“So, you can see, our teams are fielding some pretty impressive drones,” Cade said, covering his nervousness, but not perfectly.
We were watching live feeds from a trio of production drones that were following the new Drone Wars teams as they sent their highly customized, self-built combat drones into the Zone.
I had, with nothing else to do on my daily schedule, watched most of the daily episodes up to this point, so I was already familiar with all the teams. It had been interesting to see what smart amateurs had built to send in against military bots, and I had noted that the newer model units were racking up a decent kill count against the older Zone units. But each swarm of team drones was being run by inexperienced amateurs, both live humans and AIs.
“Yeah, pretty cool designs,” I said.
“I sense a but in your sentence,” Cade said.
“Well, this has been tried before. The military did it right after the walls went up around Manhattan. Then the Zone drones adapted quickly and started to eat the military units for breakfast.”
“But this is a decade later. They’re old and slow, and you, personally, knocked out two of the Spiders,” Cade challenged. His whole tone was different this time though, much less hostile.
“Which is why it might be taking longer for them to adapt,” I said, trying to stay engaged. I won’t lie: The whole stabbing-pain-in-the-neck-and-brain thing had shaken me up—a lot. “Plum Blossom has a lot to handle by itself.”
“But what would they do?” he asked, curious.
“I don’t know… set up ambushes or something,” I said.
His trademark smile came back. “Come on, Ajaya. You can do better than that. Nobody knows the Zone like you do. Give us a guess… a real guess,” he said, the normal Cade back, replacing the nervous Cade.
I felt my interest pique for the first time since we’d come back from break. I gave him a nod and then focused on the screen, really studying the situation.
There were four separate teams, with swarms ranging from four drones to a really big group of a couple dozen minidrones, all flying in fully synchronized formations. All four swarms were traveling at a pretty high altitude, flying between skyscrapers, trolling for drones, which they hadn’t been seeing.
“How many have they killed so far, to date?” I asked. He’d told me once but I hadn’t paid much attention, because, you know—neck bomb and shit.
“Four hundred and twelve,” he said.
“Most of those in the first week, right?”
“Yes. The Zone units have gone quiet lately, not coming out to challenge these big teams.”
“Which makes sense, right? If you’re getting your ass beat, stop going head to head. So, yeah, I’d expect them to see almost nothing and I’d be…”
“There, one of the little ones… a Kite,” the voice of one of the team leaders broke in, excited. “The ones that hunt with Tigers!”
“…wary if I did see one,” I finished. “Especially of something as valuable as a Tiger.”
“Look, that’s the Tiger unit right there! It’s running!” another voice said. I’d lost track of who the players were. All four swarms were dipping down between the buildings, dropping low to the street. Some of them carried little bombs they could attempt to drop on the heavily armored Tiger. Some of the littlest ones were bombs—kamikaze drones.
“You think it’s a trap?” Cade said. “I mean, it’s running for cover.”
“You’re confusing it with a real animal, Cade. It’s a computer in a mobile machine. Darting out into view is completely illogical. The sort of instinct an animal that hadn’t fought drones would follow, but these things don’t have instincts. They have combat response programming, adapted over ten years of warfare.”
All of the teams were racing to get over top of the fast-moving Tiger.
“By rights, it should have run into the first open building,” I said. “Actually, it never should have broken cover at all.”
Suddenly it turned sharply and ran right through a glass storefront window. “Oh damn, Cade, they should pull…” I didn’t get any further before the screen that was providing the current video point of view for the production went white. Simultaneously, the other two video windows of the Flottercot recording drones went crazy, the scenery blurring out as the drones both got knocked through the sky by an explosion.
“Damn,” Cade said. Then all three screens went dead, but one kept flickering like it might come back. Finally the picture began to return and when it cleared, we could see that the street was cratered and all of the windows on the facing buildings were gone, along with most of the doors.
“What was that?” Cade asked, eyes wide.
“At a guess… a fuel air explosion. You know, like a thermobaric grenade,” I said, studying the wreckage.
“They have bombs?” Cade asked, shocked.
“They have access to propane, gasoline, aerosols, cartridges, probably blasting caps, maybe military or police plastic explosives. For that, all they needed was to flood the air with propane and then ignite it with a spark.”
“How? How did they learn to do that?”
“From us, Cade. The military, the Zone War teams. We’ve used stuff like that for years.”
“They learned it from us?”
“That’s what they do, Cade… they learn.”