Ramez Naam - Apex

And he had a communications handset, on a wire, held to his face.

Feng pulled the handset away, frowning.

“It’s for you,” he said, and tossed it at General Singh.

Kade listened as Singh talked to the people topside, through the hard-lined handset they’d lowered.

“Yes,” Singh said. “Myself, Lane, Verma, fifteen others. Yes. Two casualties. No, later. Right now, I need a secure line to our Chinese Ministry of Defense contact. This is absolute top priority, you understand? National security pri one for both nations… Say again?

“Hello?

“Hello?

“Hello?”

After communications were cut off, the wait stretched out. They had air from above. They were unlikely to suffocate.

Feng free climbed the elevator cable, but reported there was only a few centimeters gap through which the handset had been snuck, between what appeared to be another several centimeters, at least, of titanium alloy. They had no Shu this time to override its controls.

Through the gap, Feng said he could hear gunfire, explosions, screams.

Sam fretted. Kade could see it on her face. She was fretting for the kids in their care.

“I can’t reach them now,” Sarai said, talking about the rest of the children. She shook her head. “They were proxying across the net before, through a router in the building next door. But now the net is down.” She paused. “I know you told us to stay in the shelter… but we had to all work together to access the elevator. But I know, after that, they went right back into the shelter. They’re safe, Sam. I swear it!”

Sam didn’t look convinced.

Kade leaned back against the elevator wall, hot and damp and still overwhelmed by the bits of data and memory and software and weaponry unpacking themselves from Su-Yong Shu’s transmission into the nooks and crannies of his mind.

He could guess what had happened. He could trace the logic of the agent Su-Yong had sent out. What would it do, having met the real Su-Yong, and having been attacked?

It would strike back. It would try to kill anyone who might have learned anything. It would accelerate its plans.

People were dying upstairs, he was sure of it.

People were dying in China.

What would he do if it was too late, if Su-Yong was back?

Not the sane Su-Yong, the one healed by time and the input of data from a biological brain.

No. The mad Su-Yong. The one who’d been held prisoner for six months. Who’d been deliberately deprived of the input that stabilized her. Who’d been tortured by her own husband. The one who could barely tell reality from fiction, who dreamt of fire and vengeance and conquest.

What could the whole world do in that case? Drop nukes on Shanghai, while she waited a kilometer below? Would that even work?

Carry a bomb to her? Somehow get past hundreds of Confucian Fist and god-only-knows how many robotic weapons and commandeered soldiers she’d have protecting her? Were those odds of success any higher?

He looked up. Every hour that passed, the odds that Su-Yong would come back, enraged, bent on conquest, driven insane by her torturers, went up, and up, and up.

And if that happened, he saw only one way to fight her.

98

Rise, China, Rise

Sunday 2041.01.20

Forty kilometers from Shanghai, an invisible soldier named Tao moved slowly and silently past row after row of officer housing, to the largest and most stately home on the base.

His three brothers moved behind him. He could see them in his heads-up display. They were pale green grid-lined wire-frames of men, painted on his vision, though they were invisible, and silent.

They were clear in his mind.

There were two elite soldiers at the door, in body armor, with high tech weaponry, integrated communication systems in their mirror-visored helmets. Tao’s eyes narrowed. These soldiers were enhanced, stronger and faster than any human should be, implanted with weaponry and adaptive systems that made them formidable foes.

They could not be allowed to give any warning.

Tao gave the signal, and in an instant, the two men were dead, necks snapped.

He looked down at the bodies.

A pity, he thought. These two would have made excellent additions to the force.

Tao reached down, silently unsealed a concealed pocket on his chameleonware suit, and withdrew a black hypersonic injector, an ampule already loaded into it. He took a position at one side of the door. A brother took a position opposite him. Two others pulled the dead men around the corner of the house, and then returned.

Garbed in the dead men’s armor, the dead men’s uniforms, the dead men’s mirror-visored helmets.

Down the street, right on time, came the man they’d been waiting for.

Doctor Colonel Wang Rongshang, Medical Director of Dachang Airbase.

Wang Rongshang didn’t look to either side as he approached, but his mind did touch theirs.

He knew all was in readiness.

He walked straight up to the door, and knocked.

Tao watched the nanites take effect in General Zhangshun’s brain. As he received updates from the other teams taking the other senior officers who were not already theirs, he proxied through a handheld radio unit, across a secure connection their mother had forged over civilian network infrastructure.

Dachang Airbase is yours now,he sent. We begin fueling the aircraft immediately.

Now it was time to organize the emergency round of “vaccinations” for the remaining soldiers.

Mei-Lien rose, tied a robe around herself. She was so tired, so exhausted from worry; worry for her son, Yuguo; worry that the state security goons would hurt her boy.

How she’d come to hate them, when the video played again and again, of them clubbing students, beating boys who were little more than children.

Dragging that poor girl away, her shirt half-ripped off.

That girl no one had seen since.

“Mei-Lien!” Zhi Li called her name from the living room.

She’d never done that before. Never woken her unbidden.

Mei-Lien walked out into her apartment. The first light was entering the Shanghai sky through the windows. And there on the screen was Zhi Li.

Zhi Li dressed as a warrior princess.

Zhi Li from her films.

Zhi Li looking stern and fierce.

Zhi Li as Mei-Lien had dreamt of being as a girl. As she still wished she could turn back the clock and be.

“Mei-Lien!” Zhi Li said, and her voice was firm, the voice of a general commanding her troops. Her eyes were full of fire.

“Zhi Li!” she said, frightened, excited, uncertain what was happening.

“Mei-Lien, the time has come! Your nation has been stolen from you!”

The screen changed abruptly, showing the face of Bo Jintao, the new Premier, the Minister of State Security, zoomed in close, something about his round face so smug, so vile.

Bo Jintao opened his mouth and laughed. “Bao Zhuang is President in name only,” he said. Too loud. Too loud.

“I am in control now!”

The laugh played again, the same laugh, a loop of it.

“I am in control now! Hahaha.”

“I am in control now! Hahaha.”

The face shifted again.

“Be grateful I let you live.”

“I am in control now! Hahaha.”

“Be grateful I let you live.”

“I am in control now! Hahaha.”

“Be grateful I let you live.”

Mei-Lien was breathing hard. Her chest was pounding. She hated this man. How had she thought he was handsome? How had she thought he was good for China? His thugs had beaten innocent children.

Another man appeared. Sun Liu, the old Minister of Science and Technology, in suit and tie, less zoomed in, looking dignified, a golden shaft of light falling on him.