Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

The sixth contractor stared out at him, eyes huge, clear coil of an earpiece hanging from his left ear. Evan stared back.

The last man, left to guard the convoy. If he hadn’t known who Evan was when he’d run into the building, he certainly knew now. He lifted a gun from his side, and Evan snapped his ARES up.

The sights were already lined on the guy’s heart when Evan saw that he was holding not a gun but a dragonfly microdrone aimed out at Evan.

The merc’s hand pulsed, and Evan fired.

The shot struck the drone, driving it back through the man’s chest and knocking him flat in the cargo area. The pop of the firing gun filled Evan’s ears, and when it receded, his brain finally registered the small noise he’d heard before the shot.

A tiny click.

Like a camera taking a picture.

Evan stepped back toward the Honda, his panicked stare lifting to the giant hockey puck of a building looming before him.

He heard it before he saw it.

The hum of hundreds of wings.

And then the swarm erupted from the top of the building, a volcano blowing its top.

67Mud Monster

The Laser Warning Receiver alerted at the hem of Evan’s shirt, the tiny three-note Taps bugle woefully insufficient for the threat rocketing at him.

Evan flung open the door to the Civic, snatched the Dronewrecker gun from the passenger seat, and aimed at the incoming swarm.

He fired, heat and laser dazzle erupting from the fat barrel of the weapon. A ribbon of drones fell from the right flank, their sensors blown, raining down uselessly to the earth. It felt odd to shoot a gun without recoil, whose only sound was like the flick of a pinball paddle. Stumbling backward, aiming at the sky, he shot rapidly, stripping away sheets of microdrones.

But there were so many more, kamikaze-plummeting at him, a hundred meters out, now eighty.

He pulled the trigger again and again, initiating another burst of high-powered microwaves, disabling swaths of the dragonflies. But for every dozen he struck down, a fresh dozen filled their space.

Sixty yards out, now fifty.

All at once they parted, peeling to the sides and swooping up to regroup, protecting the swarm. He choked out a breath of relief. Their maneuver would buy him a little more time, but not much.

He realized he’d backpedaled out of the parking lot and onto the testing field. As the microdrones retreated, he kept firing, rendering as many useless as he could.

His heel caught on a mud puddle, and he went down.

Too late he saw the single dot sailing down at him, incoming.

The swarm had diverted its numbers away not just for self-protection but to draw his attention elsewhere.

And they’d send one suicide bomber directly at his head.

It zipped down.

No time to raise the Dronewrecker.

He clicked the button on the hefty gun, releasing a burst of cover smoke, flung the weapon aside, threw himself onto his feet, and dove.

A ripple of air brushed his back, and then the night burst into light around him. The force of the explosion had him airborne, twisting over himself, a weightless cartwheel.

Somewhere beneath consciousness he registered what had happened. The solitary microdrone had chosen to take out the Dronewrecker gun first to leave him defenseless before the gathering swarm.

He landed flat on his back, the air torn from his torso at impact. For a moment he was knocked clear out of himself, floating above his sprawled, damaged body.

The siren song of surrender called to him. It was so peaceful up here, a God’s-eye view of the world, impersonal and all-knowing, the omniscience of a drone.

For a moment he drifted against the constellations. And then Jack’s growl came into his head. The hell you doing here? it said. You got work to do .

Evan felt himself spinning back down through the forever darkness, through the wispy claws of a few stray cirrus clouds, and he slammed back into himself with greater impact than his physical landing.

He blinked himself to alertness. He was stuck in the mud, in the earth itself, clothes and flesh weighted with mud and muck and grime. Earpiece gone, no weapon, cut off and defenseless. Forearm torn open anew. His bladder had released, his pants soggy. Smoke hovered in the air, war-zone thick, a no-man’s-land miasma.

Way up above, hundreds of specks collected in the eye of the moon, the swarm gathering itself, confused. Many of them were likely still blinded from the laser dazzle, and the smoke protected him from those with intact electro-optical sensors. The haze drifted above him, shielding him from sight. The heat wave from the Dronewrecker would dissipate quickly, revealing his thermal signature.

He rolled himself through the mud in one full rotation, covering himself further, winding up again on his back. He was now encrusted in a makeshift shell scrape that camouflaged him and layered over his heat signature, protecting him from the infrared sensors.

They couldn’t detect him.

As long as he didn’t move.

Or blink.

Or breathe.

He lay still, cold mud plastered on his face.

The swarm churned, agitated and frenzied.

Searching.

The able communicated with the disabled, the swarm reconstituting itself with ever greater grace and menace. It flurried out across the testing fields, darted across the parking lot, swooped over the lab building.

Evan lay still. Tried not to breathe. There was no backup plan, no next step. The drones would not tire. They would search until they found him.

The smoke shifted slowly, gauzy strips floating off like clouds. Embedded in the earth, lying stock-still, he felt as if he could sense the planet’s rotation moving him away, out of cover. He wondered if he’d already died; if this was what death felt like.

The mud on his arms, his neck, warmed and crusted. He felt it cracking, curling off his skin. With all the training he possessed, all the control he’d been taught over his anatomy and his mind, the one thing he could not suppress was his body temperature.

Soon enough the warmth of his flesh would become apparent.

There was almost a comfort in the inevitability. The whine of the drone heightened. They were across in the neighboring field, a flock of seagulls searching for prey. Now they dappled the edge of his peripheral vision.

The mask of mud across his face was thin enough that he felt sweat bead through it.

The swarm hesitated directly over him, trembling. He watched it re-form with a horrified awe. It pulled to a tip. Like a snout aiming down.

He’d been spotted.

Nothing left to do.

The swarm gathered itself around the point, readying for a plunge. This was it, then. It was time.

He vowed to face it on his feet.

He pulled himself up, a mud monster, the filth clinging to him, a ghillie suit made of earth. His OCD had shut down, drowned beneath the roar of incoming death, and all the disgust and judgment he carried with him like a shield to keep others at bay were inside him now. They were a part of him and not the world, and he accepted them as his own.

Up above, the dragonflies drew back like an enormous fist.

They tornadoed down at him.

He readied himself.

But all at once there was a ripple in the nosediving swarm, the front half torn away and then the back, sheeting down limply to the earth.

Behind him he heard the growl of a motor, and he swung his concrete-heavy head to see Candy commanding a joint light tactical vehicle.

She was atop the desert-tan JLTV, standing tall behind the gun turret. Bizarrely, her purse wagged from one shoulder, and she was holding something—silver, cylindrical—aloft to the sky like a wizard’s staff.

It took a moment for him to put it together: She’d recharged the portable EMP weapon and used it again to fry the electronics inside the microdrones.