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 are 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 this 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.