Moody watched from the deck of the Polaris as the three rubber boats zipped by her on the way to Eris Island; two from the Typhon boat, and one from the escape trunk of Polaris. The Polaris boat contained just Pete and McCallister, and no guns. The Typhon boats in contrast were crammed with men, all of them carrying weapons. She could take no satisfaction in the imminent, brutal deaths of those two traitors, because it would mean that Typhon would soon take Eris Island. And the cure.
The drones continued to bomb the Typhon ship. It was sinking rapidly even as the boats escaped it. They zipped by Dr. Haggerty, who was pathetically waving his arms at all parties, seemingly shocked that no one wanted to save him. She didn’t understand it. She felt a creeping, familiar aggravation, much like she had when Hamlin had arrived with his secret orders. Once again, so many people seemed to know exactly what was going on, while she did not. Haggerty went under for good at about the same time the Typhon submarine did.
She reminded herself that she was still in command of an Alliance submarine. She’d been watching the waterline carefully, and while only the nose of the sub still stuck out of the water, it no longer appeared to be sinking. She had to summon help somehow, even with radio disabled. Maybe she could launch the emergency beacon, draw in help from the Alliance. She had two billion dollars’ worth of technology under her command, nuclear missiles, torpedoes, the most advanced submarine in the world. Surely she could thwart three rubber boats.
The boats landed on the island, and she lost track of what was happening until the action began to center on the distant control tower. She heard the sharp staccato cracks of rifle shots. That sound stopped and was replaced by something lower, more powerful.
Suddenly there was a change in the air. The random swooping of the drones over Eris turned into a direct flight.
Toward her.
She’d observed enough drone attacks to recognize what was about to happen. Somehow the radius had changed, she realized, putting the Polaris in the killing zone. Without thinking, she executed a perfect swan dive off the side of the Polaris, into the ocean. The cool water braced her, gave her clarity of mind she hadn’t had in days. As she came up to the surface, she was already swimming fast, athletically, toward the rocky shore of Eris. The bombs exploded behind her, finishing off what was left of her submarine.
She found her rhythm quickly, swimming strongly toward shore, breaking through the waves. It was five miles to the beach. A long swim in open, choppy ocean, but she was strong, the all-time record holder on the Alliance obstacle course. The swim took her back to her training, when everything seemed so clear and her talents so valued. Every second stroke, she took a breath, and she could see bombs dropping in front of her now, too, exploding all over Eris Island. She herself must be inside the killing zone, she realized, but a lone swimmer was, at least for the moment, a lower priority target. As she powered through the waves, she felt indestructible.
* * *
Pete looked cautiously out the window as Carlson’s crew was swarmed by drones.
At first, the drones assessed the immediate threat, bombing Carlson and her men. They threw themselves to the ground, but there was nowhere to hide on the rocky bluff. Bombs fell all around them. They were close enough that Pete could see them screaming, but he couldn’t hear them over the constant roar of the exploding bombs. Some of the Typhon crew rolled into the crevice, driven either by gravity or by an instinct to seek some kind of shelter.
Simultaneously, a formation of drones headed toward Polaris. Pete saw Finn wince as the first bombs struck his ship. They poured their bombs onto the boat, then formed a beeline back to the island to reload. The Polaris held up bravely as bombs poured onto her, but eventually the top of the hull cracked, and smoke poured out as more bombs poured in. The drones were in a frenzy.
And then, suddenly, Polaris was gone, replaced on the ocean surface by a black slick of oil and a layer of bubbles as the ship’s air banks cracked and exploded.
The drones returned their attention to Eris Island.
They began targeting the pallets of bombs, which exploded with such power that the concussion almost knocked the men down in the control tower. What glass remained in the windows was shattered. Pete covered his face with his hands and felt flying shards of glass cut his knuckles. Alarms went off in the tower as bombs dropped close by; Pete saw one indicator saying that the main tower door was breached, compromised by a series of nearby blasts. But the tower itself stayed safe as the drones focused all their energy on targets outside the ten-foot radius. Pete noticed, fascinated, that the drones were prioritizing the larger pallets of bombs first, then going after the smaller ones. The island was soon blanketed in explosions.
Pete saw a smoke cloud in the distance, on the south side of the island. His heart sank as he realized that the old buildings of the medical detachment were being destroyed. Whatever remained of the group’s quest for a cure was being bombed into shreds.
It was over quickly. Soon, the island was overflowing with quick-moving, unarmed drones. Pete could practically read their primitive little minds. They were without bombs, with no chance of rearming, having destroyed all their own munitions. They quickly went into self-destruct mode.
They all picked targets, what few structures were left on the battered island, and flew perfect swan dives into them. Only the ten-foot circle around the tower was safe. Some drones flew into the sea as well, spotting some target of opportunity, a piece of flotsam from one of the sinking submarines.
It took thirty minutes before the bombs stopped falling. It seemed much, much longer as they sat and listened and absorbed the sound from a thousand bombs through the broken windows. Pete remembered reading about artillery barrages in World War II that had gone on for days. He didn’t know how men could ever endure that kind of noise for so long without going insane.
His ears rang so badly that it took him a minute to realize it was over. He stood up slowly, and McCallister did the same.
Outside the windows, the island was smoking from a thousand craters, large and small. But no drones flew overhead.
The quiet was breathtaking.
“Everybody OK?” said Pete. He stood all the way up, carefully.
“I’m all right,” said Finn.
“Me, too,” said Stewart, although Pete could hear otherwise in his voice. The old man didn’t get up.
“Admiral?” Peter walked to him.
A dark patch of blood spread across his uniform. “I don’t think it’s anything serious.”
“Are you shot?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Broken glass. Hurts like the devil, and lots of blood, but I’ll be fine.”
Pete looked closely into the admiral’s eyes, looking for false bravado. While his body was bloodied, his eyes were steady and calm. Considerably calmer than Pete felt.
“Freeze!” Hana Moody suddenly burst through the door. She rapidly trained a pistol from Pete and the admiral to Finn, and back again. Her eyes stopped briefly on the admiral, confused by a stranger in admiral’s shoulder boards. Incredibly, Pete saw in her eyes deference to his rank. Her weapon looked foreign; Pete realized she must have scavenged it from one of the dead Typhon marines.
“Jesus Christ, Moody, how did you—?”
“I rushed to the door of the tower. Stayed pinned against it while you got the drones to do your dirty work.”
Her soaking-wet clothes were torn, her face dirty and bloody. As loud as it was inside the tower, Pete couldn’t imagine what it must have been like on ground level during the barrage.
She steadied the gun at Pete, but hesitated to point it at the admiral. “You’re all prisoners of war,” she said.
From the other side of the tower, Finn laughed out loud. “Our war is over,” he said. “You can put that thing away.”
“You’ve betrayed the Alliance,” she said. “And I’m going to see that you pay for it.”
Finn then did the one thing that guaranteed the most viscerally angry reaction. He laughed at her.
With a guttural cry of rage, she fired. Her aim was off, perhaps due to unfamiliarity with the Typhon gun, and she hit Finn in the shoulder. He spun to the ground with a grunt.
She trained the gun on Pete, the only man now standing in the tower. “Have you got anything to say?”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” said Pete, trying to exaggerate the panic in his voice. “But we’ve got to help the admiral!”
Her eyes darted to Stewart. “What’s wrong with him? Who is he?”
“He’s been hit!” said Pete, trying to add to her confusion and doubt. “They shot the admiral!” He knelt down as if to aid him.
As he did, he reached in his pocket.
Moody looked away, just for a moment, to the graying admiral covered in blood. Maybe she thought he could be her ally, a supporter of her crusade for the Alliance. Even wounded, he was the portrait of high-ranking dignity, with his gray hair and weathered face. Maybe she thought Pete and Finn had taken him prisoner up there in the tower. Whatever she thought, his presence was enough to distract her for just a moment. It was long enough for Pete to withdraw his nine-millimeter pistol, and fire a shot.
He hit her in the thigh. She spun around even as she was trying to raise her gun, but Pete fired again, this time hitting her square in the chest. She stared at him, stunned, eyes wide open, but still on her feet, still with the pistol in her hand.
Pete stood, took a moment to aim, and fired a third shot, into her chest.
She fell to the glass-covered carpet of the tower floor, dead.