and forth for a while on its rounded aerodynamic shape.
“Carbon fiber mold?”
Odin studied it while McKinney scanned with the detector. She looked up. “That’s not where my readings are coming from.”
“Let’s get this door open. Move clear.” Odin watched as the team took up positions to either side of the loading bay door, and then he pressed a worn button mounted on the wall. With a hum and a rattle the metal door started to ascend. The din of distant blowtorch cutting and diesel winches came to their ears as fresh air blew into the warehouse. Looming a hundred meters away was the rear half of a rusted cargo freighter, standing five stories tall in the water, its near end closed off by corrugated interior bulkheads.
The team moved out onto the debris-strewn beach, weapons ready, and taking different paths around piles of detritus. Inch-thick pieces of rusted steel were everywhere, cut cleanly into squares.
Even with the breeze, McKinney was suddenly getting a hundred and fifty parts per billion of perfluorocarbon-nearly three times what she was getting inside the warehouse. “It’s going up dramatically now…” She ignored the constricting black bag she was wearing and focused on the detector as she walked on sandals across the beach toward the grounded freighter. “It’s coming from the ship.”
Foxy pointed down as they moved across the hard-packed sand. “Strange tracks here, boss.” He nudged a booted foot at what appeared to be striation patterns pounded deeply into the sand.
“Professor, let us take point.” Odin edged ahead of McKinney as he climbed a toppled section of hull as a ramp to get onto the keel of the broken ship. The others were close behind, staring into a dark maw that led into the darkness of the one remaining hold.
McKinney ran her hand along the inch-thick steel edge of the hull. A clean, straight cut. “Doesn’t look like someone did this by hand.” She gestured to the ruler-straight cuts, and then out to the men spraying sparks in the distance as they cut the hulls. Those silhouettes looked far more irregular.
“What do you think, boss?” Foxy inspected the edges. “Ship-cutting drones?”
Odin looked back at them, shining his Maglite into the darkness from the edge of the doorway. “I don’t want us all in the hold at once. Bullets will ricochet off this steel like tennis balls. You guys follow when I give the all- clear.” Odin stuck the duct-taped end of the Maglite into his mouth and moved into the opening.
McKinney watched him go. “Be careful.”
He mumbled something around the flashlight in his mouth, and then disappeared into the blackness.
The rest of the team raised their weapons, watching his light beam scan about in what, judging from the echoing, was a cavernous space.
After a tense minute or so they heard a shout. “Clear! Get in here!”
The team exchanged looks and hurried into the darkness. Foxy and Mooch turned on Maglites of their own. McKinney followed on their heels, and soon she was at the bottom of a huge cargo hold that was partially illuminated by bright shafts of light coming in from a series of holes cut farther up in the hull and the deck overhead. It was easily over a hundred feet to the top, with chains hanging down and water dripping into pools on the rusted steel floor, but the cut patterns in the walls were just as symmetrical as those on the hull outside.
McKinney glanced at the reading on the detector. It was now up to a thousand parts per billion. “Good Lord. Judging from the pheromone readings in here, we’ve entered the colony itself.”
“You mean what was the colony.”
McKinney looked up to see the team assembled around some sort of broken machine the size of a dog lying on its back on the floor. She walked up to them. “What is it?”
Odin and Foxy stepped aside to reveal what looked to be a metal armature-obviously not a complete machine, but the base of one. “Broken. Looks like it has magnetic feet.”
“Careful.”
Odin pointed. “Disassembled-the top’s been taken off. There’s no motor. No circuit boards.”
McKinney leaned close and pulled off her veil to get a better look. The device looked like the articulated legs of a weaver ant on a central frame-with what appeared to be magnetic pads for feet. The upper portion of the machine was missing. She tried to raise it and was surprised it lifted off the metal-and it was lighter than she expected.
Odin examined the pads of the feet, tracing wires that led up the frame. “Electromagnets. They could switch off the magnets on each foot to provide traction and leverage for movement.” He flexed the leg and found it springlike, with plastic rods rooted in place like tendons. “I’ve seen this before. Electroactive polymers. They contract like muscle tissue when subjected to electrical current. No moving parts needed.”
McKinney’s hands came up greasy. She wiped them on her black robe, then ran her hands along four aluminum canisters similar to the pheromone dispensers on the quadracopter drones they had encountered in Colorado-only, these containers were liter-sized. “Look. A similar configuration of four pheromone dispensers.”
“But five times larger.” He gave her a look of recognition for her earlier prediction.
She waved the detector over them, and above one it went up into the tens of thousands of parts per billion. “The mother lode. We should take these with us.”
“Leave the pepper pheromone behind. They’re angry enough already.”
“We should take everything.” She started unscrewing the canisters from the frame. “Why would they bother with this? A ship-based drone colony. I don’t see how these would be better than what we’ve already seen.”
Foxy nodded back behind them. “There was that wing section back there. You think these things fly?”
“A flying ship-cutter.” Odin kicked the device over with his boot. “We’re not seeing the whole picture.” He stared up at the cuts made in the side of the hull-square holes. “Shipbreaking drones.”
McKinney stood. “But why bother with that? Why not simply swarms of drones with bombs or missiles?”
Odin shook his head. “I don’t know. But I do know that swarms of steel-cutting drones could play hell with shipping, radio towers, railroads, and bridges. Someone is building an integrated autonomous war machine, with varying types of drones that can work in concert with each other. Each with a specialized job to do.”
McKinney nodded. “Like the polymorphism that ants exhibit.”
“Right. We need to stop them before that integrated system is complete. We know that a few thousand barrels of those precursor chemicals were shipped here, and now they’re gone-along with just about everything else that was here. And it looks like they loaded it all into shipping containers. Foxy, ask Azeem if he still has a contact in customs in Karachi.”
Foxy nodded.
“Pack up those canisters. We need to find out where those containers went.”
CHAPTER 28
Linda McKinney stood at the bow of the surging workboat as humid tropical air rushed past her. She was happy to be back in Western business casual clothing. Alongside her Odin gazed through binoculars at a row of massive blue loading cranes running in a line that extended halfway across the horizon. The land ahead was essentially a concrete island edged by massive pilings and a black-and-yellow warning strip. The scale of the Chiwan Container Port boggled the mind. Onshore workers looked like specks moving among the multicolored shipping containers that rose like a Lego mountain range as far as the eye could see. Monstrous container ships rested up against the island’s geometric flanks, while high- speed cranes thirty stories tall loaded them like children stacking blocks.
A young Chinese man in a hard hat, rumpled shirt, and slacks stood some ways behind them, chain-smoking near the wheelhouse of the boat. He was looking a little sick as Evans lectured him about something in Chinese- how to avoid seasickness, possibly.
McKinney shouted in the wind to Odin. “Evans knows Chinese?”
“He had business here back in the day.”
“Your other friend doesn’t look like a sailor. Who is he?”
Odin spoke while still scanning the horizon. “Shipping agent. Old smuggling contact. We used to help his
