Ramez Naam - Apex

And a huge explosion ripped through the night as brothers died.

Tao moved through the building twenty minutes later, weapon at the ready, his mind grim.

Dead brothers.

Dead brothers.

What was worth dead brothers?

They met no resistance inside the outpost.

Dead men were everywhere, their bodies blasted and blown apart. Equipment had slumped and collapsed under the onslaught of the chain gun. Cabinets and tables and electronics had exploded. Walls had exploded. Beams had come down. Debris was everywhere.

There was no resistance remaining.

Tao tapped the radio at his throat. “Send in the politician.”

“I am Sun Liu,” the human said, his hands on full palm scanners, tens of meters below surface level. “Member of the Politburo Standing Committee, Minister of Science and Technology. Requesting access to the archive.”

Tao watched as lasers scanned the man’s retinas. Behind the wall he imagined processors analyzing speech patterns, vocal stress response, and so much more.

Now, would Sun Liu still have access to this archive? How up to date would it be?

“Welcome, Minister Sun Liu,” said the silky, feminine voice.

Titanium alloy doors parted.

The archive was a maze of store rooms with contents ranging from the familiar to the bizarre. A mishmash of things the nation had created that it now wanted locked away, but not yet destroyed.

There were shelves of files. Ammunition cases. Data banks. Ancient electronics. Chemical tanks. Biological material cases, with bright yellow biohazard stickers and triple seals.

They came into a room full of cryo tubes, vertically oriented. They were occupied, faces showing on the nude bodies behind the glass. Men. Women. Faces he’d never seen.

Famous faces.

“Clones,” one of his brothers said. “Like us.”

Tao looked at these bodies, frozen, trapped, and shook his head.

“Not like us.”

But at the end of the room, there was one. One who looked too much like him. Too much like his brothers. Not the same. Not quite.

But too close.

Tao shook his head and moved on.

“Here,” Sun Liu said. “This is it.” His voice was calm. His mind was horrified.

The politician lifted a metal case from a rack of metal cases. The label below it gave a date, an ID number.

Sun Liu held his thumbs to the reader pads on the case, fear leaking out into the space around him.

The locks opened.

Inside, in the midst of thick foam padding, gleamed a diamondoid data cube.

“Test it,” Tao said.

His brother Xuan stepped up with the portable cube reader and gingerly moved the cube into it, closed the reader door, and slid his finger across a series of controls.

They waited, and waited, and waited.

Then green lights appeared.

“Basic check is good,” Xuan said. “Data looks like a neural map.”

Sun Liu stared ahead. Dread leaked out from his mind. Despair for what he’d done to his world and his species.

Tao looked down on the site as they lifted off, freshly fueled, en route to Shanghai. He could see the burning wreckage of Griffon Two down there. Sung was dead in that wreckage. Jialu was dead. Zhaoguo was dead. Jin was dead. Hui was dead. A dozen brothers dead. And the pilot they’d had. The pilot they’d made one of them by the rewriting of his neural circuitry.

By making him a slave.

Tao looked down at the metal case, sitting on the floor, now secured to his own body until he could deliver it in Shanghai.

I’d die for you, Su-Yong, he thought. Any of us would. You freed us from slavery.

Then he felt another jolt of agony escape from Sun Liu. The man’s torture had resumed.

Tao shook his head.

There were worse fates than death.

108

Wings

Monday 2041.01.20

Kade watched as the ground crews loaded fuel into the Indian stealth bombers, on this little spit of land leased from Vietnam. India’s base to protect its oil and natural gas interests in the South China Sea.

The bombers were wide flying wings, a riff on the old American B-2 body plan, matte black, equipped with state-of-the-art chameleonware and radar avoidance, engines mounted atop the wing body to mask their surfaces and exhaust from any sensors below.

Why were there two of them?

“We’re running out of time,” Kamal Garud said. He was the commander of the Division Six commandos. A captain in the India’s airborne special forces, transferred to the Division during its reconstruction. Tall, broad shoulders, rippling muscles, the aura of command.

The man’s mind was cool and hard. He was running Nexus, like all the commandos. But he had it locked down, giving nothing away.

“It’s 1am in Shanghai now,” Captain Garud went on. “By the time we deploy, it will be nearly 5am. The sky will be getting light. The risk goes up.”

Kade turned to face the man. “We go now,” Kade said. “As soon as they’re fueled up.”

“Listen, chameleonware isn’t magic,” Garud replied. “In the dark, or if you’re moving slowly, wonderful. But inserting at high speed, with light coming up, there’s a high risk of observers noticing something . If we wait until tomorrow night–”

“It’s scrambling right now,” Kade interrupted, staring at the man. “The program that wants to take over the world. It’s using every hour, every minute, every second to get closer to its goal. We have every reason to believe we have less than a day before its plan comes to fruition. And if we’re not there, it’s going to succeed .”

Kade stopped and let that sink in. “Now, I hear you on the risk of being seen. So you tell me. Does that risk outweigh the risk I’ve just outlined for you?”

Garud stared at him, his thoughts revealing nothing.

“Does it, Captain?” Kade said.

“No, sir,” Garud said.

Then the man saluted, and walked off, giving orders to his men.

And left Kade standing there, staring at the Indian bombers.

At the two bombers, when there should have been one.

Kade stood in the weapons bay of the bomber as Aarthi walked him through a system’s check one more time.

He was suited up.

More than suited up.

He was winged.

His body was in a head-to-toe chameleonware suit, with a pressurized helmet. A hose connected to a small tank that provided breathable air. Over his shoulders came thick straps with metal releases. Another webbing strap connected them across his chest. More straps bound themselves around his waist, and yet more around each thigh.

Those held the rigid wing to his back. It was a broad V, wider than he was tall. It came up to the back of his head, and down to his calves. It was surprisingly light, nearly invisible on radar, and would activate its own chameleonware when they deployed.

When they dropped out of the bottom of this aircraft sixteen kilometers up over the Pacific, eighty kilometers from shore, and started their unpowered, suicide-speed flight to their target, sixteen kilometers inland.

“OK,” Aarthi sent. “Everything’s green.”

Kade nodded, and pressed the mental command to open up. The visor of the external suit cracked its seal, and Kade lifted it.

“Thanks,” he said.

Aarthi nodded. “Just remember: stay still, and the wing will do all the steering. It knows the program.”

Kade nodded. Then he changed the subject.

“Hey, Aarthi,” he said, pointing at the heavy case in a corner of the bay. The case with the warning sign on it. “What’s in the box?”

Aarthi didn’t turn her head. She just looked at him. “Weapons, Dr Kade. Just weapons.”

“I’m not a doctor,” he said reflexively.

Aarthi smiled.