Mark Alpert - Extinction

Dusty shook his head. “If we did that, they’d crash into each other. No, the system relies on swarm intelligence. The chips on the drones communicate with one another, and each keeps track of its neighbors. When we send them a target, the microprocessors plot their paths so that the drones move together like a swarm of real flies. Check out the screen over there.”

He pointed at one of the monitors. Each of the sixteen squares on the screen showed a different part of the farmhouse. The images in the squares grew larger as the swarm approached the target. One square showed the Toyota HiLux, another showed a wooden privy, and a third showed a chicken pecking in the dirt. Several others showed the house itself, a one-story mud-brick structure with tattered curtains in the open windows. The analyst tapped his keyboard again, and three of the cyborg flies landed on a windowsill. The insects entered the house and their video feeds displayed the interior: a room with no furniture, just a Turkish carpet on the floor. An old man slept on a pallet in the corner. The drones hovered over the sleeping man and the video feeds showed his weathered face.

“He doesn’t match anyone in our database,” Dusty reported, turning to Agent Hammer. “Should we reroute to another target?”

Hammer mulled it over. “As long as we’re here, we might as well check out the other rooms.”

Kirsten let out an exasperated grunt. “You should end this test right now. You’re out of your depth.”

“She’s right,” Jim said. “You got all this surveillance video coming in, but no way to systematically analyze it. That’s why this mission is turning into a wild-goose chase.”

Hammer ignored Jim and focused on Kirsten. “You know what, Chan? I think you’re jealous. You wish the NSA had a system like this, don’t you?” Then he turned back to Dusty and pointed at the screen. “Send the drones into the room behind that door. Maybe the jihadis are eating breakfast in there.”

The cyborg flies descended to the gap under the door and crawled through. Their video feeds showed a tin washtub in which a young woman was taking a bath. An older woman sat on a stool next to the tub, helping the young woman wash her hair. Dusty maneuvered one of the drones closer so it could focus on the women’s faces. Their lips were moving. “Well, well,” Hammer said. “Here’s a scene right out of a porno flick. Do we have audio pickups on these drones?”

“Yes, sir,” Dusty answered. He tapped a few keys and the sound of a conversation in Dari came out of the laptop’s speakers. “Should I plug in the translation program?”

“No, that won’t be necessary. The picture’s more interesting than the words, don’t you think?”

Jim glanced at Kirsten and saw her face turn red. Hammer was deliberately provoking her. Furious, Jim raised his mechanical hand, thinking how easy it would be to crush the agent’s throat. But he restrained himself and simply pointed at Hammer’s chest. “Stop this. Now.”

Hammer wasn’t intimidated. “Are you kidding? At least Chan has some pull. You’re just a ‘technical adviser.’ Why should I take orders from you?”

“If you don’t stop this test in the next—”

“What are you gonna do? All your Ranger buddies are outside in the courtyard, and I got twenty agents in this room who—”

A loud, high-pitched crack interrupted him. It came from the speakers of Dusty’s laptop, which meant that the sound had been picked up by the drones inside the mud-brick house in Golbahar. “What the hell was that?” Hammer asked. “It sounded like a slap.”

Jim stared at the video monitor. One of the squares on the screen had gone black. The square next to it showed the older Afghan woman holding a homemade fly swatter. She’d just smashed one of the cyborg insects and was now stalking the other two.

“Jesus!” Hammer yelled at Dusty. “Get the drones out of there!”

But the old woman was fast. She managed to cream another drone before Dusty could maneuver it away. The third drone hovered out of reach, and its camera showed the old Afghan woman staring curiously at the fly she’d just killed. She bent over to pick it up from the floor.

“No,” Hammer groaned. “Don’t—”

The old woman suddenly retracted her hand, as if she’d been bitten. Then she fell on her side and started convulsing on the floor.

The young woman in the tub screamed. The shrill noise blared from the laptop’s speakers. Within seconds her relatives came to her aid. The drones outside the house showed several men running across the fields and calling for their neighbors.

Ignoring Jim and Kirsten, Hammer spent the next ten minutes shouting orders at his agents. As the analysts withdrew the swarm from Golbahar, the screens showed dozens of turbaned men gathering in the center of the village. Many of them carried AK-47s. The entire male population was up in arms.

Hammer turned to one of his bodyguards. “Contact Special Operations and tell them to send a team to Golbahar,” he ordered. “We got a clusterfuck in progress.”

“What happened to the old woman?” Jim asked. “The drones aren’t weaponized, are they?”

“It’s built into the electronics,” Hammer replied. “The Chinese didn’t want their dissidents to find out about the surveillance system, so each drone carries a heat-sensitive dart. If someone tries to pick up one of the bugs, the dart injects a nerve agent that incapacitates the unlucky bastard until the security forces arrive at the scene.”

“Oh, that’s great.” Kirsten shook her head. “That’s just wonderful.”

“It’s not such a big deal. It happened a few times before in our earlier tests. We just send Special Ops over there and they clean up the mess.”

She pointed a finger at him. “And how many Afghans have you incapacitated so far? Maybe that’s why the locals were giving us the evil eye when we were on the road. I’m sure they’ve noticed the clouds of flies coming out of this place.”

“Look, I’m getting a little sick of your tone. My job is to nail these terrorists, and this is the system that’s gonna get it done.”

“We’ll see about that. All of this is going into my report.” Kirsten tapped her eyeglasses, which were recording everything she saw.

Hammer frowned. “And you know what’s going to happen when the NSA director reads your report? He’s going to say, holy shit, get Hammer into my office. I want to talk to him about getting a few thousand of those drones for myself.”

“He’ll want to talk to you, all right, but not about the drones. He’ll be more concerned about the technology you handed over to China.”

“I got approval from Langley for the exchange. And we took steps to make sure we don’t get bit in the ass.”

“Like what? What’s to stop the People’s Republic from using Conway’s implants against Americans? The next time the Guoanbu arrests one of your agents in China, they might decide to put that Dream-catcher into his head before they interrogate him.”

“We can stop them from doing that. The safeguards are built into the system. If they ever—”

A tremendous thud suddenly shook the bunker. The CIA analysts turned away from their monitors and gazed uncertainly at one another. Then another thud reverberated through the room, and several video monitors fell from the wall. One of Hammer’s paramilitary bodyguards rushed into the bunker. “Sir, we’ve got incoming mortar rounds!”

“What?”

“At least ten trucks full of Afghans are coming from Golbahar. It looks like they’re retaliating for the drone test. They’re carrying AKs and RPGs and—”

Then a third blast, the strongest by far, rocked the bunker, and all the lights went out.