Death or godhood.

Death or godhood.

Very soon, it would go one way or another.

Ling shuddered inside.

She hurt. She hurt in ways she had never hurt before. She was so scared. She was forgetting things. Confused about things.

But she wasn’t going to give up.

She was still going to stop this monster.

Somehow.

99
Scramble

Sunday 2041.01.20

Kade stumbled out of the building hours later, a medic’s hand guiding him. Intense morning sunshine and the tropical heat and humidity of Bangalore hit him. He blinked at the brightness.

Outside, when he could see again, he saw devastation. Fires still burned in a dozen places. Smoke rose into the sky. There were military vehicles and troops around, and ambulances.

And stretchers. So many stretchers.

So many body bags.

“We’re unable to make contact with the Chinese government,” General Singh told them, grim faced, minutes later. “Every formal line in Beijing is down. Their embassy in Delhi is in the dark.”

“The whole country’s offline?” Sam asked.

Singh looked at her, as if deciding whether he could speak in front of her. “No,” he said. “Phones and net traffic for civilian data are flowing in general. But governmental and military offices appear to have been taken offline, or are being aggressively jammed.”

Kade closed his eyes. There was a temporary access point here, set up in one of the emergency vehicles. He reached out to it through NexusOS, got on the net, routed himself up through Shiva’s constellation of LEO satellites, towards China’s net.

He tried Ling’s net address. Nothing. It was offline, completely gone.

He had other tools now. He had Su-Yong’s weapon that could destroy the code she’d created, wipe it out of Ling’s mind, end the threat. He had scanning code that could find the agent she’d created. He ran it, sent it out, sent it searching through Shanghai, through Su-Yong’s flat, through the Jiao Tong network blocks, through the Secure Computing Center’s access points.

Nothing.

If she was out there, she was hidden. She was firewalled. She had defenses up stopping him from getting to her.

Kade opened his eyes, looked at General Singh.

“You have to send me there,” he told Singh, locking eyes with the man. “Me and Feng. Now.”

Singh stared back. “That’s impossible. What you’re talking about would be an act of war. War between two of the greatest superpowers in the world.”

Kade held Singh’s gaze. “General,” he said. “Within forty-eight hours, there may not be a world left to war over.” He paused. “You need to send me there. Or we’re all going to pay for what was done to this woman. Everyone on Earth is.”

Kade met Ayesha Dani’s eyes across the screen. He knew he was bedraggled, wet, still dehydrated and hungry from the hours in the elevator.

The Prime Minister of India didn’t seem to care.