Jon Evans - Swarm

Default Axon behaviour, when launched without any programmed objectives, was to rise to a moderate height and circle while waiting for radio commands. That did us no good, so I had popped open those drones’ control panels and used Lisa’s knife to perform brief and savage lobotomies, leaving them with a nervous system but no brain; dumb aircraft that would just fly forward until they hit something and exploded.

When the helicopter was close enough to hear its whopwhopwhop I pushed the START button on the readied drone. Its engine buzzed into life. Lisa, who had claimed the trigger position by virtue of enormously more experience shooting things, aimed it towards the incoming vehicle and made tiny adjustments.

Dmitri turned our way, noticed the open doors of our elevator, and cried some kind of warning. Too late. I couldn’t hear what he shouted; the howl of the drone engine inside the metal-walled elevator was deafening, and the resonating thwong! when Lisa launched it was even worse, like a drum sting at an incredibly loud rock concert.

The drone soared delicately out over the roof and into the night, like a huge paper airplane that happened to have the explosive power of a hundred pounds of TNT. I didn’t bother to follow its trajectory. Either it would hit or it wouldn’t. My job was to ready another drone. I was pulling it free from its hex case when the gunfire began.

I froze when I heard the first shots. Then a bullet ricocheted off the elevator walls with a triple c-c-clang!, and I abandoned the drone in favour of diving prone. Lisa, thinking more clearly than I, jumped over me to the control panel and punched the CLOSE button until the doors narrowed back to a slit.

We peered out. I felt like an archer in a medieval castle. The drone soared straight towards the target – but then the helicopter suddenly pulled back, away from the factory; its pilot must have seen the oncoming drone. The UAV wobbled in the rotor wash but kept going, out to the darkness of the Persian Gulf. I briefly wondered how far it would go. Conceivably it could reach Iran. I hoped it wouldn’t go down in an inhabited area, or start a war.

The Russians by the helipad watched us closely but didn’t advance. I wouldn’t have wanted to charge our improvised drone-crossbow either. The helicopter held its position too. Anya gesticulated angrily, waving at it to come.

“That flew perfectly straight.” Lisa sounded impressed. “But they’re too slow, they’ll see it coming.”

That struck me as a solvable problem. “LoTek,” I said.

“Present.”

“Can you kill the lights?”

“Which lights?” he asked.

“All of them.”

“Give me a minute.”

I used the time to mount the next drone on the launcher. Lisa opened the doors enough to allow it egress. No shots followed; either Dmitri and Anya hadn’t noticed or they were conserving ammunition. The helicopter began to swoop down to the helipad again, coming in low to present less of a target, moving cautiously.

“OK,” LoTek grunted into my ear, and the entire Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone went dark.

It felt almost like the carpet of the world had been snatched out from under me. Only the secondhand swirling lights of the emergency vehicles, and the helicopter’s running lights against the suddenly-dark sky, pierced the sudden all-encompassing darkness. The helicopter halted, hovering just above the construction zone across the street. A mistake: as soon as its lights were stable in the sky, Lisa launched the second drone. Again I winced at the sound.

I held my breath and watched, even though there was nothing to see: the dark gray drone was all but invisible in the night. No wonder they had managed to smuggle twelve thousand of them into the USA.

Then a bright light erupted inside the construction site. For an instant the helicopter was silhouetted in a gorgeous tableau of destruction. The drone had somehow hit one of the cranes, about a hundred feet below where the chopper hovered. It was catapulted violently upwards by the shockwave, and I held my breath, hoping – but its pilot retained control.

As the hot wave of desert air from the explosion washed across my face, the steel of the construction crane gave way, and its top half, including its cab, folded and fell away with an agonizing metal moan. Moments later a resounding crash echoed through the night.

“Stop gawking and get me another drone!” Lisa commanded.

I started out of my reverie and got to work.

“Rotor wash,” she said, disgusted. “Blew it away and down. We can’t get a direct hit with an unguided drone, it’s just not possible.”

“I hate to rush you, but fucking hurry up already, I can only keep the wolves at bay for so long.” LoTek said into our ears. “And I hate to criticize, but maybe a little less of the random explosions and wanton destruction. The emirate of Dubai, like most governments, tends to frown on buildings going boom within its borders.”

“That’s very helpful,” Lisa said tartly, “thanks so much.”

The helicopter circled back towards us, and worse yet, as I mounted the third drone, lights came back on all over the roof. An automatically triggered emergency generator, I supposed.

Then I caught my breath, and thrilled with something like triumph. Only five figures were visible by the helipad. Jesse was missing. He had used the power cut and the distraction of the explosion to get away, he was out there somewhere behind one of the air-conditioning ducts that sprouted like huge metal fungi all across the roof. I was sure he’d picked his handcuffs too.

The helicopter swept back towards us, coming in over the factory this time, low enough that gravel flew up from the roof beneath. Lisa fired the third drone not directly at it, but at a protruding duct nearby. I saw her intent; if it exploded close enough, and at a sufficiently obtuse angle, the resulting shockwave might send the vehicle tumbling to its destruction.

But with the factory lights on, the incoming UAV was all too apparent. The helicopter lifted up and pulled away. Its rotor wash inadvertently knocked the drone off-course and left it drifting helplessly across the roof, flat and low, on course for Iran like our first shot. I winced as I opened the next case. We only had two drones left, and I couldn’t see how either might be used successfully -

“Look,” Lisa said.

A figure sprinted across the roof, racing to intercept the drone before it cleared the factory. Jesse. I watched openmouthed, and tensed when I heard the pop of bullets as they shot at him; but he was too far away, moving too fast.

I thought he wouldn’t make it, thought the drone would escape – but he managed a final Olympic-worthy burst of speed, leapt through the air like Michael Jordan, and caught the UAV in midair just before it flew out of reach. I gasped with terror as he landed stumbling on the very edge of the roof, but he managed to right himself, and ducked behind another duct, carrying the drone with him. Its engine yowled helplessly for a moment; its propeller was built to carry its bird-light body, and Jesse was nearly two hundred pounds of solid muscle. Then he found its OFF button.

It had been a spectacular physical feat but I didn’t see what good it did. The helicopter corrected its course and proceeded towards the landing pad. I mounted a new drone, our third last, and Lisa swivelled the drone launcher to aim it. Not at the helicopter. At the five people waiting for its arrival.

“Wait,” I said, “what are you doing?”

She said grimly, “We can’t let them get away with Sophie. No matter what.”

“ What? ”

“She’s too dangerous.”

The helicopter slowed into a hover, began to stoop towards the landing pad. Lisa squinted, ready to fire, ready to kill everyone there.