Jon Evans - Swarm

“I can’t see,” Lisa muttered into my ear, “you’ll have to tell me when.”

I nodded. The drones fell towards us, closer and closer. Our police pursuit, who had been distanced somewhat by our unexpected U-turn, grew nearer at almost the same speed. I hoped they didn’t think the giant metal box I was holding propped up was some kind of bomb. Though it was mostly battery, so dense and heavy that if they shot at me their bullets would probably bounce right off.

“I’m almost there,” Sophie shouted, “I’m almost there, don’t do it yet!”

At that Danielle seemed to slow down a little, or else the drones accelerated, or it was just a trick of perception; whatever it was, suddenly they no longer seemed there , they seemed here , and every instinct screamed at me to fire the cannon.

I forced myself to wait. They grew larger as they grew closer. I could see the lead drone’s wings and its whirring propellor.

“Got it!” Sophie called. “Shoot!”

Lisa didn’t move.

“Shoot,” I echoed quietly, and for some reason thought of Jesse.

Lisa’s hands slapped both buttons. The cannon shuddered, and emitted a low ominous buzz, like from a power substation or a giant insect, as the ambulance’s lights and electrical systems went out as if Lisa had flicked their off switch. I saw the rotors of the lead drone slow and stop. It began to drift further behind us, and fall further downwards.

“Get us out of here!” I shouted.

Danielle stood on the accelerator. For an ambulance it had a remarkable kick. We rocketed away while the first three drones in the swarm exploded in quick succession, sending the pursuing police cars tumbling side-over-side, leaving smoking potholes the size of washing machines in Boulevard Sheikh Zayed. The fourth and fifth drones had followed closely enough that they were disabled by the explosions of their peers, veered off course, and tumbled to explode relatively harmlessly against skyscrapers.

The sixth and final drone kept coming.

I looked down at the analog dial. It had swung all the way back down to EMPTY, and was slowly creeping back up through red towards green as the generator recharged. Much too slowly.

As if in slow motion the final drone fell gradually towards us, like an airplane on autopilot, descending the flight path to our fiery death with perfect grace. It was so close that I could see the blur of its propeller in the night. The cannon’s range varied nonlinearly with its power; at half charge it had one-eighth the range of a full charge. The needle reached the one-quarter mark. One-sixty-fourth the range.

A hundred feet away. Seventy. Fifty. Forty. I could see the glint of its nose-spike camera. Thirty feet from us, ten above the road. The LED on its belly flashed red.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” I muttered.

If anyone else said anything, I didn’t hear it. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten. I could feel its rotor wind -

“Now,” I said, and Lisa slapped the buttons, and the generator expelled its weak charge.

The drone didn’t actually shut down, but it faltered, and began to glide downwards. That gave me time to shove the EMP cannon out of the ambulance, and Lisa time to slam shut its doors.

A second later we actually lifted off the ground with the force of the explosion. Our tires spun frantically with no purchase for a long breath. Then we landed, and they grabbed traction, and somehow, heroically, Danielle kept the ambulance from rolling as we squealed and rattled to a halt.

I looked to LoTek and Sophie and saw that their laptops had snow-crashed.

“Oh, shit,” I said, “the pulse -“

“Flash memory is fine unless you aim the cannon right at it,” LoTek said, “we just need to cold boot.”

He matched action to word by ejecting and quickly replacing his laptop’s fuel cell, then doing the same with the phone that served as its Internet tether. Sophie didn’t bother with her computer; she just held out a thumb drive to LoTek.

“The adjusted signal?” he asked.

She nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“Dead certain.”

Danielle tried to start the ambulance. It wouldn’t.

“I think we’re stuck here,” she said apologetically.

I shook my head in dismay. “The cops will be here any moment. We’re not getting away.”

“Did you ever think we would?” Lisa sounded almost amused.

“Doesn’t matter if we get away as long as we get it done.” LoTek’s laptop and phone had booted. He grabbed the thumb drive from Sophie, plugged it in, started typing. “Let’s hope the attacks have some kind of Gaussian time distribution, and Twitter was just reporting a handful of early arrivals.”

He hit ENTER, stopped, nodded briefly, and sat back. It was so anticlimactic that I wanted to shout at him not to stop.

“Done.” He sounded tentatively satisfied. “Every cellular tower in America is blaring out that signal and shutting down every drone within range.”

“Until the cell companies notice and take back the towers,” Sophie muttered, worried. “Which will be in, what, five minutes? If the drones are launched in remote places with no cell coverage, and they probably are, we might miss half of them.”

I groaned aloud at that thought.

“I took care of that.”

“How?” Sophie asked.

“I just shut down the entire North American power grid,” LoTek said casually. “The cell towers will run on battery power for hours, they’ll be fine, but their owners will be too busy dealing with the blackout to override me. Take a look.”

He showed us his laptop. On screen was a stylized real-time map of American electrical consumption, with the brightness of each city apparently indicating its power usage.The Boston-Atlanta metropolitan axis shone so brilliantly it seemed to threaten to burn out his laptop’s LCD display.

Then, one by one, without any fuss, all the cities started going out.

“Teach you Yankee rebels not to have a resilient infrastructure.” He smiled, pleased with himself. “At least I’m going to be arrested for something suitably epic. The legend of LoTek lives on!”

Danielle rolled her eyes.

“But did it work?” Lisa demanded. “Did we stop them?”

In the silence that followed I heard what sounded like dozens of sirens coming towards us from all directions.

“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “We’ll find out if the lights come back on.”

Our entrance into Dubai’s gleaming new glass-and-steel police station was a full-on perp walk: all four of us in handcuffs, escorted by a crowd of scowling police, while cameras rolled. Our faces were as grim and tense as those of the arresting officers – until we saw the television showing CNN.

We froze to watch, but there was really no need. Even before we saw the story graphic America Attacked! , and heard the robotically pretty anchorwoman report “dozens of attacks that have left hundreds dead” with mechanical gravitas, the mere fact that CNN was still broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters proved that only a handful of swarm attacks had gotten through.

I moaned with physical relief. We all turned to look at each other, grinning so widely you could have counted our molars, and then Lisa whooped, and burst into jubilant laughter, and the rest of us couldn’t help but join in. We cackled like madmen with relief and triumph. The surrounding crowd of police and media stared dumbfounded; they could never have seen such a delighted lot of arrestees. Much later I realized they thought we had been celebrating the hundreds dead, rather than the tens of thousands saved.

It wasn’t until after we had been processed, fingerprinted, and imprisoned in small but comfortable solitary-confinement cells that I thought of Jesse, and how much he would have loved that moment, how amused he would have been to be arrested and jailed for the crime of saving the world.