Kill Decision (53 page)

They continued to spin as they descended, and the collisions with drones only increased. There were several loud bangs.

“Prepare for impact! Prepare for impact!”

The chopper rotated, then slowed, then finally tilted rearward. McKinney could see them descending toward the top of a pile of drone-covered containers. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Then ten feet.

They hit hard, tail first, but the landing surface gave way beneath them. The deafening whine of the drone engines all around them masked even the sound of the crash, and the crumpling of corrugated steel containers. The chopper collapsed partly into a container with its nose facing upward. The blades shattered with a loud snapping sound.

The impact knocked the wind out of her and caused her to lean on the pheromone cord. She struggled to release it, and then fought against gravity as the chopper rolled sideways. Then the copter mostly righted itself again before coming to a rest.

McKinney heard Odin’s voice in the headphones beyond all the howling drone engines.

“Everyone all right?”

McKinney patted her body and checked the area around her for punctures or crash damage, but eventually she nodded. “Bruised, but I’m good. Foxy, okay?”

Foxy nodded as he was switching off the engines and the fuel pumps. “Fine. Turns out we should be happy we only had fuel vapors left. Otherwise I think we’d be on fire.”

Odin spoke into his headset radio. “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual. We’ve landed on the mother ship. Chopper disabled, but crew okay. Moving on foot to objective. Maintain your present course until you get confirmation we’ve succeeded. Out.”

“Copy that, Safari-One-Six.”

Odin pointed at the intact canister bracket still affixed to the nose outside. “Grab the canisters and let’s move.” With one last glance at his companions he opened the copilot’s door and climbed up onto the storage container roof. Foxy did so on the other side, racing forward to unclamp the canister. Odin turned to grab McKinney’s hand and haul her up out of his door, since the rear doors seemed to be blocked by the walls of a shipping container.

In a moment they all stood atop a twenty-story-tall block of containers amid the deafening engine roar, with numberless drones flying, perching, and crawling about them. It was a vast field of seething machines. The bright Pacific sun was partly shrouded by a cloud of drones as well.

Foxy sprayed himself, McKinney, and Odin with pheromone, then looked out on the mass of drones in every direction. He shouted, “Well, that is something you don’t see every day.”

Four hundred feet ahead, across a series of container blocks separated by narrow chasms, loomed the white conning tower and the wide windows of the ship’s bridge. The radar masts there were still rotating, but no human was in sight. There were scorch marks here and there on the metal and all the windows in the control tower were either shattered or missing, twisted windshield wipers dangling.

“We’ll need to jump the gaps. It’s a long way down, so be careful. C’mon.” Odin nodded for them to follow, gingerly stepping over the wing of a dormant ship-cutting drone. McKinney could see its antennas and optic sensors moving to and fro. It was fascinating in a macabre way. Someone had actually breathed life into her work. Another foot-long antlike crawling drone walked across the back of the much larger ship-cutter—on its way somewhere else. It looked like a small crawling wire-cutter. Then she realized there were dozens of the little things wandering around between the bigger drones.

“Professor! This isn’t a goddamned field trip!” Odin tugged her away, and they moved across the seething field of machines to the tower.

Foxy pointed. “Heads up . . .”

McKinney and Odin looked up to see several drones racing back to the colony, microjet engines roaring. They created a visible commotion as they flew through the cloud. Soon a trail of other drones started following them.

And then McKinney saw the collective intelligence of the swarm, as the information, transmitted via pheromone and simple algorithms, manifested itself like a wave. Thousands of drones started taking to the air, leaking upward like liquid into the sky, following their agitated brethren—billowing outward in the direction from which the scouts had come—to the north. Back toward the
Tonsberg,
which was only just now visible on the horizon. The added roar of thousands of drones taking flight caused them all to crouch down and wince.

Odin leaned in and shouted into the headset radio. “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual. Heads up! You have incoming. Repeat: incoming. ETA ten minutes. Do you copy?”

There was a pause, and then Smokey’s voice came over the radio.
“Copy that. How many we looking at?”

McKinney watched the numberless horde rising into the sky.

“The skies will be dark with them. Just hang on as long as you can, and we’ll get the colony ship diverted soon.”

“Copy that. We’ll keep ’em busy.”

*   *   *

S
mokey keyed off
the mic and looked across the hood of the Bentley at Evans, who was pouring another glass of white wine from a bottle with Swedish writing on the label. They stood on the weather deck, the wind from the ship’s twenty-six knots flowing over them.

Evans nodded and looked to the south. He spoke in a dramatic, gravelly voice. “The forces of Mordor gather for the attack.”

“Go easy on that shit, man. We might wind up in the water in a few hours.”

“All the more reason . . .” He emptied his glass and poured another.

Ritter groaned in the backseat of a blue BMW M5 sedan parked next to the Bentley.

Evans looked down at him in annoyance. “How do you like your drones now, asshole?”

Nearby, at the railing, the captain scanned the horizon with his large binoculars.

“I can’t believe what I am seeing.” He lowered the binoculars. “They are coming. Perhaps six thousand meters out.”

“Now you know why we wanted you to evac.” Smokey grabbed an MP5 submachine gun from the car hood and strapped on a combat harness.

Close by, Ripper opened the cab door of her armored yellow front-loader and stowed an HK416 rifle next to the seat.

Evans tossed the wineglass into the wind and took a deep pull directly from the wine bottle.

Smokey grabbed the bottle from him and tossed it overboard as well. “Battle stations, Morty.”

“Oh, nice! Litterbug.”

Mooch raced out onto the deck from the crew quarters. “Radar shows a cloud inbound. We need to get to battle stations.”

“We know.” Ripper pointed to the horizon.

Mooch put a hand on the captain’s shoulder. “So, the captain, Evans, and Ritter will stay in the engine room. It’s safer there, and they can control the ship as well as direct us to hull breeches, fires, or anything else by radio.”

The captain eyed Ritter, sitting handcuffed in the backseat of the BMW. “Who is this man?”

“He works for the people who built the drones—and he might be able to help us find out who they are. So keep him safe.”

Smokey produced the key and unlocked Ritter’s handcuffs. The man barely responded. “Morty! Go with the captain.” He pulled a now staggering Evans over to the BMW’s passenger seat and pushed him in as the captain started the turbocharged engine.

The Swede looked grim. “And what if everything goes wrong?”

“You mean we start to sink? We rally up in the ship’s galley. That’ll be our Alamo. They won’t be taking prisoners.” Smokey gave him a thumbs-up. “Stay in touch by radio, Captain.” Smokey pounded the roof, and the BMW took off down the ramp, screeching through the garage levels.

Mooch, Ripper, and Smokey then stood side by side at the ship’s railing watching the dark, writhing cloud coming toward them from the south, like bad weather.

Ripper checked the action on her pistol. “I don’t know about you guys, but I am really starting to hate these fucking drones.”

Smokey headed back toward the Bentley. “Best we can do is keep them too busy chasing us to cut up the ship. Deck three is the least crowded, so use that for speed. And for godsakes, Ripper, don’t run that shovel into the hull walls below the waterline.”

They ran for their vehicles even as the black cloud grew.

Smokey revved the Bentley. With tires screeching, he fishtailed down the loading ramp into the depths of the ship as the howling of a thousand small jet- and two-stroke engines became a deafening clamor—and the bodies of the drones blotted out the sun.

*   *   *

E
vans sat unsteadily
on a desk chair in front of several computer monitors in the spotless engine control room. He’d expected a dark and noisy place, but there were several sections to the ship’s engine room—the engine itself was the size of a semitruck and occupied a cavernous three-story-tall space crisscrossed by piping, but there were also several smaller auxiliary engines that were idle, banks of large generators, cooling water and fuel pumps, fuel filtration systems, oil and fuel ports. The place was massive.

The captain and Ritter came back into the control room. “You shouldn’t have drank so much. You’re going to be useless.”

Suddenly there was an explosion somewhere, and the deck vibrated.

Evans sat up straight as alarms went off on the control board. “What the hell was that?”

A klaxon sounded and red fire strobes started flashing.

The captain shoved the wheeled chair aside and starting clicking through screens. In a moment he brought up a surveillance camera on one of the monitors. It showed a downward view of the starboard hull near the bow of the ship. As they watched, several small aircraft raced into the frame and “landed” on the hull near the waterline in a shower of sparks, leaving long scars in the orange paint. Even as the first ones came to a stop, a dozen more were already screeching to land next to them—like leeches.

The captain watched, utterly confused.

Evans searched fruitlessly for cigarettes. “They’ve got electromagnetic landing gear, Captain. They’ll stick to your hull like fucking barnacles. And that’s when the fun really begins.”

“Madness. Absolute madness!”

Ritter watched, shaking his head.

On-screen the first arrivals were already sending a shower of sparks into the passing waves as their steel-cutting torches kicked in. Their wing acted as a cowling to cover them as they worked, and they began cutting downward below the waves.

“My God! They’ll gut us like a fish.”

“That’s the general idea.” Evans was still patting his empty pockets for cigarettes.

Suddenly all three men looked up to trace a scraping sound as it passed fast along the hull wall opposite them. It was quickly followed by several more beyond the steel.

The captain clicked through still more control screens. “We have a double hull. It will take them some time to cut through.” He grabbed the radio. “There are numerous drones cutting into the hull below the waterline, and there’s a fire on deck one. Port side, compartment three.”

The sound of gunfire and screeching rubber came in over the radio, along with Smokey’s voice.
“We’ve got our hands full at the moment, Captain!”

*   *   *

M
cKinney stepped carefully
around scurrying wire-cutter drones, and then leapt the eight feet over a ten-story chasm to the last container block separating them from the control tower, which now loomed right above them. She landed next to Odin and Foxy, who caught hold of her to prevent her from tripping on still more winged drones and the hovering, lawn mower–sized quadracopter drones roving about.

They could barely hear each other above the mind-numbing noise of thousands of small engines. She watched as several of the quadracopter drones rubbed past each other, their sensilla antennas brushing together—an exchange of information.

Odin sprayed her and Foxy with more pheromone and leaned in to her ear, shouting, “These quadracopter drones seem to be more aggressive. Unless we keep spraying, they start following us.”

McKinney watched one doing just that. “Those look like larger versions of the human-hunters we faced in Colorado.” She noticed the twin gun barrels bolted into the frame. “These gas masks might not be helping us much. We’re still exhaling. It probably requires a lot of pheromone to overcome the aggression score we’re receiving from our other chemical signatures.”

Odin motioned for them to keep moving. “Then let’s speed up.”

McKinney and Foxy followed toward the edge of the container field over the backs of winged drones.

Odin keyed his radio and shouted, “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual. What’s your status?”

There was a pause, and then the sound of engines roaring and staccato gunfire came in over the radio.
“Our status is that they’re cutting up the ship like we’re not even on it. We’re too busy dealing with the hunter-killers to do anything about the hull-cutters. Fire suppression systems kicked in, and the hull’s penetrated in two places. So far the pumps are keeping up.”
More gunfire.
“How about you? Over.”

Odin looked out to the horizon at the indistinct outline of a ship in the distance. “We need ten more minutes. What’s your current position?”

“About sixteen miles north-northwest of you.”

“If you think the ship can’t make the distance to the
Maersk,
abort and head out of the colony’s territory.”

“So far we’re holding up. But I copy that. Out.”

They reached the end of the container field and looked at the bridge tower across a thirty-foot-wide chasm. McKinney peered over the edge at an eight-story drop to the ship’s deck and a tangle of machinery.

Odin pointed and shouted over the din of the drone engines, “Crew didn’t get a chance to abandon ship.”

McKinney followed his gaze toward the ship’s bright orange free-fall escape boat. It was suspended, angled downward in its launch chute on the starboard side. The boat was easily forty feet long and fully enclosed.