Jon Evans - Swarm

Anya’s mouth twisted. “Next time you see them, tell them this honey is poison.”

“Us specifically.” Jesse sounded genuinely bewildered. “Who would do that?”

I snorted with disbelief. “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe the Colombian drug gangs you’ve been working for? Just a wild guess here. Going way out on a limb.”

Anya and Jesse gaped at me.

“What are you talking about?” Jesse demanded.

I was furious. “The whole reason we’re here is because the DEA asked us to come spy on you, because they think you’re funded by, here’s a nice phrase for you, ‘narco-terrorists.’ Who just happen to be using Sophie’s software to fly drone bombs into DEA agents and Colombian police chiefs.”

Anya stared at me like I was speaking a language she did not understand.

Jesse turned to Sophie. “You can’t believe this.”

I half-expected her to reveal everything. Surely we were beyond secrets now.

“I was skeptical,” she said, “but first we discover weaponized drones nearly identical to yours, and then we come visit you, and a bunch of Hispanic thugs attack us offshore of Haiti. Kind of an extreme coincidence, don’t you think?”

Anya shook her head. “This is madness. We don’t work for any drug gang.”

“Then where do you get your money from?” I demanded.

“My uncle.”

I gave her the most disbelieving look I could muster.

“Enough,” Sophie said sharply. “We’re here now. No sense fighting about why. We have to start doing something about it.”

“Like what?” Jesse asked.

She turned to me. “Do you have your phone?”

“My phone?” I patted my pocket. “Yes. But – holy shit. The wi-fi. We can send an email.”

I tore my iPhone out of my pocket. Its battery was dangerously low, but all I needed was sixty seconds. I launched its browser, aimed it at Gmail… and read:

WebKit can’t open the page because it can’t find the server.

“They must have shut down the dish,” I said, dejected. Nobody actually said, Maybe while we were arguing , but we were all thinking it. “We’re cut off.”

The Ark Royale shivered as its engines came to life, and began to move. Jesse looked out the porthole as the ship adopted a course.

“Due south,” he muttered.

“What’s that way?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. Colombia.”

The words did not exactly strike hope into our hearts.

“Not like I didn’t enjoy my last visit,” I muttered, “but I really hadn’t planned on going back so soon.”

We sat in grim silence for some time. The adrenalin drained from my veins, was replaced by the poison of terror and despair. I felt physically sick. Every time I thought I heard a noise outside the cabin I twitched with fright that it might be them come to hurt or rape or kill. The grinding fear of captivity was even worse than being on the run in the jungle. I tried to think about something else, anything else, but my mind was caught in the gravity well of nauseating dread. All I could think of was what they might do to us.

I looked to Sophie to offer her some kind of strength and comfort, or maybe to find some in her, but she didn’t notice; she wore a distant expression, lost in thought. I envied her. Anya smiled at me weakly when I looked at her; her rage too had been replaced by trepidation. I made myself smile back. I was glad I wasn’t alone. This was bad enough with others around.

Sophie said, “Wait a minute.”

I had heard that thoughtful note in her voice before. It meant she had just been visited by an insight. She picked up my phone, and launched its browser again.

“What?” I asked.

“The local network still works. The UAV server.”

“What about it?” Anya asked.

“There’s an HTTP interface. We use it for remote testing.”

“What?” Anya sounded shocked. “That’s an enormous security hole!”

“We never realized security was such an issue,” Sophie said archly. “The point is, we can use it to access the drones.” She tapped at the phone’s on-screen keyboard, made a satisfied noise. “Look. Here’s the camera view from the UAV parked up top.”

We all leaned forward to examine the image. It was crude black-and-white, low resolution and high-compression, but we could recognize the aft of the Ark Royale as seen through the nose camera of the one aerial drone still sitting on the flight deck.

“Their boat’s gone,” I said.

“I see it,” Jesse reported from the porthole. “It’s leaving.” He squinted. “Just one guy on it, I think.”

“Leaving three. With guns. And us locked in here. On a boat captured by fucking drug pirates. Heading for Colombia.” I shook my head with disbelief at my own recap of the situation.

“Now I know how low-tech felt,” Sophie mused, a strange expression on her face. I didn’t understand the sentence at all, but Jesse turned and looked at her as if she had said something illuminating. She took a breath and came back to us. “OK. I think our first objective is to stop the boat.”

“Sure,” Anya said sarcastically. “And the first objective of mice is to bell the cat.”

Sophie smiled sweetly at the Russian woman. “How unfortunate for the poor mice that unlike us they don’t have their own personal air force and navy. Three active UAVs and twelve USVs, to be exact, at our beck and call.”

It was so much like watching her play a video game that it was hard to believe the image on my iPhone was very real. When Sophie pressed its touch-sensitive screen, the resulting signal was conveyed via the Ark Royale ‘s radio antenna to the winged UAV, which in turn transmitted its nose-camera output back to my phone: a low-res image, flickering with jitter and lag, of the white blotch of the Ark Royale growing larger as the UAV dove towards the ship. Sophie steered the drone by touching the edges of the screen around that picture. I had written that code, and was proud of it.

The phone emitted a low-battery bleep, and I winced.

“Get your charger,” Sophie said, without taking her eyes from the screen.

Jesse said, “There’s no plug in here.”

The phone had no more than five minutes of power left. Probably much less, given that its screen, radio, and CPU were all running at or near capacity right now. We would be cut off after this UAV kamikaze mission, if not during. Unless -

“Wait.” I leapt from my berth and scrabbled through my baggage. “I brought a hand charger.”

I had added it to the pile atop our bed in Pasadena, what felt like a lifetime ago, in case it might come in handy in Colombia. Handy wasn’t the word: it might be a lifesaver. I plugged it into the phone gently, trying not to disturb Sophie’s control, unfolded its crank, and began to rotate it as fast as I could, transforming my own muscle power into electrical charge.

“Shit!” Sophie tapped rapidly at one corner of the screen. “I can’t do it. Sorry. There’s too much lag. I can’t aim it accurately.”

We waited for a moment as she banked the UAV in a wide circle.

Her mouth thinned. “I’ll get it. I’ll go around and do it again.”

I said, “Let me do it.”

Sophie shook her head almost automatically.

“Let me do it,” I repeated. “Who wrote the interface? Who runs the tests in the lab? Who plays a lot of video games?”

She gave me a startled look. Then a slow smile began to spread over her face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Who knew it would be a survival skill? Give me that thing. I’ve spent twenty-five years building up hand-eye coordination for exactly this moment.”

I passed the hand charger to Jesse, who took to it with such enthusiasm that I feared for its structural integrity, before I took over. I’d done this before, for our wind-tunnel and field tests, but this UAV steered like a cow, and getting the feel of its controls took some practice. But not too much. In a way I really had been practicing ever since my first game of River Raid at age eight.