The missiles were a standard four-by-two array, rear-mounted on a jeep for mobility. Not that the jeep would need to move today, as it wasn’t the target. The focus of this demonstration was at the far end of the airstrip; a cluster of cars, a dozen blue models surrounding a single red one.
A klaxon sounded to signal the start of the final exercise. First the drone carried out some impressive, but standard, high-speed manoeuvres. Everyone knew drones had no onboard pilot by definition, but Sir Terence found it often took an extra moment of enlightenment for non-RAF personnel to truly understand the capabilities made possible by that omission. No pilot meant no concerns about g-forces, oxygen pressure, inertia, or indeed any life support systems whatsoever. It meant the craft could turn on a sixpence, as it was doing now — changing speed, direction, and altitude in ways no human pilot could attempt, much less endure.
But the manoeuvrability display was a minor part of the demonstration. That was for the hardware boys to show off, to prove they could make drones as capable and impressive as anything America had tucked up its sleeve.
The drone righted itself out of a barrel roll, turned, and made its final approach to the airstrip. The jeep lit up as it fired a single ground-to-air missile at the drone, a green-tipped ‘dumb’ rocket that streamed a fuel trail in its wake. The drone easily took evasive action, banking right, and the rocket passed harmlessly by, flying on into oblivion. But two more missiles had already been fired, and these bore white tips — the mark of ‘fire and forget’ self-guiding weapons. The X-4 dodged and weaved through their paths, even as they made their own automatic flight adjustments, slowing and turning to re-seek their target within seconds. But unlike a manned vehicle, the drone could fly just as fast as the missiles, and it soon became obvious they would run out of fuel before catching it.
Of course, that was assuming the remaining five missiles didn’t slow it down first. They fired simultaneously, bathing the jeep in a glow of hot exhaust as a mixture of white and green tips sped toward the drone. One dumb rocket almost winged it, but the X-4 rolled at the last minute, flipping its wing out of the attackers’ flight path while diving to avoid the high path of a self-guided missile. The sky filled with fuel trails, obscuring the view, but this was also part of the demonstration. A human pilot would have been flying blind in the middle of such chaos, but the drone’s ‘eyes’ were made up of dozens of sensors and cameras that ‘saw’ straight through the fog of battle.
Nearing the end of the airstrip, while still taking evasive action from three remaining self-guided missiles, the drone fired its own weapon. A single rocket soared out from under its wing, aiming for the cluster of cars. The red car exploded in a ball of flame, leaving the surrounding blue cars untouched. Bullseye.
The drone continued on, performed a loop, then flew to its landing zone at the far end of the airstrip and came to rest. Behind it, the chasing missiles dropped to earth as the demonstration team aborted them.
An impressed silence fell over the airfield, quickly followed by enthusiastic applause.
Anyone not versed in the project might have thought they were applauding the human pilot controlling the drone from a nearby bunker; that the live fire part of the exercise was another hardware demonstration, to show off the drone’s responsiveness to its remote pilot. But the pilot had done very little. In fact, after the opening aerobatics display, his only action had been to activate the evasive manoeuvre autopilot, and trigger the payload release. The evasive action itself, dodging and weaving to avoid the barrage of missiles, and the corrective targeting required to bullseye the target car while engaged in those manoeuvres, were all calculated by the drone’s own software. It was all part of a new and highly advanced system for which Sir Terence had been assigned responsibility.
Exphoria.
9
Giles had commandeered Briefing Room Eight, one of the smaller ‘Brooms’, for privacy. Bridge followed him inside, and took the seat he indicated for her.
Every Broom was a soundproofed, windowless box, and a baffled signal zone. No cellular, no wifi, no RFID or bluetooth. Even old-fashioned squawkbox walkie-talkies could barely penetrate the walls. The only outside connection was through a computer, housed in a separate secure server room, and accessed solely through a single wired mouse and keyboard placed at the top end of a four-seater conference table. Several wall monitors mirrored the computer’s display, which currently showed a slow, gentle camera pan over verdant green fields. Bridge had come to hate that screensaver after several years of staring at it in various Brooms and departments, but as Giles sat down he made no move to log in to the computer and thereby remove it.
“I have a job for you,” he said.
“I thought you said I wouldn’t need to take notes.”
“This isn’t the briefing. First I need to know if you’re willing to take it on.”
Bridge’s mind raced, trying to figure what analysis subject Giles might think she would potentially shy away from. She was the youngest member of the CTA, but there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen during the past seven years.
The Cyber Threat Analytics unit was Giles Finlay’s concept, created following the 7/7 London bombings. At the time he was a young, recently-promoted SIS ops controller, with an old school friend among those killed on the Russell Square tube-train explosion. Although the attack itself was on home soil, making it MI5’s jurisdiction, Giles argued the security services had been left behind when it came to digital communications, especially terror co-ordination through private ad hoc networks and encrypted consumer channels. GCHQ did the
