darknet tonight.”

The Colonel was speechless.

“Let there be no doubt, Colonel: the Daemon is evolving. Sobol apparently provided a mechanism to permit the user population to change it. And it’s that mechanism that’s going to help us bend the Daemon to our purpose.”

“Then, the loss of our forces is . . .”

“Still a colossal fuck-up. Any word on the number of men lost?”

“We’ve lost the entire damned force, sir.”

“And their equipment?”

The Colonel just shook his head.

“Goddamnit. Now we’re going to have to redraft the entire psychological operations program. And reshoot all those news broadcasts we taped—goddamnit to hell!”

“That the entire security force was wiped out by supposed gang-bangers isn’t going to help the privatization sales pitch, sir.”

“All of this can be dealt with. We just need Operation Exorcist to succeed, or all of this will come back to haunt us.”

Sebeck returned to consciousness as he was being dragged across a field by his elbows. It was daylight, so he must have been unconscious for a while. He felt groggy, as though he’d been drugged. His hands were zip-tied behind his back, and tape covered his mouth.

His HUD glasses were long gone. His armored helmet was gone. The crackling of automatic weapon fire could be heard some ways off, punctuated by soldiers speaking into radio headsets.

“Tango. Delta, Zulu. Five, six, three. We are go for extraction. Repeat, go for extraction. Over.”

Sebeck craned his neck back to see what was behind him—but it was too difficult. As they dragged him forward, he passed a dozen mercenary soldiers leering and laughing. The situation was starting to become clear.

His quest was finished. He had failed. The soldiers carried him toward the tailgate of a waiting pickup truck, where they tossed Sebeck into the cargo bay. He landed face-first on the corrugated steel alongside an unconscious Price. He had never been happier to see Price’s puffy red face and flaring nostrils. At least he was still breathing.

The tailgate slammed shut, and the pickup lurched forward. Sebeck tried to turn his face away from the rough, scratched metal of the cargo bed. He managed to turn on his side and saw trees racing past overhead.

Before long the pickup truck was racing down a road so fast that the soldiers on either side of him kept tensing their muscles to deal with the impact of bumps. They occasionally opened fire on unseen targets, but otherwise, Sebeck just listened to the roar of the truck engine.

In a few minutes the truck lurched off the road and moved across quieter ground—grass perhaps. The truck skidded to a stop, and the soldiers piled out. Sebeck was then grabbed by the ankles and yanked off the truck, causing his face and shoulder to hit the ground first. He was dragged across several yards of meadow grass, struggling to get his face out of the dirt. They finally let go of his feet and pulled him up by his elbows again.

As Sebeck looked around, he realized these men didn’t view him as a human being. He was like a piece of meat. An objective. Nothing more.

He could hear another mercenary behind him speaking on a radio. Sebeck couldn’t understand why the soldiers suddenly had radio communications. Didn’t the ultrawideband emanations of the darknet disable other radio communications? He was probably misunderstanding it. Or perhaps the heavyweight defense people were starting to get involved. Someone had invented ultrawideband, after all, and Sebeck didn’t think it was Sobol.

Glancing around he saw there were twenty or thirty soldiers in the field, all dressed as farmers or laborers—some with bandages on their arms and legs, real or faked. They were a mix of races. So their bond was the mission. Or their contract.

A few soldiers approached Sebeck with what looked to be a parachute harness. They roughly grabbed him and wrapped it around his torso. As they worked, he could see two other men unwinding a steel cable from a spool.

One of the soldiers, a Latino with a teardrop tattoo under one eye, grabbed Sebeck’s jaw. “You’re goin’ for a ride, hombre!” He laughed and turned Sebeck so he could see what looked like a weather balloon being lofted skyward, dragging a steel cable up with it. As Sebeck looked farther up into the sky, he could see another elongated, translucent balloon already ascending with a cable beneath it. Just then Sebeck saw Laney Price lifted up and hurtled skyward.

What the hell?

Then a steel cable lifted up off the grass nearby, coming taut just as the harness around Sebeck yanked tight. He suddenly launched up into the air, too, rapidly ascending. Sebeck twisted in the wind, watching the ground recede beneath him. In just a few moments he was hundreds of feet in the air with a view of the distant town of Greeley, still shrouded in columns of black smoke. He could also see torched farmhouses dotting the landscape—a scene of devastation. The only hopeful sign was the variegated landscape of grass, crops, and the saplings of recently planted orchards.

However, as Sebeck kept ascending, rising thousands of feet into the air, his view broadened, and he could see the bigger picture was the larger ocean of corn in which this island of variety was planted. The monoculture of corn stretched from horizon to horizon—and none of those farms were burning.

Sebeck hung there realizing the vastness of his failure. They hadn’t even made a dent in the old system. And here it was carrying them away—to disappear forever.

Sebeck kept rising, listening to the slap of the steel cable against the back of his harness as he swayed in the wind. He wondered why he wasn’t afraid of the height. Between his feet he could see thousands of feet to the broad plain below. He was actually level with the nearby clouds.

Then he heard the roar of approaching aircraft engines. He wriggled his body to turn enough to see—and there, some miles away, he could see the head-on view of what looked to be a C-130 cargo plane, chopping at the wind on a collision course with him. He watched it with silent amazement. No effing way . . .

As the plane approached he could see what looked to be a V-shaped fork extending from the nose of the aircraft and running some ways away from the fuselage. It was collection fork, and, as Sebeck watched, the C-130 headed straight for the balloon. He winced as the plane roared past only fifty feet overhead.

As it did so, the steel catch fork grabbed the balloon, instantly yanking the cable and accelerating Sebeck so violently that he blacked out again.