Knife That Does by Ani Fox

Author:Ani Fox [Fox, Ani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2024-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9:

The Ukrainian Buckle Bolt Revisited

You’d think that getting to Greece from Baja California would be hard in times of war and electronic chaos. Except we’d misunderstood the nature of The Hive’s attack. We being me with Nine asking lots of pertinent questions. Me alone, I had assumed they’d drop the whole internet, crush everything electronic, drop us into the stone age again, and then hunt humanity to extinction. Instead, they went Invasion of the Body Snatchers style and simply perverted the Net and by extension everything touching both The Web and The Swarm.

Planes still flew, though with a lot of fighter escorts hidden from the passengers. News services got gag orders and a few editors disappeared. Censorship, reruns, a few deaths and kidnappings later, and suddenly the world forgot all about the weird New York City terrorist event. Gas leak. The politicians and talking heads went back to yapping about faux crises, the good citizens of the world ignored it all as they upped their screen time and downed more drugs of choice.

In under forty-eight hours The Hive had erased the existence of the war, established functional control over the planetary grid, and was slowly encircling The Syndicate while leaving all the apparatus of humanity in place. They didn’t want to erase what had been built. They wanted to take what we had and use it for the exact same purpose—total control of everyone alive. Except that they would then add the exciting twist of converting people into literal walking shells. Ironic in its crude extension of the analogy. Instructive in the extreme.

It also gave them huge advantages. They got to use tech with abandon, we had to stay analog and quantum. All the heavy guns and boring non-sophont AIs worked for the Adversary now. That made this moment even eerier because it suggested almost literal Delphic prescience on the part of Agrippina Karthago. To know in advance, to truly grasp the endgame of her Hive opponents and build into her capability set a Joker card—me. The Kutzk trained, chaos deploying, destructive angel of untraceable provenance. My body would be resistant to Hive control, impossible to track, and not unrelated, tough enough to drag me through multiple waves of asymmetric combat against complex operational assets.

Fuck. She’d known. Known before the Autumn War, known before she ever sent that invite, possibly before my family had been slain. Known then, decades ago, that sooner or later, an unwanted, unwinnable conflict would erupt. So, she hired … wait for it…her own literal Ukrainian Buckle Bolt, inventor of the phrase and strategy. Which gave me a strong clue as to how to best proceed. Pina would never plan things out so meticulously then leave me without options. She would leave assets tailored to my skillset and capabilities—old, functional, barely automated stuff that could be used for force multiplication against the shiny new and technologically advanced next generation (ad infinitum). Items considered low value targets by people who lacked the niche skills to operate dangerously outdated equipment.

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