Kade stared at the man. “What would that tell the next one?” He asked.

Garud yelled back. “That’s not the point!”

Confucian Fist were moving forward now, separating the commandos, removing their gear, fastening restraints around them.

Kade shook his head. “It would be tomorrow, Captain. Prisoner’s dilemma is always iterated in the real world. Defection is a sound strategy when you’re playing against defectors.”

Garud just stared at him.

Kade tried again. “Posthumans are coming, Captain Garud. There’ll be one after this. And another. And another. And more after that. Humans drove this woman crazy. You nuke her for it? The next posthuman will decide to nuke you first. You want them to treat you well? Then give them a reason. Treat them well.”

Garud leaned forward, a Confucian Fist holding his hands behind his back, and spat at the ground.

Then something epic descended on all their minds, something huge, something raving, something utterly without mercy.

Bai groaned and fell to his knees. He could feel her pushing into his mind, feel it pushing into his mind, pushing into his brothers’ minds. The thing he’d thought was Su-Yong.

No.

It put its mental fist around his will and squeezed, crushed, making way for its will. He felt it reach in and impose its order, its discipline, its desires on him.

He’d thought he’d been a slave before, degraded by pain, controlled by the virtual lash.

No.

He’d been free. Infinitely free compared to this.

Bai pushed back up to one knee, his hand on his weapon, his eyes alive and searching for his targets.

His soul dying as he fought with every ounce of his being against the invader.

And lost.

This was slavery.

This was hell.

Kade felt the attack as Su-Yong’s mad program attempted to impose its will on them all.

Weapons came alive inside him. Information constructs Su-Yong had passed on unfolded within him, expanded like origami into new shapes, vast and intricate.

His mind became a weapon.

Beside him he felt Feng’s mind unfold into complementary structures.

Viral weapons lanced from both of them, synergistic things, expanding into nearby minds, replicating, hunting out parts of her errant monster’s mind, creations that bore her errant monster’s telltale signature, carving them up, slicing them into billions of tiny fragments, forensically dissecting them, analyzing their contents and structure, following them back to where they originated from.

He felt minds around him snap free as the viral weapons sliced through tendrils of the monster’s thought. He felt the monster itself recoil, reel itself back, fleeing this unexpected attack, leaving behind telltales of its mental state, of its plans, of what it knew and intended.

The viral copies in the minds all around them shot tendrils out to each other, linked up, formed a compound structure, a new, larger entity, with a wider scope, a higher gain, a greater sensitivity, a higher signal strength.