On the ground, no one knew what had happened inside the Heart of the Swarm.
First the station vanished. Then Chi Yuyan's signal went dark. The golden network remained, but contact with the orbital group was lost.
Huangfu looked up at the sky and ordered the defence to continue.
The first wave struck the outer wall nine minutes later. Monsters fell from the clouds by the thousand, crashed into the shields and reassembled themselves from the wreckage. Every creature carried part of the Heart's memory. They already knew the frequencies of human weapons and reconfigured their shells after the first hit.
The old army would not have lasted an hour.
Ammunition was distributed among depots that had once served separate districts. The Upper City's batteries used new energy cells, while the Lower City's guns ran on old crystals and were incompatible with the new ammunition.
The conglomerate's engineers proposed concentrating supplies on compatible elite units. Workers at the repair plant replied that they could modify adaptors for everyone within two hours if they were given access to the restricted schematics.
"Those are trade secrets," the company representative objected.
Huangfu opened the military vault and released the documentation onto the public network.
"In two hours, either your company will no longer exist or there will be no secret left to protect. Get to work."
Workshops in both cities began printing adaptors. The first batches were crude and overheated after three shots, but they allowed every battery to draw on the common stockpile. Engineers above corrected mistakes made by workers below. The workers found uses for parts the engineers considered obsolete. Within an hour, they had produced an adaptor better than the pre-war model.
The southern sector ran out of medical capsules. A private Upper City clinic locked its storeroom, citing an unpaid government contract. The clinic's director refused to open the door without a guarantee of compensation.
The Lower City warden did not break the lock. He called three journalists, showed them the queue of wounded and asked the director live on air to repeat his condition.
The storeroom opened a minute later.
"Before, we'd have just taken them," said a young volunteer.
"And let him call us looters," the warden replied. "Now we have more than our fists."
Doctors from the two districts worked in the same tents. They used different names for medicines and spent the first half-hour arguing louder than the artillery. Then one patient nearly received a double dose. After that, the medical teams drew up a shared table and stationed an interpreter beside every row.
The new world was not being born in speeches. It was being born in adaptors, tables and open doors, without which no victory meant anything.
The distributed legion changed tactics faster than the swarm. One flight used thermal blades, the next switched to kinetic strikes, a third lured the enemy into electrical nets. Everyone received the data, but each flight decided for itself how to use it. The swarm could not create a single defence against hundreds of variations fast enough.
Vierlia was not there. Her former pupil, a C-rank mecha-maiden from the Lower City, took command of the air. A week earlier, headquarters would not even have admitted her to the officers' channel. Now ten squadrons had chosen her as their commander.
"Northern group, do not repeat that manoeuvre," she ordered. "They've already adapted. Split into threes, choose your own altitude."
The sky filled with scattered trajectories. To an observer, it looked like chaos. To those in the network, every open gap had meaning.
In the east, a bridge collapsed.
Nangong Ci completed the evacuation seconds before the first support fell. Luo Jun's sister pulled the last child from the tunnel, then saw a level-six beast above them.
Nangong Ci could have activated her mecha-form and saved herself. Instead, she blocked the exit with her own body.
The claw pierced her armour and the old laboratory scars beneath it. Her source cracked.
"Get the people out!" she shouted.
"Together," the young woman replied.
"I killed your brother."
"Which is why you don't get to make me watch you choose a convenient death for yourself."
She sent a request through the network. Five unfamiliar flights transferred energy to Nangong Ci. No one had forgiven her past, but right now people were helping the person holding the wall.
Nangong Ci rose.
Her SSS-rank armour could no longer activate in full. Separate sections were sustained by dozens of weak sources. She seized the monster's claw and held it while the artillery changed ammunition, then hurled the creature into a kinetic barrage.
When it was over, Luo Jun's sister bandaged her wound.
"I'm still going to testify against you," she said.
"I hope you do."
"But today you saved one hundred and eighty people."
Nangong Ci closed her eyes.
"Write that down too. Not for the court. For me."
The western wall came close to disaster. One of the generals who had formerly served the Council disconnected from the network and tried to restore the old command structure. He ordered the Lower City flights to hold the breach while the elite division withdrew.
The soldiers saw the order in their interfaces and rejected it.
"This is mutiny!" the general shouted.
"No," Huangfu replied. "This is a refusal to carry out a criminal order."
He relieved the general of command and took his headquarters guard into the breach himself. For the first time, the old commander fought outside the safety of a fortified command centre. His mecha-maiden partner was damaged almost at once, but the neighbouring flights shared the strain.
"You can withdraw," she said. "Without headquarters, the defence will lose coordination."
"If the defence depends on one old man, Fan Yuan wasted his time."
Huangfu transferred authority to the sectors and remained on the line.
In the Lower City, people opened factory shelters to families from above. In the Upper City, hospitals admitted the wounded without checking their registration. Not everywhere, admittedly. At one bridge, guards again tried to separate out the 'priority citizens', but the crowd removed the barrier themselves and let the children through first.
Han Qingting was among the evacuees. With his source damaged, he could no longer enter a mecha-link, and for the first time he depended on help from the people he had called his inferiors. A Lower City porter saw his family insignia and recognised the heir.
"He's the one who poisoned our people during the examination," someone in the crowd said.
Several people demanded that Han Qingting be left outside the gates. He went pale and clutched the dead amplifier to his chest.
Zhao Ming, the candidate whose contract had been torn up, stood at the shelter entrance.
"Let him in," he said.
"After everything he's done?"
"We'll put him on trial after the attack. If we decide now that only the deserving receive help, who gets to decide who deserves it?"
Han Qingting went inside without managing to offer his thanks. Zhao Ming expected nothing from him. Later, the heir testified about the student union's contracts. It did not make him a hero, but for the first time in his life he acted against the dictates of his family name.
The wall between the cities still stood. But at its checkpoints, the old rules no longer applied.
Three hours later, the swarm changed tactics.
The monsters stopped attacking the wall and moved towards the Abyss's central tower. A human signal guided them. Murong Chengtian had hidden a backup beacon in the laboratory network in advance. The Council had intended to bring the Heart back into the city even if the primary core was lost.
Nalan Qingxin had found the beacon in the accounts, but had not managed to transmit its coordinates to the ground. Now Huangfu could see only the direction the horde was taking.
"They're not going after the people," he realised. "There's something beneath the tower that they need."
Nangong Ci knew the old tunnels.
"The Abyss's backup nerve. If the swarm connects to it, the entire network will become compulsory again."
The tower was twenty kilometres away. Between them and their target stood more monsters than there was ammunition left in the entire capital.
Huangfu ordered the backup node destroyed.
The engineers replied that the charge would have to be planted by hand. The swarm would intercept a remote signal. The group's chance of returning was zero.
Nangong Ci stood.
"I know the way in."
Luo Jun's sister rose as well.
"We're going together."
"This isn't an evacuation. There'll be no way back."
"You're choosing for me again."
Nangong Ci gave a weary smile.
"Damn Fan Yuan. Even when he's not here, he won't let me sacrifice myself in peace."
Twelve volunteers from both cities joined them. No one received an order: each of them saw the mission parameters and chose to go.
They entered the tunnel while the army opened a corridor for them.
The first-generation chambers beneath the tower had survived. Nangong Ci recognised the turns by the smell of metal and old scratches on the walls. She had once spent two hundred days without light in one of those chambers.
The group found three Council technicians there. They had been ordered to maintain the backup nerve until they died. When one of them saw Nangong Ci, he stepped back.
"You blew up the northern laboratory. My wife worked there."
"I thought there were only military personnel inside."
"You didn't check."
Nangong Ci did not explain that the laboratory had tortured people like her. She helped the technician remove his suppression collar and gave him a map of the way out.
"You can come with us and testify," Luo Jun's sister said.
"First I'll shut down the coolant pump. Otherwise the nerve will survive the explosion."
The technician returned to the control panel. His knowledge allowed them to halve the charge without bringing down the residential districts above the tunnel.
Nangong Ci understood something else she had not known during the uprising: different people always worked inside the enemy machine. Some built it knowingly, others were afraid, and still others simply could not see the whole picture. Destroying them all was easier than sorting them out. But after a decision like that, the guilty died alongside those who could have been saved.
At the backup nerve, the group encountered automated defences. The twelve volunteers could not break through them with their weapons. They sent a request through the public network, and the artillery on the surface calculated a strike through thirty metres of concrete.
"Margin of error is two metres," Huangfu warned them. "You may not have time to get out."
Every member of the group saw the risk. Two decided to withdraw and led the technicians away. The rest confirmed the mission.
The old army would have called those who left cowards. The new one thanked them for evacuating the technicians.
The artillery strike tore the chamber open. Nangong Ci planted the charge directly on the nerve.
Above them, the Heart of the Swarm suddenly convulsed. A wave of doubt passed through the entire mass of monsters. Some stopped. Others continued the attack. Still others turned their weapons on one another.
The first weak signal from Chi Yuyan reached Earth.
She had begun restoring the swarm's right to refuse.
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