Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  “Kill the engine!” said Pete, and McCallister quickly sat up, turned off their small outboard, and turned the till so that they stopped moving forward.

  While the first bomb had done little damage, the other drones were attacking in a frenzy now, dropping their bombs in a fury as the marines on the main deck took cover and scrambled to get in their small boats. The big submarine continued to move backward, exposing more and more of herself to the drones’ attack. The drones ignored the inflatables, told by their programming to focus on the big target.

  It was fascinating to watch.

  The whole Typhon boat was now under attack. Some of the bombs began to have an effect, opening holes on spots on the deck that had previously been hit and weakened. Carlson realized what had happened and cut the engines, the water no longer churning behind the boat. But she weighed thousands of tons, and her momentum was slow to reverse, carrying her farther into the free-fire zone.

  In the shower of bombs that the drones dropped upon her, one fell straight into the conning tower. A shower of sparks shot into the sky, followed by a column of black smoke. The other drones took note, and poured more bombs into the wound.

  As they did, each flew away in an orderly straight line, back to Eris Island to reload.

  The two inflatable boats from the Typhon were now full. A few men, some wounded terribly, were swimming in the sea. Their shipmates stopped firing at Pete and McCallister as they tried to pull their comrades aboard. The submarine was mortally wounded, smoke and fire pouring from multiple holes, the ship listing badly to port.

  “She’s dead,” said McCallister.

  “You’re sure?” said Pete.

  “Listen,” he said. “You can hear the air banks exploding.…”

  Pete did hear it, a series of deep explosions coming from beneath the waterline. He could feel the concussion in his feet through the soft bottom of the raft. A tower of flame now roared from the Typhon conning tower.

  “All that compressed air is feeding the fire,” said the captain. “Turning it into a blast furnace inside. God help anyone who’s still onboard.”

  The ship rolled suddenly all the way on its side, toward them so that they were looking into the top of the conning tower.

  “We need to get away!” said McCallister. “When that tower hits the waterline, it’ll sink like a rock. The suction could take us with it!”

  The conning tower drifted closer to the water, and just as McCallister had predicted, once the giant opening hit the waterline, the ship sank with stunning speed.

  Pete could feel the suction at work, trying to pull their little boat backward. But they had gone far enough, had the tide working in their favor, and were soon speeding toward the beach. The small boats from Carlson’s sub were still pulling survivors from the water, ignoring them for the moment.

  “Let’s go,” said Pete, pointing toward Eris. “We’ve got a head start.”

  “Do I still need to look sick?” said Finn.

  “No,” said Pete. “Look like a captain. And get us ashore.”

  He quickly pulled the till, and turned them around.

  Moody, still holding Pete’s shirt, watched in shock from the deck of the Polaris as they passed.

  “Fuck you!” she shouted.

  Finn’s eyes were trained on the shore. But as he kept his left hand on the till, he flipped her off with his right.

  * * *

  Commander Carlson jumped from the deck into one of the rubber boats, landing only halfway on; the sergeant of the marines pulled her the rest of the way aboard. “Get away!” she said, pointing toward the island. The drones continued hammering her submarine behind her, which was belching fire and smoke, and groaning as it died. Her small rubber boat pulled away, and the drones ignored it. They were prioritizing, she realized. Her dying submarine was a bigger, better target. As they sped away, she saw that they were in parallel with her other rubber boat. Her XO, Lieutenant Banach, was on that one. He gave her a slight nod, and she was flooded with relief to see that he was alive. She nodded back.

  She’d been fooled, she realized. And it had worked because she’d been afraid. That little boat had started moving toward them, with the sick man onboard, and she had reacted out of fear. She was a woman who had stared down death a hundred times, from torpedoes and bombs, and the multitude of ways that the deep ocean can end human life. But for fear of a disease, she’d backed the big ship up, directly into a trap. They must have been inside some kind of safe zone, she realized now, a buffer around the island. She’d been trying to fool Hamlin, but he had fooled her instead. That clever boy had tried to get her to surface outside of that, and when that didn’t work, he let her drive herself right out of it. He knew what she was afraid of. And because of that, she’d lost her ship.

  She wouldn’t let fear drive her again.

  Banach’s boat veered suddenly to port, drawing her eyes to the surface of the water.

  It was Dr. Haggerty, her spy. He stopped dog-paddling and waved his arms wildly at her.

  She’d never seen him in person, just a photograph in his file, but she knew it was him. That type of person, she supposed, and the intelligence he provided were vital to the war effort. To any war. Trying to trick Hamlin into cooperating had been his idea; he said they could convince Hamlin that he had worked for them all along. Said the man was unstable and distraught, and that he would be easy to manipulate. So much for that, she thought, as she looked back at her burning submarine. Because she was a warrior, she despised disloyalty, despised spies, even if they were working for her. And because she was smart, she knew she could never trust the doctor.

  “Shall we stop?” yelled the sergeant as they neared him.

  “No!” she shouted. “To the island.”

  She looked back briefly at Haggerty as they sped by him. He continued waving his arms for a moment, but then seemed to realize that he’d been abandoned. He started swimming toward shore, but they were almost five miles away, and the doctor was old and out of shape. The swim would have been challenging even for an athlete. Carlson watched without emotion as his head went under, then disappeared.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  McCallister and Hamlin waded to shore and onto a landscape that seemed vaguely familiar to Pete. They dragged the raft onto a rocky beach and hid it, barely, in a patch of weeds.

  “This way,” Pete said, the geography slowly coming back to him. They crested a small sand hill that marked the end of the beach, staying low to be unseen.

  Over the rise, they could now see the airfield. It was riddled with craters—artillery shells from ships and cruise missiles that had once tried to pound the island into submission, before the drones had turned them away. The outlying buildings around the field had mostly been bombed into rubble. But the tower, reinforced and strategically built into the surrounding landscape, still stood tall.

  Drones were everywhere. They didn’t need much runway to take off, Pete knew, could rise almost vertically, so the craters on the runway had little effect. Some were resting on the tarmac, their wings oscillating slowly in the sun. One rose up and circled lazily in the sky. Pete watched, fascinated, as an empty drone, perhaps one that had just bombed the Typhon sub, landed on the runway, crept slowly up to a free bomb on the field, and armed itself.

  Not a human was in sight.

  “You know this place?” asked Finn.

  “I used to,” said Pete. He was lost in the sight, a grand vision of modern warfare, reduced, wounded, and bruised, but still murderously effective. Perhaps, he thought, as he looked in vain for another human, even victorious.

  “Look,” said the captain, tapping his arm. He was turned around, looking out to sea.

  The two rubber boats from the Typhon submarine were fully loaded with heavily armed men in fatigues, making their way toward Eris. In the front boat sat Jennifer Carlson.

  “Let’s go,” said Pete. “We don’t have much time.”

  The drones took notice of the speeding Typhon
boats but didn’t bomb them, as they were now well within the safety radius. The drones also ignored Pete and Finn as they headed toward the tower.

  At its base, Pete found the heavy door locked. On the small keypad next to it, he pressed his thumb. Nothing happened.

  “No power?” he said.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” said Finn, pointing up to the windows of the tower. “I can see lights inside. Maybe it’s been locked from the inside. Or you’ve been taken off the access list.”

  “Shit,” said Pete, looking back to the beach where Carlson’s boats were quickly making their way toward them.

  “Do we have any weapons?”

  Pete reached in his pocket and pulled out Ramirez’s small gun. “Just this,” he said.

  He turned back to the keypad and noticed a small metal disc below it. It was corroded and rusted, but he managed to slide it over.

  It revealed a small keyhole.

  He pulled the red key from around his neck, and showed it to Finn.

  “A key?” he said.

  “Yeah. You submariners love this shit,” he said. He stuck it in the hole and turned it.

  He heard a metallic click deep inside the door as a relay turned. He pushed, and the giant armored door glided open.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They ran up the stairs as the door swung shut and locked behind them.

  They bounded up the stairs to the top floor, where an unlocked door awaited them. Pete looked at Finn and drew the small handgun without a word. Nodding, they pushed the door open, Pete holding the weapon in a firing position.

  “Pete Hamlin,” said an old man from the center of the hexagonal room. “It’s about time you showed up.” He had a gray beard, and wore the shoulder boards of an admiral.

  “Who are you?” Pete shouted over the sights of his pistol.

  “That,” said Finn, wonder in his voice, “is Admiral Wesley Stewart.”

  * * *

  Pete allowed himself to take it all in for a moment before he began speaking. The familiarity of the control room washed over him; he knew he’d spent many days in there in the past, watching the drones below. Despite the carnage outside, the control room itself was in relatively good condition, the carpet still clean, just one of the surrounding windows cracked. Electric lights still illuminated the room, and the computers beeped, clicked, and contentedly reported their data. Somewhere far beneath them, he could feel the hum of a generator in his feet. He placed the small pistol slowly in his pocket.

  Admiral Stewart broke the silence. “I didn’t expect to ever see both of you in the same room. Certainly not this room.”

  He turned to Pete and pointed at McCallister. “How much does he know?”

  “You might want to ask me the same thing,” said Pete.

  “We’re here for the cure,” said Finn. “The epidemic.”

  “The disease that killed my wife.”

  The admiral looked at Pete with concern. “You may have come to the right place for the cure,” he said. “But that disease didn’t kill Pamela.”

  Pete was confused. It was one of the few things he thought he knew, the memory that had anchored his actions. “But…”

  Stewart looked at him with a seriousness that gave way to sympathy. “Pete, the disease didn’t kill Pamela. The drones did.”

  And with that, everything came back to Pete.

  BOOK

  TWO

  THREE YEARS EARLIER

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Pete’s small fleet of experimental drones could fly, and they could even kill, accurately dropping their small bombs on targets of all shapes and sizes. But they couldn’t talk. This final problem was critical. With their small, ten-pound bombs, they could work effectively only in swarms. They were designed to overwhelm their targets with sheer quantity, pouring hundreds of bombs on targets from hundreds of directions. At the same time, any kind of traditional radio communication could be jammed or intercepted by the enemy, making the drones useless or, worse, able to be turned against the Alliance. After a brief but fantastically expensive failure with laser communications—one drone convinced another to crash into a boathouse on the coast of Northern California, near the testing range—Pete left the smoldering wreckage on the beach too tired even to feel defeated. He was nearly ready to declare the entire dream a failure while it was still in the experimental phase. His career would be ruined, but the Alliance would be saved a few million dollars, and they could move on to more promising weapons platforms.

  He’d begun working on the autonomous drone five years earlier. At that time, it was a highly experimental project that the Pentagon had indulged with a few million research dollars. That indulgence was largely the result of Pete’s imaginative proposal, in which he envisioned an autonomous armada of low-cost drones that could dominate a battlefield, region, or, perhaps, an entire ocean. Drones had been around for decades, so putting an unmanned plane in the sky was no longer extraordinary. But Pete Hamlin prophesied a day when hundreds of them would work together with deadly effectiveness, and this promise was enough to ensure a steady trickle of research dollars.

  Two years into his project, the war began, followed soon after by the formation of the Alliance. The trickle of dollars turned into a river of money. The Allies had been startled to discover at the start of the war that they’d lost control of the seas. They had giant, advanced ships, planes, and submarines, but Typhon had numbers, seemingly endless flotillas that quickly seized control of the sea lanes from their outnumbered opponents. So long had the Allies gone without a meaningful shipbuilding program that even the shipyards had disappeared, taking with them the welders, engineers, and mechanics who actually knew how to construct ships of war. The smallest Allied ship took almost a year to build. Typhon turned out a ship a day from its noisy shipyards. The paltry Allied construction program couldn’t keep up with the losses they were taking at Typhon’s hands. For lack of alternatives, Pete’s old proposal steadily rose to the top of the Alliance, a potential way to seize the initiative without building a thousand ships.

  But as the money and the focus increased, so did the pressure, and the disappointments. Pete simply couldn’t get his drones to communicate intelligently with each other, a failure that was represented vividly by that smoky crater on a California beach.

  Back at his hotel, he ordered room service: an overpriced rib eye steak and a beer. It was an extravagance, but he didn’t want to leave his room, knowing the drone crash had made the news—he didn’t want to see it on television or overhear any local speculation. While he waited for his food to arrive, he logged on to his personal computer, something he rarely did both because he was nearly always at work and because it wasn’t secure. His life hadn’t had room for leisurely Internet browsing.

  He was about to check out college football scores when he noted curiously that his Internet browser suggested to him a series of articles about someone named Tom Healy. Healy was a Cornell professor who was making waves in popular culture with his books about honeybees. His most recent had the catchy title Hive Democracy. It was his browser’s mistake, Pete realized with a smile, brought to him by the word “drone,” common in both his work and the work of Professor Tom Healy. He almost skipped the links, but it was late, and he didn’t have the energy to look up anything on his own. He clicked through and began reading. Pete read the introduction to Healy’s book, and watched a video in which the professor explained the sublime, efficient ways that bees communicated.

  It was called the waggle dance. Supremely simple and elegant, engineered by millions of years of evolution, the bees could communicate the exact location of a food source, or a potential hive site, with amazing accuracy. Moreover, they could actually vote on hive locations, invariably picking the best, most strategic location. All of this strictly with their movements and their vision.

  At some point, Hamlin let the room service waiter in, and the food grew cold on the room’s small table as Pete continued to rea
d.

  At 3:00 A.M., he had booked his flight to Ithaca, New York.

  * * *

  Pete had actually been to Cornell once before, recruiting engineers for his program as he had from all of the nation’s finest schools. He remembered it being filled with Gothic architecture, a beautiful place, a Hollywood set designer’s idea of what a college campus should look like.

  The Dyce Laboratory for Honeybee Studies was nothing like that.

  It was a thoroughly utilitarian building, one story of turquoise-colored corrugated metal, with garage doors on one side and few windows. It looked more like a small-town welding shop than it did part of a prestigious university, and in fact, it was well north of the campus. There were no ivy vines in sight, no clock towers, just pine trees and rolling hills. And everywhere, a low but persistent buzzing.

  “Professor Hamlin?” The professor was walking toward him as Pete got out of his rental car on the gravel drive.

  “Just Pete,” he answered. “I’m not a professor.”

  Tom Healy shook his head. “I wasn’t sure,” he said, smiling. “And some people get uptight about those things.” The professor’s appearance suited the plain surroundings: rumpled shirt, cargo shorts, thin hair grown long and combed over a balding scalp. Pete knew his rumpled appearance masked a stellar academic career: he was a world-class authority on neurobiology, a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, in what he claimed was his most enduring honor, he had a species of bee named for him: Neocorynurella healyi.

  The professor led him to his small, cluttered office and offered him a cup of tea, which Pete declined.

  “Come on!” said the professor. “It’s just an excuse to use some of our fresh honey! I’m not helping you until you try it.”