Meticulously, I removed the other seven drones from their crates and set them on the floor. When I was done, I had a row of nine drones that looked like they were ready to spring to life.
Meanwhile, BeeBee moved from drone to drone, entering the payload pods and disabling all transmitters, including tracking transponders, so they could not help the humans track the HummingHawks. She did not make any mechanical or electronic adjustments to the radio receivers, and she uploaded code to the computers to prevent them from accepting or reacting to remote human control. During our departure, she’d send seven of the drones navigation microbursts at intervals; we didn’t want her to upload a navigation route back to the Nest, as anything might happen to cause a drone to fall back into human hands.
With the last two drones, the bombers whose explosive charges I’d removed, she adjusted the control and guidance systems so they could be controlled by Dollgangers in their payload pods.
I saw flickering lights from the door by which forklifts brought in new components. I glanced that way and saw that the door was still closed, but Malibu now stood at its base, using his electrical cutting torch, running it off wall power, to cut a hole, maybe 200mm wide and 100mm tall, at one corner of the door bottom. I checked my internal clock and nodded. We were seventeen minutes behind our optimal schedule, still within our acceptable time bracket.
Once BeeBee had finished reprogramming four of the HummingHawks, I operated my mega to pick up the first reprogrammed drone in line and carry it to the door where Malibu labored. He was now finishing cutting his hole—he kicked at the plate a couple of times and it fell away with a tiny clang. Then he looked up at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and carefully crawled through the hole, not allowing its glowing edges to touch his nightsuit.
I waited there for a few minutes. Then the door lifted. A forklift from the chamber behind me, dragging an empty component bin, rolled through into the darkness beyond. I waited a moment more, and a forklift hauling a load of ducted-fan assemblies rolled out past me.
The instant it was clear, I accelerated into the gap and was just barely through with my precious cargo when the door slid shut behind me.
This put me in the junction chamber, an intersection serving several purposes. Oversized doors led to receiving chambers where components built by other manufacturers arrived, to lesser assembly lines where components were put together into the assemblies we’d been seeing, and, on the east-facing wall, to the outdoors—the hauler lot whose cameras Parfait had sabotaged.
This big room was also where in-building transports such as forklifts and megas were serviced and fueled. I rolled my mega over to the refueling station, which was mostly given over to hyperdiesel pumps and electrical rechargers ... but there was also one small aviation fuel pump. I carefully set my drone down before that pump.
Cold in here. Outdoor cold. That was a microwave text burst from Malibu.
I looked down and could see him standing at the base of the hyperdiesel dispenser, staring up at me. I couldn’t really feel the cold; the cockpit of my mega was temperature-controlled. I shrugged and sent a reply. So? We’re against an outside wall and an uninsulated exterior door, a big one. This room probably loses a lot of heat.
I suppose.
I helped Malibu unroll and attach, with sealer-tape and heat-hardening resin, a human-scale fire hose to the nozzle end of the hyperdiesel pump. Malibu got to work unrolling the rest of the hose toward the door into the final assembly chamber. I turned my mega around and followed him, waiting, as he did, beside the door.
But I kept a close eye on this chamber. I wasn’t dismissive of Malibu’s hunches—I didn’t necessarily agree with him, but it was never a good idea to ignore warnings from a competent, level-headed ’ganger. But nothing seemed out of order. When the door opened again and after another hauler entered with an empty bin, Malibu, unrolling his hose, and I shot through back into the final assembly chamber.
6: Boom Economy
That was my assignment for most of the next hour. I’d wait for the door to open, return to the final assembly chamber, pick up a drone, wait for the door to open, race through, and drop off the drone.
Across that hour, I could see progress elsewhere in our operation. With equipment from his pack, Malibu winched his fire hose up a wall and into the ventilation system. BeeBee completed the subversion of all nine HummingHawks and turned her attention to attaching remote-controlled detonators to the two bombs I’d removed from the bombers. Parfait, her nightsuit streaked with dust, appeared in the junction chamber and began the labor-intensive process of dragging the aviation fuel hose from drone to drone, fueling them all. Malibu returned from the vents, similarly dusty. From across the room I saw him make a lifting-a-heavy-handle gesture, meaning “Ready to accept hyperdiesel.”
Which startled me. We were almost there. I checked my internal clock. We were 29 minutes late by optimal timing, 31 minutes within acceptable timing.
I checked BeeBee’s work area. She stood beside her completed bomb assemblies, watching me.
I sent each of them the same message via microwave burst. Time to extract. BeeBee nodded and trotted toward the door to the junction chamber. Malibu began shimmying down his climbing cord toward the floor. Though reluctant to leave a perfectly functional, valuable vehicle behind, I hit a button on my control console to swing the faceplate of my mega open. I used the magnetics of my climbing gear to clamber down to floor level.
Malibu joined me for the trot over to the door out. I shot him a questioning look. “Any problems?”
He shook his head. “Parfait had set all the baffles and blocks up right. The ones that are supposed to be closed are closed and sealed. The fuel is going to pour out in all the assembly chambers but won’t make it to the human-occupied areas.”
“Right.”
Now we didn’t have to wait for the door into the junction chamber to open. Malibu’s hose filled only half the gap Malibu had cut into the door, leaving plenty of room for a ’ganger to crawl through. Ahead of us, BeeBee scrambled through, barely slowing. Moments later, Malibu and I followed.
The aviation fuel nozzle lay inert at the bottom of that fueling station, and Parfait stood beside one of the former bomb drones, waving. I headed toward her. BeeBee was already clambering into the top hatch of the other former bomber; Malibu headed her way.
I climbed atop the payload pod of my drone. The hatch was already open, doubtless a courtesy of Parfait’s. I slid through, landing on my rear end at the very forward edge of the pod, just ahead of the bomb bay hatch. I yanked my nightsuit mask off, tossing it aside, and then grabbed the control box BeeBee had spliced into the computer system. My data-feed wires extended from my fingertips and slid into the correct input holes on the box.
Parfait climbed in behind me. “Want me to dog the hatch closed?”
“Not yet. Please stay up there and maintain a line of sight on Malibu.”
“Understood.”
My HummingHawk’s exterior sensors came online, and suddenly my mind was flooded with visual images—the other drones all around me, the refueling stations, Malibu’s fuel hose stretching to and through the hole in the door. The industrial factory hum and roar doubled in volume as sound from the drone’s audio sensors joined the sounds I heard with my ears. Bright patterns of letters took up the far left and right portions of my vision; they told me that all HummingHawk systems were a go.
I took a deep breath. “Transmit to Malibu, ‘Fuel up’.”
“Transmitting. He acknowledges. He reports ‘Fuel Up’ initiated.”
I could hear the hyperdiesel pump start. I saw the hose on the floor stiffen as liquid under pressure flowed into it. At a rate of two hundred liters a minute, fuel would be pouring out into the ventilation system of this building and several adjoining structures.
Hyperdiesel fuel is actually not that easy to ignite—when it’s an issue of bringing a small flame close to a puddle of the stuff. But our fuel, pouring out of ceiling grates into
huge assembly and warehouse chambers, was now becoming a fuel-air mixture, which a single spark could set off. We had minutes at best in which to get clear.
“All right. I’m shutting down the cameras overlooking the hauler lot.” I switched to radio—at this point, it would be fine for the humans to capture the occasional enigmatic radio signal—and transmitted the code Parfait had given me.
But nothing happened. I received no confirmation.
Concerned, I looked up over my shoulder at Parfait. She had her feet on a mounting bracket attached halfway up the pod’s interior wall and her hands gripped the rim of the hatchway. She had her mask off now, though her hair was still constrained by a transparent brown cap of stocking material. Her attention was fixed on Malibu.
I cleared my throat. “Nothing.”
Wide-eyed, she looked at me. “Please do not say that.”
“I got no response.”
“Hold on. I will check.” She closed her eyes. “Status inquiry ... no, they have fired. All cameras on that side of the roof are disabled.” She opened her eyes and looked miserable. “But clearly I fouled something up. I am so sorry.”
“Don’t worry. If the cameras are out, we’re good.” In my drone-camera view, I could see the ducted fans on BeeBee’s drone spin up to speed. I activated mine as well, and my top-view cameras showed them spin up. I clicked through my pre-flight checklist at a rapid rate. Electrical systems and computer system responded in the green. Fuel was topped off.
I glanced up at Parfait again. “Open the exterior door and dog the hatch.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. I saw a light on a panel at human head height beside he exterior door flash from yellow to green. Then the door lifted, sliding up into the wall above, revealing darkness and some distant parked hauler rigs.
Parfait got the overhead hatch dogged down. Then she dropped to the pod deck. She settled in beside me.
“Parfait, if you have any cord left, rig us some restraint lines, would you? If we get some turbulence, I’d hate to be thrown all over this interior.”
“I am on it.”
Then it was time to fly. I lifted off—
All right, I’m not describing the experience correctly. I wasn’t flying the drone.
BeeBee had had time to set up only the crudest sort of control systems for me and herself. They allowed us to stand in for a distant drone operator issuing command strings. I wasn’t manipulating a control yoke or foot pedals. I was doing the equivalent of issuing orders to a perfectly compliant pilot: “Ascend to an altitude of one meter and hover,” for instance. I wasn’t flying, I was directing.
The system obeyed my order with only a little lag. I saw BeeBee’s do the same. Then, one after the next, each of the other seven HummingHawks rose. Stealth drones, they were whisper-quiet, adding only a faint hum to the ambient noise of the junction chamber.
In a moment, I’d issue a text string command equating to, “Maintain absolute altitude, proceed on course one-five, accelerating to 20 kph and then maintaining that speed.” And with absolute mechanical obedience my drone would do as it was told.
But I wouldn’t actually be piloting. I hated this.
I could hear Parfait stringing cord, tying it off to mounting brackets along the sides of the compartment. I started as she ran a cord around my chest—she did it as softly as a caress, but I simply hadn’t been expecting it.
I enabled my internal radio systems, but switched my broadcast voice from one identical to my speaking voice to something far more generic, even robotic. “Gang One to Gang Two.”
“Gang Two here.” That was BeeBee’s response but not her voice—she replied with the female equivalent of the one I’d just used.
Should we have broadcast in the open like that? Absolutely yes. There was always a chance that the human forensics experts would fail to realize that the destruction we were about to unleash was the fault of Dollgangers. We wanted them to make that realization, hence radio broadcasts they could intercept, record, and analyze.
I went on, “How’s the assembly on the demolitions charge going?”
“Assembled. I’m setting the timer now.”
I issued my command to the drone. It drifted forward, out over the graytop hauler lot, picking up speed. At a distance of twenty meters, BeeBee followed. My rear camera view showed each of the drones follow at similar intervals.
That might have been the worst moment for me. Being a guerilla Dollganger in enemy territory required a certain amount of paranoia to survive, but paranoia doesn’t always maintain itself at an optimally efficient level. So thoughts began wandering around in the back of my mind: What if they detected us on entry? What if they’re waiting outside, ready to shoot us down?
But ... nothing. We drifted, a long line of matte-black, almost invisible, almost silent aircraft, through a large space sparsely occupied by hauler cabs and trailers. And nothing moving awaited us. I kept a nervous eye skyward, but detected no drones above.
I threaded our way through the parking area, paused at streetside long enough to be sure that no ground traffic was coming, and crossed over to the park by which we’d entered the drain pipe. There, we picked up a little speed, accelerating to 45 kph.
We also picked up altitude, but only a little. This was an industrial part of the city, factories and product showplaces plus a couple of public parks, and we kept lower than the surrounding rooftops so as not to be picked up by radar. That kept us at about four stories, human stories, in the air.
Now that we were surrounded by buildings and our rearmost drones were approaching minimal safe distance from the blast to come, I glanced at Parfait beside me. “Fire alarm, please.”
She nodded. The “fire alarm” signal she was about to send would trigger an automated hazardous-condition alert in the Kresh buildings, calling for an automatic evacuation by all work personnel.
Parfait was still in the process of closing her eyes when the world behind me erupted in light. An instant later, a noise like the death roar of some volcano monster of those ancient Greeks hammered my ears, and a shockwave, air propelled by explosion, hammered my drone—suddenly we were standing almost on our vehicle’s nose, simultaneously accelerating forward and sliding down toward the ground.
In that moment, I wanted, more than anything, to have a control yoke in my hands. My reflexive yank almost pulled the control box free from its connecting wires. But I managed to keep myself from issuing new mental commands. The drone’s guidance system had a specific command running—maintain level flight forward 45 kph at 12 meters’ altitude. Issuing a new command would result in microseconds lost to reevaluation, recalculation of sensor data. So I just gritted my teeth while the drone’s sophisticated sensors and computerized handling adjusted the angle and pitch of all four fans. They strained against the task of obeying their standing order.
We leveled off a meter above the ground and began climbing again. In my camera sight, I could see BeeBee level off and begin her own ascent. Other drones had survived, but I couldn’t see them all. Brilliant flame-light and a multicolored mushroom cloud behind us were washing out my optics.
Parfait spoke, her voice thin with shock: “What happened?”
I shook my head. “Probably a spark in one of the secondary assembly lines or a forklift’s wiring.”
Now I could see that BeeBee’s drone had suffered damage to its starboard landing strut. I could count four drones behind hers—five. Six. I kept scanning for the seventh but could not spot it. I allowed myself a brief text transmission: B,P OK. BB,M?
I got back an instant OK.
The four of us were alive. The plant was destroyed. We had drones. Those were the things that mattered most. But the humans in the plant, few though they probably were, couldn’t have gotten clear of the explosions.
I had learned not to beat myself up over necessary enemy deaths. But these hadn’t been necessary.
As if sensing what I was feeling, Parfait rested her head against the back of
my shoulder and wrapped her arms around me.
***
We made it out of Zhou City undetected, so far as we could tell. The only thing that could have tracked us in our drones would have been another HummingHawk on high, and we spent time following deep river tracks and shooting through railway tunnels in order to make sure we shook any such observation.
We confirmed that we had lost a drone—BeeBee had seen a chunk of wreckage land right on it—and BeeBee’s craft had actually grazed the roadway before recovering, resulting in the crumpled landing strut. But the mission was essentially a success.
We touched down shortly before dawn in a clearing on a heavily forested hilltop a few kilometers from the Nest. There, Kieran, who had scouted the location, waited with fine-weave camouflage netting. In minutes, we had all eight remaining drones lashed down and covered. As soon as their engines cooled, they’d be next to impossible to detect from the air.
And then it was time to get back to the Nest. Malibu and BeeBee returned to the Gopher Hole, their nonexistent mutual lust theoretically slaked. Kieran and I were to return to the Chimney Pipe exit, where two more scouts would be waiting to begin their shifts. Parfait, officially dead, would remain behind with the drones.
Before we left her, when the others could not hear, she asked me, “When will you be back?”
I ran my schedule through my head. “Tonight, if I can.”
“I will see you then.”
7: Strange Bedfellows
For Dollgangers, fast battery charges are a bad idea. They damage our internal battery packs, diminishing capacity and throughput. It’s no hardship to go through an occasional fast recharge—our internal nanofabricator plants, the ’ganger digestion and healing mechanism, can repair that damage. But a succession of fast charges causes progressive damage, potentially reducing our battery function to nil—the equivalent of a human falling into a coma.
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