But Monica had said the patterns indicated he was controlling them directly. Both things couldn’t be true.
“Shit,” Bridge cried out, making the police sergeant look in. She shooed him away, typing furiously. “It’s not over,” she said to the chatroom. “Hang on, I’m scanning again now…there, four of them.” Four more signal destinations on the same ultra-high frequency, this time with no high bandwidth side-stream of data. “I think those first drones were regular explosives, not the RDDs. Their job was to blow out the windows, and make holes for this second wave to fly through. These are the drones with the radioactive material.”
“But how are they flying?” asked Steve. “Giles shut down Bowman’s laptop. And if they’re autonomous, how could he be sure they’d make it through the broken windows?”
“Because that’s what this was about all along. They’re autonomous, self-guiding, error-correcting. They compensate for obstacles, re-target accordingly…this is the Exphoria code in action.”
The chatroom fell silent as everyone digested the implications. Then Ciaran said, “Isolate and add them to the target list. The package will swamp them, too.”
“The botnet’s not big enough,” said Monica. “It’ll distribute agent resources equally, and we saw how long it took to shut down the first drones.”
“Monica’s right,” said Bridge. “I’m going to redirect the whole botnet away from the first wave. Hit this second wave head on, with the full force.”
“Whoa, there,” said Steve, “we don’t know what the first drones will do when you let them loose. They might continue straight into the building and explode.”
“Or they might just drop on my head and explode,” muttered Bridge, “but that’s got to be better than letting an RDD through, right?”
“What if you’re wrong? What if that first wave was carrying the dirty bombs, after all, and you have two unexploded RDDs above your head?”
Bridge took a deep breath. “I know it’s a hunch, but this is a classic setup. You set off a small bomb to get everyone’s attention, and then you set off a big one in the same place to take out all the people who come running to look. This has to be Bowman’s plan. It just…it has to be.” She imagined Andrea’s voice whispering “Quasi,” and realised she was trying to convince herself as much as the others, because there was no time for second-guessing. She couldn’t see or hear the new drones overhead, but it was now thirty seconds since they’d appeared in range. If they were designed to catch the party while people were still reeling from the explosions, they could hit the Shard at any moment.
She half-stepped out of the police car, and called to the fire watch commander. Of the three fire engines that had attended the scene, one crew had entered the building after the first explosion, while the police began evacuating everyone inside. The firemen who’d remained outside were now raising ladders to reach the hovering drones. Bridge craned her neck to see, but couldn’t make them out against the night sky.
The watch commander jogged over, followed by the police sergeant. “Right old mess, this, ma’am,” said the policeman. “What can we do for you?”
She turned to the fireman. “How close are your ladder men?”
“We’re getting there, ma’am,” he said. Every man here was willing to follow Bridge’s orders, but not a single one would stop calling her ma’am. “Rotation positioning is delicate when you get that high up. But we’ll get them down safely, so long as they don’t fall first.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” said Bridge. “They might be about to do just that. How long?” The watch commander nodded and held a brief radio conversation with each of the fire squads operating and climbing the rotating ladders. The consensus was about two minutes. “Too long,” said Bridge. “You’ve got thirty seconds, and then you’d better be ready to catch them.”
Bridge climbed back inside the car and started typing. “Diverting in thirty seconds,” she said to the chatroom. “Cross every digit and limb you’ve got.”
The police sergeant leaned in. “Dare I ask?”
“Best not,” Bridge shrugged. “Then you can tell everyone you had no idea what the mad woman who blew up London was doing.”
“Oh,” he said, looking up at the fire ladders. “Happy days, then.”
She entered the command to turn the MaXrIoT botnet on the new drones, and hit Enter.
One second later, three million requests hit the second wave of drones. Bridge crossed her fingers and waited.
Five seconds later, she heard a fireman call out, “Ladder one, capture achieved. Returning now.”
Seven seconds later, the remaining first wave drone careered into the Shard ten floors down from the party venue and exploded on impact, showering more glass over the road. Bridge strained to see the fireman up ladder two, who’d been closest. He was still there, and she hoped he was OK.
Ten seconds later, straining her neck to see up, she thought she saw a couple of dark spots move across the sky, toward the windows.
Thirteen seconds later, Andrea called her phone and said, “What the hell just happened? The last drones dropped out of the sky, and now there’s a new bunch hovering twenty metres outside the windows up here. What did you do?”
Bridge laughed with relief. The botnet had neutralised the second wave before it reached the target. “I think,” she said carefully, “that we won. But the firemen might need some fishing nets.”
She climbed out of the police car to stretch her limbs, and massaged the back of her neck. It was cool to the touch.
When Giles returned to the Shard, the clean-up was in full flow. Andrea was co-ordinating debriefings from the back of an ambulance, assigning officers to watch over certain attendees, and making sure Sir Terence Cavendish went directly to a secure hotel suite where his family would be
