“No sir. Lost them just before the first impacts.”

Eric sighed, but he wasn’t surprised. When the Liberty went up, the pulse was probably big enough to take out even hardened orbital birds. Thankfully, the atmosphere would have kept it from frying most ground-based systems, but that didn’t help him much at the moment.

“We’re having decent luck with the Net, though, sir.”

“Oh?” Eric cocked his head, but then nodded quickly.

It sort of made sense, now that he thought about it. The global network had originally been designed as a military communications system, so one of its biggest features was the fact that it was designed from the ground up to route signals around broken links. It was also mostly running on fiber now, so the backbone of the civilian network was actually better defended than most military systems.

“Alright. I’ll link in that way,” he said. “Thanks.”

“No problem, sir,” the reservist said. “Where are you going now, if I can ask?”

“Back to my ship.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Beijing, China

MAJOR GENERAL KONG swore at the display, unable and unwilling to believe what he was seeing. The city crawled with enemy units, literally and figuratively crawled, and the reports coming back in made it clear that their normal response teams were utterly ineffective.

“We need to bring in heavy armor and air support. Police units are insufficient!”

“I am well aware of that, Chairman,” the general growled. “We are bringing our forces back from the exterior bases, but it takes time. Our forces have been arrayed outward since the war, so we have few heavy units to deploy.”

“Do not give me excuses! Bring those units back immediately!”

Kong tuned out the ravings of the Chairman, knowing that, for the moment at least, he had little to be concerned about from the man. In the current situation there wasn’t a military officer in the entire Block government who would listen to the Chairman over him. For all intents and purposes, he was the military, and right now the military was in charge.

For all the good it seemed to be doing.

The enemy forces were not particularly tough, as best as he could tell from reports and recordings, but they were more than a match for the police units initially sent against them. Internal military had somewhat more luck, but even those were relatively light in terms of firepower and armor, so at best they were holding the line while heavier forces were brought in.

The only thing that was keeping it from being a rout was the air support provided by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, and those units were being stretched sorely thin between India and China at the moment.

Kong found himself looking silently over to his computer, remembering just what was located on his personal drives.