Ramez Naam - Apex

Automatic fire erupted incredibly close. She saw Dai knocked backwards, blood shooting out of the back of his jacket.

“Dai!” she screamed.

Qi was on his feet too, firing, standing where Dai had fallen. There were soldiers in her view. She was trying to run, trying not to look, but she couldn’t help it.

Qi fired. He fired again.

She saw a soldier fall.

Then machine gun fire cut Qi in half.

“Qi!”

Bai moved out in a flood of his brothers into the square. He was fully visible, in ordinary fatigues, an assault rifle in his arms, no time for chameleonware.

The square was chaos. Ten thousand protesters. At least two thousand armed troops. Gunfire. Paralyzed tanks. Drones flying overhead. Molotov cocktails hurtling through the air. Grenades flying back. Emanations of pain and confusion from minds everywhere.

Bai sank into it. They’d trained for this. Chaos was their friend.

He opened his mind to his brothers. The battle came alive from two hundred points of view. The battlefield became a living map in his mind, a gestalt of the perceptions of all the Fists: sights and sounds and insights, troop positions and firing angles, weak points and cover zones, potential crossfires and enfilades, tactics and stratagems.

The Confucian Fist moved together, two hundred bodies fanning out, one collective consciousness steering them.

Bai raised his rifle, fired on a group of incoming soldiers, forced them to dive for cover, sending them straight into the crosshairs of his brother Peng, sniping from a roof. Across the square, Tao rolled for cover himself, pinned down by fire from three angles, and Bai and Peng reflexively took out the soldiers gunning for him.

The battlefield was an extension of their minds. Its map was their personal space. Their brothers were their phantom limbs, striking in concert, conjoined in ways more intimate and immediate than any enemy could achieve.

The humans had engineered them to be the ultimate soldiers. Stronger, faster, more hardy.

But this was what truly made them deadly. This was what truly made them posthuman. The ultimate soldier wasn’t the strongest. It was he or she who was most connected.

Bai picked off a group of soldiers pressing Quang, then swapped in a fresh clip in the space while Liwei fired, perfectly in synch.

There. A breakaway group of soldiers, rushing for the center of the square, seen from Lao’s perspective, on the other rooftop.

Rushing for the leaders.

Bai moved towards them, throwing himself into the press of protesters, putting himself on an intercept course. Humans were panicking everywhere, running to and fro, colliding into each other.

No, not everywhere.

A few were fighting with cunning and courage, taking shelter, loading bottles with fuel, popping up to hurl them. Others were holding aloft phones, recording what was happening, to let the rest of China and the world know.

Bai saw the brave ones pay with their lives.

We’re here, he thought at them. We’re with you.

Then he was through the press, Liwei just behind him, in time to see the actress’s bodyguards die, as the soldiers moved in to execute the leaders.

And then he was the maelstrom.

“Qi!” Zhi Li screamed as her bodyguard, her loyal friend, was cut down by machine gun fire. She stumbled, suddenly realizing Lu Song’s hand wasn’t in her own. Then she was down on the ground, pain in her palms. She looked up and a soldier was bringing his rifle around to murder her.

“China!” she screamed, screamed with all her rage, the word she wanted to be the last to leave her lips.

A blur came out of nowhere, an impossible thing made of muzzle fire and fists and feet. The soldier fired and it went up into the sky and then he was gone. She looked and there were more soldiers bringing their guns around to shoot, the soldiers who’d meant to kill them. Their machine guns were firing but not at her, and they were dying, they were dying and she didn’t even understand it.

Something struck near her in the dirt and she looked up and there was another soldier pointing his rifle down at her and firing and somehow he’d missed but she was still going to die.

Then the metal pipe Lu Song held in his hands collided with the soldier’s helmet like a bat, rocking the man back. Somehow Lu Song was up above her, on his feet. He swung at the man again, the other way, clubbed him in the helmet again. Then the soldier got his rifle around, pointed at Lu Song.

Shots burst out.

The soldier fell to the ground. Lu Song stood there.

He turned.

Zhi Li followed his gaze.

And there was Yuguo, a look of amazement on his face, Qi’s pistol in his hand, smoke still rising from it.

And beyond him, there were two men in fatigues, standing over a dozen dead soldiers.

Two men with identical faces.

Bai came to a stop, the bodies falling around him and Liwei like toy soldiers. Blood was coming from his arm where he’d been hit. Liwei was cut across the shin.

They were both breathing hard. Sweat was cooling on their brows. He let the rest of the thoughts of his brothers wash over him.

The Army troops were pulling back. The Fist had killed hundreds in the last few minutes.

But not without cost.

Hong was dead. Liko was dead. Deming was dead. Donghai was dead. Minsheng was dead. Shirong was dead. Guotin was badly burned, lying on the ground, fighting the pain. Guozhi was gut-shot, repeatedly, bleeding, in need of urgent care. Others had cuts or trivial bullet wounds. And where was Chanming? Where was Aiguo? Where was Genghis? Hadn’t they deployed? There was a hole where their minds should be.

Dead, most likely.

“Who… who are you?”

Bai turned. He was still breathing hard. It was the student. The boy they’d identified as one of the leaders. A high-value target worth protecting. He was looking back and forth between Bai and Liwei.

Bai looked at Liwei, then looked back at the student. He was suddenly aware of phones around them, phones pointed at him, phones recording this.

“We’re brothers,” Bai said.

“Are you… are you with the Army?” the student asked.

Bai felt his breathing slow, finally catching up to the exertion of killing these soldiers before they could kill the protest leaders. He could see the actress watching now. And her partner, Lu Song.

He’d always liked Lu Song’s films.

“We’re Confucian Fist,” Bai said. He paused. “We serve the people.”

Then Bai felt something that shocked him.

A mind. A mind he hadn’t touched for most of a year.

A mind he’d thought was dead.

Here, now.

Very much alive.

117

Confrontations

Monday 2041.01.20

John Stockton waited in the President’s Room off the US Senate Chambers.

What a gaudy, tacky place this was. The gold and blue tile-work on the floor. The frescos on the ceiling. It looked more like a church in Italy than something that belonged in the US.

Goddammit, he didn’t want to be here.

He’d made this his first stop after his inauguration in ’37, coming here to show the Congress that he was serious about working with them, that he was serious about signing bills right here, like Lincoln had, like Reagan had.

After the inauguration. Not before.

He hadn’t been back once, until now.

He hated this. Hated having the inauguration indoors for fear of disruption. Hated the mistrust the American people had, when everything he’d done the last four years he’d done to make the country stronger.

Stockton parted a heavy red curtain with his hand. He heard one of his Secret Service detail make a sound behind him. He ignored the man. The glass was bulletproof. If they wanted to fire a rocket at him, they were welcome to try.