Foxy was wrestling with the controls. Alarms were wailing and lights flashing on the console. “We’re going down. This might be unpleasant.”
McKinney tugged on the pheromone cord. “Don’t land nose-first, if you can help it. We need to preserve the canister.”
He laughed ruefully as they started to spin. “We might be landing in a way that solves all our problems.” He struggled to stop the spin, working the foot pedals, handle, and yoke frantically. “Tail rotor’s going.”
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.
