Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

while. Then, of course, there was the come-down. The side-effects. The dependencies. Blade brought hallucinations and psychosis. The riots melted into chaos. Dronetown after dronetown was sealed. City stacks were closed, all trade subject to search and seizure, all citizens under curfew. Blade spread and the riots grew. Public services began to fail. The police could not contain the pandemonium, and the populace protested every move. Anarchists waged war, addicts rampaged, and the Path advanced. The noose tightened. Every action backed the other, and the feedback loop grew with each botched raid and protest.
Field Commander Karl Vonner sat alone in his control room, making sure the media talked about sports and the weather instead of burning cities, playing the fiddle while all of Rome burned about him. Sometimes he raged. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes, in weak moments, he almost reached for his phone, to call family he hadn't spoken to in years, or even a complete stranger, to carve himself open. He hadn't broken yet, but he grew closer with each turn of the spiral.
He'd seen the numbers and read the studies. Humanity couldn't survive another war, it couldn't survive without central control. There wasn't enough left, not in food, space, metals, nor fuel. All that remained on Mother Terra was power. Raw power. There were too many guns, too many bombs, too many Bergman drives. Without the Authority, without unity, the whole damn planet would burn.
In the blue wash, he asked himself, 'Did we drag ourselves out of the Collapse for this? Three hundred years of rebuilding, unifying, pulling ourselves up from barbarity and famine, for this? Ending with a bloody whimper?'
Vonner had trained his whole life to see patterns, to connect dots, to forge sense from madness. He was one of the best. He'd made Field Commander by thirty! He should have spotted the plot behind this insanity, but who would profit? Who would gain? Not the Path! No, they'd die in the first fires of war. Not the Authority, either. They'd fall right after. No one profited from this, not the high or low, they'd starve alike, in the ruins of a planet which once held life.
Cui bono? He'd stayed up night after night, that question rebounding through his head. He'd stared at his mirrored ceiling and asked, 'who gains?'
Days passed, and still, he watched his boards and screens. He drank his stale coffee and washed his face in the sink. His staff dwindled, but Vonner never left his post. He stared at the wall of screens and ran the numbers over and over. He waited for his answer.
He was at his post when the Emergency Broadcast System chimed. He was slumped in his chair, eyes riveted to the myriad screens, half-dazed, neither awake nor asleep. The slivers that remained of his consciousness were glued to the blue, adhered from eyestalk to datastream. In his torpor, the chime was deafening.
He sprang forward, headset ripped from his matted hair. He snatched up his goggles and gloves as molded coffee splashed to the floor.
Every screen was alight with one image, one message. The seal of the Authority blazed across them all, gold on blue, the eagle's wings spread across the globe. Vonner was on his feet. The boards were ablaze with authorizations, authentications, and handshakes. The Emergency Broadcast System was online, and this was no drill.
Then, he saw it. A line of sunset-red text on a white screen: point of origin - validation failed.
This broadcast was illegal.
The chimes sounded through the room and through his headset, tri-tones, to grab the attention of every possible onlooker.
His tablet buzzed. Blue and gold shone from the screen. His phone chimed, and there too, he saw blue and gold.
Vonner slapped the override.
A lesser man might have been tempted to watch, to see what was to follow. Not Vonner. He was an Agency man, through and through. He did his duty. Vonner flipped the killswitch before most men could blink.
But the screens were still blue, and the chimes still sounded.
His eyes flashed over the boards. White lights. Yellow. Red. His goggles flickered, as the VR augment took over his reality. Like a melting painting, the screens and consoles washed into a white room, clean blue light-boards at his fingertips. The feeds now hung in the air, surrounding him, spiderwebs of data strung between. Traitorous red rushed over shimmering silver. He traced the pulses, swam against the signal.
He raised a gloved hand and opened a window.
It seemed a simple feat. A wave of the hand, a flick of the eyes, and a hundred options collapsed into a single choice.
In the real world, this was the result of a precise symphony of calculations. Sensors in the gloves compared velocity, vector, and relative distance to each other, to his goggles, and to the "anchor" hung around his neck. Those points formed an inverted digital pyramid, the "base" drawn from hand to hand to eye, and the peak set the anchor against his chest. Changes in relative direction or velocity referenced the anchor, and the aug obeyed his every eye-flick, finger dip, and vocal command.
Vonner swam the digital sea. He darted from point to point, chasing the signal over connection upon connection. The network was a web, and he was the spider. He had the authorizations. He had the access.
The traitorous red lines fled, and Vonner followed.
Around the world, the broadcast began. Every viewer, every tablet, every holoprojector, every speaker, repeated the signal.
Vonner caught the red-flickered-silver data and closed his fist. A stack of commands executed, and the emergency cutoff triggered.
The signal continued.
Vonner isolated the root transmitter, the origin of the broadcast, and collapsed it. In a single motion, he deauthorized the source from net access.
The signal continued.
He attempted to initiate a second EBS, to override the transmission.
The signal continued.
Cold panic settled.
The world trembled, and a chime sounded in his ear. It was a phone call from the Capital. From the Citadel.
Vonner closed his eyes and tried to swallow. More than his career