The

until certain sequences of code awakened them. They woke now.
Angrily and triumphantly, they tore into the software that had carried and fed them. Various parts of the networks were swamped with alerts, rendered blind or had their information doctored only subtly. With no basis for comparison, the artificial intelligence had to start from nothing, compiling data and attempting to determine what was wrong where. The agents danced maniacally from system to system, occasionally defeated, but more often steps ahead of attempted fixes. It would take days to correct all the errors to an acceptable level for combat and days more to check the results. The system would never regain full efficiency and would eventually have to be abandoned.
* * *
None of the attacks were indefensible against. None were particularly state of the art, although the phase drive engines used as directional energy weapons were a new twist. It had simply been thought unthinkable to attack in such a fashion, laying waste to civilian territory so callously. And it would have been unthinkable had not the UN attacked Freehold first with nukes and kinetics and had not "Madman" Naumann been in control of the Freehold military.
Few cities are equipped to handle more than a few hundred deaths per ten million population in any given day. The combination of attack, induced riots and the predictable panic reactions of millions of terrified inhabitants brought the death tolls into the thousands, then the tens of thousands. It became impossible for emergency services to get into the cities. Panic spread even to cities not attacked, rumors of impending doom creating wild disturbances and attempts at evacuation. The UN and regional governments tried to squelch news stories, but the necessities of modern communication made it all but impossible. Those attempts created