Freedom TM

were darknet sentries still moving about on the walkways near the main house. One of them wore the telltale armor of a Daemon champion. They were all carrying darknet weaponry. There was no way he could exit unseen. And night would be no better, since he knew they’d have night vision. In fact, he’d be at a disadvantage.
    The Major remained calm. He reached into his pack and produced a pair of quality HUD glasses along with spooled wire that led to an electronic enclosure.
    In the closing days of Operation Exorcist, the Weyburn Labs team had made significant progress cracking into the encrypted Daemon darknet. Partial credit was due, of course, to Dr. Natalie Philips for her work at Building Twenty-Nine—where she provedthe concept of darknet identity theft. But in order to use this network, they needed to own it. They had been well on their way to doing that—and The Major might soon be again.
    His researchers had advanced past the need to keep a darknet operative medically alive in order to spoof them—they’d done better. They digitized the biometric data and created a unit that injected it into the standard darknet HUD glass sensors, replete with pulse sensor. All that was needed to steal a darknet operative’s identity with this system was their biometric data—fingerprints, iris scan, voice.
    And The Major had given just that to the lab team.
    As he powered up the unit and slipped the glasses on, he became Loki Stormbringer. He suddenly saw the HUD display first-person, instead of on a projection screen, and he saw darknet objects moving in a plane of augmented reality. They were all over the place. This was going to be a very interesting new world.
    He walked with purpose out the storeroom door, ignoring the guards, and then kept walking briskly toward the distant guest bungalows. He gauged the houses were two miles away across slightly unkempt gardens and uncut lawns.
    He kept his back turned to the guards and just kept walking. As the minutes ticked away and he estimated he was hundreds of yards from the main house, he felt the tension draining from him. He looked up at the sky with his new glasses.
    He saw the call-outs of surveillance drones up there, thousands of feet in the sky. But he was one of them now. A member of the darknet. He also had four hundred thousand euros in his bag. It would be much needed since his accounts had all been emptied by Sobol’s Daemon. If only he hadn’t been greedy. But he still had some safe-deposit boxes in Zurich and Dubai.
    And he could now steal all the darknet identities he needed. He suddenly frowned at Loki’s reputation score. It looked surprisinglylike a half-star out of five. And what was this? It now looked like Loki was only a tenth-level Sorcerer.
    What the hell?
    No matter. This was only a temporary identity. The sky was the limit now. He was almost to the bungalows, and he could either head out on foot for the power station or try to obtain a vehicle legitimately from the darknet.
    He risked a glance behind him, but there was no one in sight any longer. He was more than a mile from the main house.
    He kept walking and chuckled to himself. Once he was clear of this place, he knew some hackers who could make very good use of this darknet identity theft technology. Very good use.
    “Excuse me, Major.”
    The Major stopped cold. The voice came from
right behind him
.
    The Major clicked the safety on his Masada rifle and spun around even as he crouched. Then, in utter astonishment, he slowly came to his feet again.
    “It is ‘Ze Major,’ is it not?”
    Only a few feet away, impossibly, stood a spectral image of a Nazi officer in a full black trench coat, monocle, and filter cigarette. He looked real, except for the fact he was a ghost. The Major was so stunned he kept the gun aimed at the ghost’s head.
    It knew who he was.
    “I zought I recognized you.”
The apparition tapped his cheek just under the eye.
“From your eyes. I can tell zees zings.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette.
“My name is Heinrich Boerner.”
He started taking off his leather gloves as he spoke.
    Meanwhile, around him, The Major heard a rising whine, like electric motors. He turned to see a line of razorbacks coming over the grass toward him. Why hadn’t he heard them?
    “Fuck!” He turned to run and saw another row of razorbacks moving toward him from the bungalows—like lions approachingin deep grass. There were at least a dozen closing in from all directions.