After defeating the seagulls, the commissioning of the drone station at Eris Island was a triumph. The success rate was higher than their most optimistic projections, the failure rate negligible. In the first few weeks, the drones took a deadly toll on enemy shipping, both military and civilian. Silent, grainy video from the drones was shown on breathless newscasts and widely viewed Internet clips. The clips were always roughly the same. An open, featureless ocean. A ship comes suddenly into view, far below. The ship would seem to grow rapidly as the drone swooped down, details becoming visible, the outlines of the cargo containers or the flash, rarely, of defensive gunfire. A single bomb would fall and explode with a silent white burst, momentarily drowning out all the visuals with the washed-out lightning of its high explosives. Then other drones would come into view, and the screen would become awash in white as they dropped their explosives in force. When the explosions dimmed and an image returned, what had been a ship was transformed into an oil slick and jagged wreckage, and drones were everywhere, drawn to the kill.
Enemy countermeasures were even less effective than Pete had predicted. Automated gunfire from bow-mounted guns would throw clouds of twenty-millimeter shells into the sky. Clouds of chaff would surround ships under attack, distracting the drones and degrading their sensors. But drones could overcome every countermeasure with sheer quantity. Whatever the enemy could come up with that could defeat ten drones couldn’t defeat twenty. If it could defeat twenty drones, it couldn’t defeat a swirling, relentless swarm of fifty. Enemy tactics evolved quickly from attacking to impairing to evading, until finally, inevitably, submerging.
Within weeks, the only military ships in the ocean were submarines, carefully staying hidden beneath the waves. Civilian shipping ground to a halt. A month after the initial launch, the second wave of a thousand drones flew all the way from Detroit to Eris on their own, at a lazy pace dictated by the shining sun and the thermoclines they could soar upon. Unburdened with bombs, they were light and efficient as they made their way west. Cities along the route had viewing parties to watch on rooftops and in football stadiums, and they cheered as the stream of drones passed overhead while high school marching bands and country musicians played patriotic songs. Watching the drones fly by made Allied victory seem inevitable.
With the station at Eris working so well, Pete immediately began planning the drone station in the Atlantic; several suitable locations had already been scouted. He would fly there at once to begin the work. But first, he had to stop on the mainland for a piece of pressing business.
His wedding.
* * *
By then they’d known each other for a year, although you could hardly say they’d dated. Pete had been consumed by the drone project, seeing Pamela mostly from the screen during chat sessions on his tablet computer. She’d broken up with him briefly as a result. That’s when he begged her to meet him in Hawaii. At the head of the Kealia Trail, he’d proposed to her, not at all sure what her answer would be.
While neither wanted a huge ceremony, Pete kept delaying the wedding anyway, overcome by obligations as Eris neared completion. He felt a twinge of guilt about it. But Pete was spending his days with military men, including many naval officers and chiefs who’d missed every milestone of family life. Missing a child’s birth was so common among the submariners he knew that it barely merited comment. So this made Pete feel better, along with the constant reassurances from everyone he was around about how important his work was.
But by the time he left Eris Island, he was determined not to let Pamela down again. They had a small outdoor ceremony in Calabasas County, near San Diego. Pamela was a vision in a white dress she’d bought, with typical thrift, for four hundred dollars at a department store. At the time of their wedding, it had been two months since they’d seen each other. They stayed at a hotel near the submarine base that night, and Pete gave her a string of Mikimoto pearls that he’d bought at a Navy Exchange. She expressed shock, saying she’d never owned anything so nice or expensive. Pete put them on her, which gave him an inordinate amount of pleasure, fastening the clasp with shaky hands at the back of her neck.
She gave him a small present wrapped in silver paper. He opened it and revealed a Lucite block, with the ten stages of the honeybee’s life forever trapped inside.
“I didn’t know what to get you.…”
Pete turned it over, looking at every angle of the bees, watching the thick honey pour back and forth in its tiny vial.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “I love it.”
* * *
They flew to Mexico for a two-week honeymoon. Pete had volunteered to handle all the planning, because it felt like he should do something. He planned the entire trip, and paid for it, with one trip to an Internet travel site. At the resort, they fell into an easy routine of waking up early to claim the best lounge chairs around the pool, and then eating breakfast and drinking coffee while watching the sun rise. They eavesdropped on the other honeymooners at the bars and napped together in the afternoons.
Three days into the honeymoon, they returned to their room from the pool, pleasantly drunk from an afternoon of margaritas and sunshine. An envelope had been slipped under their door. Pete watched Pamela cringe at the sight of it.
“It’s probably nothing,” he said.
“I’m actually shocked they left you alone for three days,” she said.
It was a note from the Pacific Command. Pete had received an invitation to speak at Stanford University. Everyone knew he was on leave, but they wanted to make sure he was aware of what would be a great opportunity. It would the first stop of a victory tour, a chance to gloat in front of many of those who had condemned the program, and him. For just a moment, he considered declining because of his honeymoon, but in the end he didn’t fight hard. It was too tempting to resist. There would be many people in the audience who had doubted him, and maybe doubted him still. He asked Pamela, told her he would be gone no more than forty-eight hours, and she, of course, gave her approval because his enthusiasm left her no choice. He boarded a military charter to Palo Alto and assured her that she’d barely notice his absence.
Pete had another motivation to return briefly to the project, one that he didn’t reveal. He’d received a disturbing report about some of the drones flying far from their assigned patrol areas, and desperately wanted to investigate the claims. He’d received some of the programming transcripts already but was having a hard time penetrating the code, which had been heavily modified by the Alliance team charged with the final program. Pete was no programmer, but at times it seems like the code had been almost deliberately made complicated, to make it impossible for him to troubleshoot. He needed more data, but couldn’t get the access he needed from his hotel room.
It was impossible, he knew, for the drones to malfunction that way, to function at all that far from their operating areas. But supposedly some activist on the coast of Oregon had filmed a drone. The government had quickly taken the video down, squashed the report, and detained the purveyors. Some of his more hawkish friends in the Pentagon promoted the idea that it was a Typhon drone, requiring an even greater investment in their drone program. Whatever it was, Pete wanted to find out more, and that was impossible with an unsecured Internet connection at an all-inclusive resort in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
* * *
The crowd at Stanford was made up of nerdy engineers and aggrieved college students, with significant overlap between the two groups. The moderator was the university president, who introduced Pete cordially but with a stern, disapproving undertone that Pete was pretty sure he had rehearsed in a mirror. Such a presentation would have been unthinkable even just a few months before, when his program was described in the same way people decades before had described Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars”: it was not only immoral, they said, it was impossible, a crushingly expensive, destabilizing overreach by militaristic fanatics. The threat of SDI had helped bring about the end of the Cold War, as the Soviets knew they couldn’t keep up with American technology. Hamlin and his colleagues envisioned that the drones would have the same kind of transformative power.
Introduced to the crowd, which filled Memorial Auditorium, he let the polite applause die down before speaking.
“As long as weapons have flown into the sky,” he began, “we have tried to remove human pilots from the process.” He clicked a button on his remote, and an antique engraving of a hot air balloon appeared on the giant screen behind him. It stopped Hamlin for just a moment. He’d only reviewed these slides on the screen of tablet computer. Seeing the high-resolution image on a screen so many times larger was slightly breathtaking. He could see details he’d never noticed before in the engraving, the tiny soldiers pointing, the puff of smoke coming from the boiler that was generating hot air to give them flight.
“This was true even before airplanes. In 1849, Austria tried to bomb Vienna with unmanned hot air balloons. Some of these, incidentally, were ship-launched. On August 22, 1849, Austria launched about two hundred unmanned balloons. This, the first aerial drone attack, contributed to the end of the Venetian revolt.”
He started clicking through slides, his pace reflecting the rapid advance of technology. “Development kept pace with every advance in aviation. Remote-control biplanes were tried in World War I, generally with disastrous results. Remote-control single-wing planes were tried in World War II, without much better luck. Joseph Kennedy, Jr., JFK’s older brother, was actually killed in a test flight of this program. Our enemy, the Germans, went a different route in an attempt to bring unmanned weapons to the skies: rocketry. Their success, and the success of rocketry in general, stalled drone development for many years.”
He put a new photo up, his first in color: a cigar-shaped missile with stubby wings and the word TOMAHAWK painted on the side. “As technology improved, the dream of unmanned aerial weapons took a new turn: cruise missiles. But these weren’t drones; they were weapons in and of themselves. They could be used once, and then they were destroyed along with, hopefully, their target. They couldn’t perform any other missions, like surveillance, and they could never return to base.”
New slide: a small, fragile-looking plane painted in desert camouflage. “Attitudes changed dramatically in 1982, when Israel deployed these, the Scout UAVs, with great success in their brief, triumphant war against Syria. While the Scout was unarmed, its use as both a decoy and for reconnaissance proved invaluable. For the first time, the drone had proved itself on the battlefield. The US military took notice.”
“Technology raced ahead,” said Pete. “Soon, it was obvious that drones could do nearly everything a manned plane could do. It could do many things better, like stay in the air for many hours and fly deep into harm’s way without risking an American pilot. The only thing holding back the wholesale deployment of drones were doctrinal conflicts, and squeamishness about the use of unmanned aircraft. It took another historical event to eradicate this squeamishness.”
He advanced the slides again, this time showing the World Trade Center, smoke pouring from both towers. “On September 11, 2001, all that changed. We had a new kind of enemy, and needed a new kind of weapon.” New slide: a new drone, bigger than the previous, and for the first time, it was holding on to a missile. It had odd, downward-facing tail fins, and a bulbous nose. It was immediately recognizable as an unmanned craft: there were no windows.
“This is the Predator,” said Pete. “On February 4, 2002, the Predator fired a Hellfire missile in the Paktia province of Afghanistan, near the city of Khost. It killed three men, the first time the CIA had ever used the Predator in a targeted strike. The modern era of drone warfare had begun.”
He flashed through a few slides, showing the rapid evolution that took place after the success of the Predator and its successor, the Reaper. Drones got larger, more heavily armed, and, critically, more automated. “Drones were no longer just an acceptable alternative,” he said. “They were a central part of military strategy and tactics.” Finally he showed a photo of the airfield at Eris Island, a thousand drones arranged in the sun.
“Modern drones, unlike the Predator, are completely autonomous. They use a complex algorithm to assess targets, and the viability of an attack. Bigger targets are more valuable than smaller targets. Faster targets are more valuable than slower targets. If a drone can’t kill a target by itself, it will gather help until a kill is assured. If it sees a viable target and can’t rearm in time, it will actually crash itself into it.”
He paused dramatically. “It is the Internet of weapons systems.” It was a metaphor he’d carefully chosen for this Stanford audience, at the place where so much of the actual Internet had been born. “It’s distributed all over the world. It’s survivable. If any one piece fails, the other pieces fall into place, making the system impossible to destroy.”
He showed a brief video clip of drones taking off and landing, ingesting new bombs in what even to Pete was the creepiest part of the entire cycle. That video stopped, replaced by an old black-and-white photo of a military ship. The long, flat deck gave it away as an aircraft carrier. Crosshairs marked the center of the ship: the photograph had been taken through a periscope.
“This,” said Pete, “is the Shinano. She weighed sixty-five thousand tons, and on November 29, 1944, she was sunk by the United States submarine Archerfish. Until recently, she was the biggest ship ever sunk by the United States Navy.”
The old imperial carrier disappeared and was replaced by modern video of a container ship—a giant one. She was cruising across a featureless ocean, unaware of what was about to happen to her, or that her death would be shown to a roomful of college students.
“This is the Taymal,” he said. “A container ship of the type I am sure you recognize. This is an enemy ship, fully laden with enemy cargo bound for an enemy port. Seven hundred and forty thousand tons in all, with about thirteen thousand containers. One side effect of our campaign is that nearly every enemy merchant ship is full, because their fleet is so depleted.”
This film, unlike the ubiquitous war porn they’d all gotten used to on the news channels, was not filmed from a nose camera onboard a drone. Rather it was filmed by a surveillance plane far above the battle that happened to be tracking the progress of the Taymal when the drones showed up, a fortunate accident. So, far more clearly than normal, they could see the full deadly formation of the drones as they arrived at a lower altitude, ready to attack. It was spectacular footage, and Hamlin had been saving it for an occasion like this.
Soon after the lead drone came into the frame, there were quick flashes of light as the first bombs dropped. A few of the neatly stacked containers were knocked askew. Another bomb exploded, and a container fell overboard with a large silent splash.
The ship made a panicked turn to starboard, but evasion was impossible. The drones that had dropped their payloads peeled off to reload and alert their brothers, and soon the sky was filled with drones, each dropping bombs with killer precision. A fire broke out in the forward part of the ship and spread rapidly aft as a fuel tank was penetrated.
Suddenly, men could be seen scurrying around the deck, trying to control the damage. Pete heard the audience gasp. Up to that point, it had just looked like machines versus machines. Even though he’d watched the clip a hundred times, Pete hadn’t noticed the crewmen before, too small to be noticeable on his computer screen, but here, expanded on the auditorium’s giant screen, they were impossible to ignore. Their movements were panicked, and at the same time, valiant. They were scurrying around trying to save the ship, themselves, each other. One man, in flames, fell into the sea.
The Taymal slowed and stopped, and began to sink. It listed severely to port, causing more of its containers to tumble overboard. The crewmen continued running around, fighting until the end, even though it must have, at that point, seemed as inevitable to them as it did to the audience in the thickly cushioned chairs of Memorial Auditorium. They were doomed.
Soon the Taymal was halfway under, then completely submerged. A dozen stubborn containers bobbed upon the sea, but these, too, were bombed by the drones until no trace of the ship, cargo, or crew remained.
The lights came back on as the video ended, and Pete looked out at the shocked crowd. He cleared his throat.
“Eight minutes,” he said. When he’d practiced the speech, without noticing the tiny men onboard the Taymal, this phrase had sounded so much more triumphant. “Eight minutes was all it took to sink one of the world’s largest cargo ships. Without risking a single American life.”
He wrapped up without even hearing himself speak. The moderator asked if there were any questions.
A gray-haired man raised his hand and stood. A helper rushed over with a cordless microphone. “That operation was completely autonomous?” he asked. “Was it directed by anyone on the ground?”
“Completely autonomous,” said Pete. He cleared his throat, getting back into his rhythm after the disturbing video. “Obviously many of the details of the program are classified, but that is one thing that we want our enemies to know. The drones will seek them out, and the drones will destroy them. It takes no intervention from a ground crew of any kind.”
Next question: a young woman with a peace sign on her shirt. “Wasn’t that a civilian ship?”
“There are no civilians in that part of the Pacific,” he said. “Anyone at sea in that area is a combatant and will be treated accordingly.”
An unhappy murmur went through the crowd, as Pete expected. A shaggy young man in a denim jacket stood up and shouted without waiting for the microphone.
“What about the drones attacking us, on American soil?” he yelled.
“Impossible,” said Pete, his tone dismissive. “Numerous safety features are built into the drones to prevent just that.”
“Bullshit!” said the man, causing a stir in the crowd. Pete didn’t mind; he’d been protested before. Tie-dyed pacifists, of course, but also the standard anti-government crowd, who were convinced that the government drones would spy on their mountain cabins and take away their guns. The shouting protestor continued. “Drones are attacking mainland, civilian targets, and the reports are being suppressed by the Alliance!”
Pete shook his head with a wry smile. “Simply not true,” he said. “If drones were hitting anybody on the mainland, I would be the first to know about it. And I haven’t heard a thing.”
“All of you!” said the man, turning to the crowd. “Look for the video now, before it gets taken down!” he said. He was holding his phone in the air as if the audience could see the images on it. Uniformed military guards suddenly began moving toward him. Where did they come from? Pete wondered.
“Look for it!” he yelled as he was led away. “In the last three days, drones have dropped bombs five times on the West Coast! We have video of a drone patrolling in Sequim, Washington. We have reports that people were killed just this morning in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico!”
Pete froze at the mention of the resort town where Pamela waited. The crowd erupted; shouts of approval countered by jeers. Most people in the room reached for their phones, some to film the guards dragging the man out of the auditorium, others to look for the video he had referenced.
Chaos reigned in the audience. Pete walked numbly backstage, where he was strangely alone, the crowd noise dissipating behind thick curtains. He pulled out his phone and searched for “Sequim drone” on the Internet. It was listed in a dozen places, but it had been taken down in every place he looked. Six thousand people had watched it on YouTube before it disappeared: This video no longer available.
He texted Pamela, and called her: no answer.
He called the resort’s front desk: no answer.
Finally, he called his masters at the Alliance. He got through to an officer in the situation room, who after several terrifying minutes on hold, put him through to the tactical duty officer in the Alliance war room.
“Are you on a secure line?” asked the major.
“No,” said Pete.
“Get somewhere where we can talk,” he responded. Pete could hear the stress in his voice.
“I’m the OIC for the entire drone project,” said Pete. “You have to tell me what’s going on.”
There was a long pause as the major thought it over.
“There appear to have been some catastrophic failures, among a small number of the birds.”
“Fatalities?” said Pete, his voice catching.
“No,” said the general, a slight note of hope in his voice. Pete felt relief flood his body until the duty officer finished his thought. “None on US soil.”
Pete hung up the phone and walked out a side door, around to the front steps of the auditorium. A few of the protestors eyed him, but none confronted him directly, perhaps because of the dazed look on his face. He sat on the steps until his watchers from the Alliance found him and hustled him into a waiting car.