Jon Evans - Swarm

“Where is everybody?” Sophie asked, through the mask. LSA Python seemed to have been entirely depopulated during our brief interregnum.

“ Run ,” Lisa said. “Red alert won’t last forever.”

I heard an incoming drone. Sophie started, grabbed Lisa and pulled her backwards.

She shrugged Sophie off angrily. “It’s one of ours, you idiot! Come on!”

She set off at a dead run along the nearest barrier wall. Sophie and I followed. I wondered when anyone had last called Sophie an idiot. Halfway there I glanced over my shoulder, like Lot’s wife, and watched another Grassfire drone dive into a distant empty patch of real estate and explode. The idea was to lure reaction teams elsewhere.

“Come on!” Lisa shouted.

I gave up on gawking and concentrated on running. We continued around the corner of the wall, and I nearly ran into the military ambulance waiting for us, with Jesse behind the wheel. It started moving even before we closed the doors.

“On the stretcher, both of you,” Lisa ordered us, as she peeled off her gas mask. “On your backs.”

I followed orders, as did Sophie, for once in her life too stunned to do anything but obey. Lisa ripped my gas mask off hard enough that I protested at the strap-burn, and replaced it with an oxygen mask. The pure O2 was cold and had strange mouthfeel.

“I need to hook you up,” Lisa muttered, “hang on.”

She had an IV in her hands. We were rattling forward at high speed, and I feared for my veins, but she chose a calm moment and caught a blood vessel with the needle first time out.

“Believe it or not,” Lisa said so softly that only I could hear, her face drawn, “my mom made me help with her needles sometimes.” She shook her head. “Funny what you think of when the shit goes down, isn’t it?”

I said, “I was just thinking a poisoned gas mask would be a really ironic murder weapon.” The oxygen mask muffled my words.

She chuckled, and the pain-lines smoothed from her face. “True dat.”

“Can I ask questions now?” Sophie asked desperately.

“No, shut up.”

Sophie had recovered enough to ignore that command. “Those drones. Grassfire.”

“Not bad for a bunch of hackers from twenty different countries throwing shit together on short notice, huh?” I could hear the grin in Jesse’s voice. “Drones come in, they call in a red alert and get the whole base to hunker down, because they can’t imagine anyone inside might be responsible. You’d be amazed how many warfighters are in Grassfire. Subvert from within.”

“Holy shit.”

“Don’t get too impressed. We’re not out yet. We need to be gone before they clear the alert and start figuring out what happened. Fifteen minutes if we’re lucky.”

The ambulance began to slow down.

“Play almost dead,” Lisa said. “You just got hit by a gas attack. We need to fly you out of here to a specialist facility.”

I nodded, closed my eyes and concentrated on method acting. It wasn’t hard. I had after all spent most of the last two weeks sick and weak with stress, fear, adrenalin and exhaustion.

The ambulance stopped. A voice that sounded like a teenage girl’s asked to see IDs. Lisa plucked mine from my chest.

“We need to get them to Kuwait immediately.” I heard the strain in Jesse’s voice and wondered if it was an act or he was genuinely scared of getting caught. The former, I reassured myself. Jesse was never scared. The world was Jesse’s plaything.

“Sorry, sir,” the girlish voice said briskly. “No one’s allowed onto the flight line. No departures until the alert is cleared. No exceptions.”

“These people are dying , you understand?” Lisa said sharply. “Every minute counts!”

“Sorry. Orders.”

“Who’s your superior officer?” Jesse demanded.

“Lieutenant Samuelson of -“

“I know Samuelson. Just a second.” I heard a squawk of radio static.

“You can use my phone,” the woman said helpfully.

“No, I can’t. Lines are down. Hello, Doctor? I need to talk to Lieutenant Samuelson, I need clearance to get our patients out of here.”

After a brief moment a warped voice responded, “I’m sorry. Can’t reach him. I can send a runner -“

“That could take twenty minutes! We don’t have time!”

“The lines are down. Most radio too. They hit the comm centre, I think they’re jamming our frequencies too, we’re lucky we’re having this conversation.” It was hard to tell, but I thought the voice had an accent. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just a second.” Jesse’s voice changed, he was talking to the woman again. “Listen. You haven’t gotten clearance because they slammed our comms, but we need to get these patients out of here right now, or they won’t make it. I’m sorry, soldier, but we’re cut off from the chain of command. You have to make a decision, and if you make the wrong one, these people will die.”

A moment later her uncertain voice said, “Let me check the lines.”

“I told you they’re down.”

“Let me check!” And a second later, scared now: “They’re down.”

Lisa said, her voice throbbing with what sounded like real emotion, “Listen. Please. The gas they used, they were at ground zero, we don’t even know what chemical it is yet and it’s eating their lungs like acid. We have to get them to the hyperbaric chamber in Kuwait, stat.”

“Up to you, soldier,” Jesse said grimly. “As your superior officer, I’m telling you your orders have changed. We don’t have time for confirmation. If you stop us here, these people will die.”

A very long moment passed.

“All right,” she decided. “Go ahead.”

I took a deep breath of pure oxygen as we rolled onwards. Then the ambulance stopped. The doors opened. Jesse and Lisa carried out Sophie’s stretcher first, then came back for me, and rolled me up into the battered Antonov plane that had brought us to the base.

“They’ll shoot us down,” Sophie objected, after the ramp closed.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jesse said. “This is a perfectly legitimate flight from a company that’s been running military cargo contracts for ten years. Or at least that’s what their flight-control computers will tell them.” He grinned. “Some people think of the US military as an obstacle. We think of it as a really dangerous but really awesome tool. Like Stormbringer as a Swiss Army knife.”

I had to grab for the wall to steady myself as the airplane rolled forward.

“A tool,” Sophie repeated disbelievingly.

“Are we beginning to see the possibilities here? Leverage, baby, asymmetry, that’s what Grassfire’s all about. Use the enemy’s strength and size against them. Trouble is, you can’t do it too often or they’ll start noticing. Like LoTek says, always be invisible. We’re pushing our luck pretty far here already. But I seriously doubt they’ll shoot us down.”

He was right: we flew off unmolested, and unescorted.

“Where are we going?” Sophie’s voice sounded strained, and not just from the howling engines that made it like trying to converse in a nightclub.

“Dubai.”

“What for?”

“Well, we were sort of hoping you might be able to help us save America and the leaders of the free world from the planet’s first drone army. I mean, since we went to the trouble of busting you out of the CIA jail on the major military base.” His grin seemed force. “Never a dull moment, right? The life of a repo man is always intense.”

Sophie considered. “And the Russians have the override sequence.”

I nodded miserably, feeling three inches tall.

“We have to figure they’ll work out how to defang it real soon,” Jesse said. “If they haven’t already.”