Kill Decision

CHAPTER 30

Linda McKinney watched Odin gently playing catch with Huginn and Muninn on the deck of the Tonsberg, near the Sikorsky helicopter. She knew he was saying his good-byes, since it seemed likely they would not return.

He looked over to her, and McKinney came alongside and tossed a pellet of food to Muninn. The raven caught it without difficulty.

“We’ll be back.”

He was stone-faced. “I hope you’re right about this, Professor.”

Foxy was finishing up the twin pheromone canister rig on the nose of the chopper. A wrench clattered to the metal deck and he stood. “Well, this is what we’ve got.”

McKinney and Odin turned to see that the twin metal canisters had been clamped into place with fire extinguisher brackets bolted below the chopper’s nose. The nozzles of both were aimed straight at the fuselage, and a braided copper wire ran through a hole drilled in the windscreen.

Foxy ran his finger along the copper wire. “Pull on this and it directly depresses the nozzle valves.” He gave it the barest tug, and a cloud of pheromone vapor sprayed the chopper, leaving a wet spot two feet in diameter. “Voila. What do you think?”

Odin examined the assembly and tugged forcefully at it, trying to shake the canister loose. He looked up at McKinney.

She nodded. “Simple’s good. How do we detach it for the run to the ship’s bridge?”

Foxy leaned in and threw the clamp lever, popping the canister bracket loose. “That easy. Then we depress the valve by hand.”

“Let me see that…” McKinney extended her hand and took the canister from him. “We need to dose ourselves too-for when we land.” She pressed her finger down on the nozzle and sprayed herself with the odorless, colorless perfluorocarbon. It nonetheless felt moist and cool as she could feel it evaporating slowly. She handed the canister to Odin.

“How long does the coverage last?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. So watch how they behave toward you. If they start getting aggressive, you need another dose.”

Foxy sprayed himself as well, and then reclamped the canister into place on the nose of the chopper.

Just then they heard the deep growl of a powerful engine, and they turned to see a new silver Bentley sedan drive up a ramp from the lower deck, leap the apex, and screech to a sliding halt in front of them. Steel deck plating crudely welded across all its windows marred the beautiful car, with burn marks at the connection points lending the appearance of smeared mascara. There were small view ports in the steel plates. After a moment the passenger door opened with difficulty, and Evans got out. Beyond him Smokey was behind the wheel.

“What do you think? The Mulsanne armored edition. Some billionaire in Hong Kong will be very disappointed with our mods.”

“Can’t say much for the styling.”

Evans thumbed in the direction of the ramp. “There’s six more wrapped in plastic down there. Buses, tractors, earth movers. And there’s gonna be a BMW shortage in Beijing if this ship goes down.”

Odin placed Huginn and Muninn in the folding cage and handed them to Smokey. “Keep them safe.”

“Will do, chief.”

“Where’s Ripper?”

Smokey gestured down the ramp. “Welding armor plate onto trucks. Figure if we stay mobile, they’ll have a hard time swarming us, and there’s running room on the ramps down there. We might be able to crush them against walls, and whatnot.”

Odin nodded, examining the weapons arrayed across the car’s backseat. “Is that all we’ve got?”

Smokey nodded. “Pistols too. But three. 338 rifles. A couple MP5s, and an HK416. A few hundred rounds and some frag grenades, some thermite.” Smokey leaned forward. “You’re not taking any weapons?”

Odin shook his head. “Where we’re going, if we need to start shooting, we’re dead already. Better that you have them to hold off an attack.”

Smokey handed him an HK tactical pistol. “Take a pistol at least-you might need to shoot off a lock or something.”

“Or something.” Odin grabbed it and slid it into a leg holster.

The sound of a heavy diesel engine roared belowdecks, and in a moment a large front-end loader rolled onto the main deck with Ripper behind the wheel and Mooch sitting in the shovel. There were steel plates welded around the cab on this too. Mooch hopped out as it came to a halt. The engine cut off moments later.

“Should be able to stomp a few of the fuckers with that.”

Foxy shouted, looking at his watch, “Time to kill drones, people!”

The team moved into a circle but did not touch or say good-bye. They simply stood looking from one to another. McKinney was slightly off-balance trying to understand this close-knit team’s unspoken ritual, but they seemed to just be regarding each other. Evans also watched from the car door.

After a few moments Odin broke the silence. “You all know the stakes and what’s expected of us. We will meet on the other side.” With that he snapped a sharp salute, and the others returned it. They nodded to McKinney and immediately resumed their duties.

Foxy started flicking switches in the Sikorsky, and the engines began to whine to life. Odin opened the copilot door. “Time to go!”

Evans shrugged to McKinney and shouted over the noise, “Good luck, Professor.”

She turned and entered the chopper as Evans watched. McKinney barely had her seat belt on by the time the Sikorksy lifted off and edged out over the ocean. She looked down to see the captain standing on the top of the control tower, simply watching them leave.

Odin handed her a set of headphones, and the moment she put them on, she could hear Foxy speaking.

“… fuel to get there. We’re gonna keep this straight and simple.” He pointed. “Look, you can see the Ebba Maersk already.”

McKinney craned her head and could indeed see a smudge on the horizon if she didn’t look directly at it. “Foxy, fly low to the water. That’s what they seem to be doing, and it might help contain pheromone dispersal.”

Foxy nodded and brought them down alarmingly low-within twenty or thirty feet of the water’s surface.

“Jesus! Not that low.”

“I got it, Professor.”

Odin turned back to her. “ETA about ten minutes.” He extended the copper nozzle wire to her. “You’re the best person to control this.”

McKinney nodded and took the line.

Odin then spoke into the radio. “Safari-One-Six actual, crossing Lima Delta, out.”

“TOC copies. Happy hunting.”

He then pointed to a firefighter’s oxygen mask and supply tank sitting on one of the captain seats. “Put it on, and we’ll do an equipment check.”

McKinney started prepping the gear, and the process considerably calmed her nerves. She knew enough about herself that when frightening events were afoot, she preferred to be actively doing something. Listening to Odin’s instructions on the oxygen rig served that purpose. She tried to lock eyes with him, but he was all business-focused on the mission. She decided that came from experience and tried to put everything else out of her mind too.

They were coming up on the huge container ship all too fast for her liking. And soon they could see drones flying about in ones and twos, running forage patterns-with denser clouds closer in.

Odin raised binoculars, then shouted, “Incoming! Professor. Dose us. Oxygen masks on.”

She tugged on the wire to release pheromone, then lowered her oxygen mask and turned on air.

Odin looked side to side as they skimmed over the ocean surface. “We’ve got six… hell, we’ve got several dozen headed this way with a lot more behind that.” He lowered the binoculars. “How are we doing on pheromone?”

“We’ll find out in a moment. Let me know if they get aggressive, and I’ll increase the spray.” McKinney tried not to get crazy with the application of pheromone. She imagined the size of an ant if its mandibular gland were the size of the canister outside. Then tried to remind herself how small an amount they could detect. Nonetheless, her first blasts from the nozzle felt excessive.

As she looked up from the canister, her heart raced. Flying in alongside them now were a dozen flat black flying wings only about five feet wide, with loud but small turbofan engines. These were clearly not ship-cutters because they didn’t have legs or a welding torch nose-instead they seemed to have automatic rifles or similar weapons bolted under their wings. They looked cheap. Poorly made. Some were damaged, but they still functioned enough to fly.

Judging from the motion of their engine nozzles, they seemed to be able to rotate them to increase their maneuverability. They were flying in close to the chopper-mere feet from the window-almost bumping into the Sikorsky, skirting under it.

Foxy swerved and cursed. “Goddammit! They’re going to take out our rotors if they crowd us too close.”

A drone bumped into their fuselage.

But just as soon as they appeared, they dispersed. The chopper was suddenly flying in open air again, just off the water. Drones now occasionally crossed their path, but it was the more random activity of a hive running foraging patterns. McKinney let out a relieved breath and pulled the cord to apply pheromone again.

Odin and Foxy glanced back at her. “Looks like you were right, Professor.”

“It was more than a hunch. These things operate on algorithmic principles.” She nodded. “Now let’s hope we don’t run out of pheromone or oxygen before we get this done.”

Odin keyed the radio. “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual.”

“Go ahead, Safari-One-Six.”

“Looks like the pheromone ruse works. We are flying into the swarm and toward the ship right now. Will keep you apprised. Out.”

“Goddamn, that’s good news, chief. Out.”

Just a few miles ahead they could see the broad stern of the Ebba Maersk. McKinney swallowed hard at the swirling crowd of aircraft and the now discernible vuvuzela-like whine that came to them even through their own engine noise.

“My God, look at it… there are thousands of them.”

Foxy shook his head. “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to get close enough to land without hitting a dozen of those things. Look how packed in they are.”

Odin motioned with his hand. “Get up higher. Try to come in from overhead.” He glanced to the side. “Hey! Getting some aggressive approaches at three o’clock. Professor, give us another dose.”

McKinney pulled on the nozzle.

Nonetheless a drone slammed into the side of the helicopter, cracking the side window and knocking their trim off before Foxy could recover.

“Jesus!”

McKinney watched the damaged drone spin apart and crash into the sea. No other drones seemed to be following its lead. She pulled several more times on the nozzle to coat their fuselage, just to be sure. Clear droplets traced along the glass.

Looking ahead, she could see they were now rising above the stern of the massive container ship. The water churned from the huge propellers as the ship steamed southward. The control tower in the distance rose like a massive T square near the center of the ship, probably twenty stories above the water-in the center of thousands of blue, gray, orange, and silver shipping containers that rose almost to the level of the control tower itself.

Unlike other shipping containers McKinney had seen, many of these had open panels in their sides and tops from which drones were entering and leaving the nests. She could see the turbofan drones tilting their engines down and hovering in for a landing, the air wavering with hot exhaust. But there were thousands of drones of still smaller size. She thought she could make out clouds of black quadracopter drones as well, not unlike the ones they’d faced in Colorado-but bigger, lawn mower-sized, with smoke coming off them as their two-stroke gasoline engines added to a deafening droning sound. It seemed to set the fillings in her teeth vibrating.

“God, would you listen to that?”

Foxy was bringing them into the cloud, angling for a landing. “Will these things make room for me, Professor?”

McKinney leaned forward to look. “If we collide they’ll back away… after trying to exchange data via their sensilla.”

There was a loud thump as a drone bumped into them from behind.

“Goddammit! We’re running on vapors. There’s no time for finesse. We gotta land.”

Looking below, it seemed like the ship was the molting ground of some vast flock of birds. Tens of thousands of drones covered every available surface-others seemed to be crawling around. McKinney released more pheromone and looked on with amazement at the complex and terrifying manifestation of her work. In some sick way it almost gave her satisfaction to see her model working-but she quickly rebuked herself.

Another drone bumped into them, and there was a loud bang as pieces of something sheared away and fell out of sight along with the drone. McKinney hoped none of those pieces belonged to the Sikorsky, but moments later the chopper started vibrating. An empty water bottle rattled in a cup holder at her elbow. The vibration quickly increased. Several red lights and alarms went off on the console up front.

Odin looked up through the overhead view ports. “We’re leaking something up there, and it isn’t pheromone.”

Dark fluid sprayed across the glass.

Foxy was checking indicators and struggling with the yoke. “Gotta land… gotta land.”

Another bump, followed by yet another bang, as a drone edged into them.

“I don’t see a way to clear a path without running into them. We’ve got some damage to a rotor blade already-maybe more than one.”

McKinney scanned the vast expanse of containers below them but didn’t see any helipad or unoccupied spot. They were now flying into a cloud of smaller drones, and the impacts were coming fast as popcorn popping. The chopper lurched, and a lawn mower-sized quadracopter bristling with antennas bumped right into the window next to her before it disappeared below them.

Foxy was wrestling with the controls. Alarms were wailing and lights flashing on the console. “We’re going down. This might be unpleasant.”

McKinney tugged on the pheromone cord. “Don’t land nose-first, if you can help it. We need to preserve the canister.”

He laughed ruefully as they started to spin. “We might be landing in a way that solves all our problems.” He struggled to stop the spin, working the foot pedals, handle, and yoke frantically. “Tail rotor’s going.”

They continued to spin as they descended, and the collisions with drones only increased. There were several loud bangs.

“Prepare for impact! Prepare for impact!”

The chopper rotated, then slowed, then finally tilted rearward. McKinney could see them descending toward the top of a pile of drone-covered containers. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Then ten feet.

They hit hard, tail first, but the landing surface gave way beneath them. The deafening whine of the drone engines all around them masked even the sound of the crash, and the crumpling of corrugated steel containers. The chopper collapsed partly into a container with its nose facing upward. The blades shattered with a loud snapping sound.

The impact knocked the wind out of her and caused her to lean on the pheromone cord. She struggled to release it, and then fought against gravity as the chopper rolled sideways. Then the copter mostly righted itself again before coming to a rest.

McKinney heard Odin’s voice in the headphones beyond all the howling drone engines.

“Everyone all right?”

McKinney patted her body and checked the area around her for punctures or crash damage, but eventually she nodded. “Bruised, but I’m good. Foxy, okay?”

Foxy nodded as he was switching off the engines and the fuel pumps. “Fine. Turns out we should be happy we only had fuel vapors left. Otherwise I think we’d be on fire.”

Odin spoke into his headset radio. “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual. We’ve landed on the mother ship. Chopper disabled, but crew okay. Moving on foot to objective. Maintain your present course until you get confirmation we’ve succeeded. Out.”

“Copy that, Safari-One-Six.”

Odin pointed at the intact canister bracket still affixed to the nose outside. “Grab the canisters and let’s move.” With one last glance at his companions he opened the copilot’s door and climbed up onto the storage container roof. Foxy did so on the other side, racing forward to unclamp the canister. Odin turned to grab McKinney’s hand and haul her up out of his door, since the rear doors seemed to be blocked by the walls of a shipping container.

In a moment they all stood atop a twenty-story-tall block of containers amid the deafening engine roar, with numberless drones flying, perching, and crawling about them. It was a vast field of seething machines. The bright Pacific sun was partly shrouded by a cloud of drones as well.

Foxy sprayed himself, McKinney, and Odin with pheromone, then looked out on the mass of drones in every direction. He shouted, “Well, that is something you don’t see every day.”

Four hundred feet ahead, across a series of container blocks separated by narrow chasms, loomed the white conning tower and the wide windows of the ship’s bridge. The radar masts there were still rotating, but no human was in sight. There were scorch marks here and there on the metal and all the windows in the control tower were either shattered or missing, twisted windshield wipers dangling.

“We’ll need to jump the gaps. It’s a long way down, so be careful. C’mon.” Odin nodded for them to follow, gingerly stepping over the wing of a dormant ship-cutting drone. McKinney could see its antennas and optic sensors moving to and fro. It was fascinating in a macabre way. Someone had actually breathed life into her work. Another foot-long antlike crawling drone walked across the back of the much larger ship-cutter-on its way somewhere else. It looked like a small crawling wire-cutter. Then she realized there were dozens of the little things wandering around between the bigger drones.

“Professor! This isn’t a goddamned field trip!” Odin tugged her away, and they moved across the seething field of machines to the tower.

Foxy pointed. “Heads up…”

McKinney and Odin looked up to see several drones racing back to the colony, microjet engines roaring. They created a visible commotion as they flew through the cloud. Soon a trail of other drones started following them.

And then McKinney saw the collective intelligence of the swarm, as the information, transmitted via pheromone and simple algorithms, manifested itself like a wave. Thousands of drones started taking to the air, leaking upward like liquid into the sky, following their agitated brethren-billowing outward in the direction from which the scouts had come-to the north. Back toward the Tonsberg, which was only just now visible on the horizon. The added roar of thousands of drones taking flight caused them all to crouch down and wince.

Odin leaned in and shouted into the headset radio. “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual. Heads up! You have incoming. Repeat: incoming. ETA ten minutes. Do you copy?”

There was a pause, and then Smokey’s voice came over the radio. “Copy that. How many we looking at?”

McKinney watched the numberless horde rising into the sky.

“The skies will be dark with them. Just hang on as long as you can, and we’ll get the colony ship diverted soon.”

“Copy that. We’ll keep ’em busy.”

S mokey keyed off the mic and looked across the hood of the Bentley at Evans, who was pouring another glass of white wine from a bottle with Swedish writing on the label. They stood on the weather deck, the wind from the ship’s twenty-six knots flowing over them.

Evans nodded and looked to the south. He spoke in a dramatic, gravelly voice. “The forces of Mordor gather for the attack.”

“Go easy on that shit, man. We might wind up in the water in a few hours.”

“All the more reason…” He emptied his glass and poured another.

Ritter groaned in the backseat of a blue BMW M5 sedan parked next to the Bentley.

Evans looked down at him in annoyance. “How do you like your drones now, asshole?”

Nearby, at the railing, the captain scanned the horizon with his large binoculars.

“I can’t believe what I am seeing.” He lowered the binoculars. “They are coming. Perhaps six thousand meters out.”

“Now you know why we wanted you to evac.” Smokey grabbed an MP5 submachine gun from the car hood and strapped on a combat harness.

Close by, Ripper opened the cab door of her armored yellow front-loader and stowed an HK416 rifle next to the seat.

Evans tossed the wineglass into the wind and took a deep pull directly from the wine bottle.

Smokey grabbed the bottle from him and tossed it overboard as well. “Battle stations, Morty.”

“Oh, nice! Litterbug.”

Mooch raced out onto the deck from the crew quarters. “Radar shows a cloud inbound. We need to get to battle stations.”

“We know.” Ripper pointed to the horizon.

Mooch put a hand on the captain’s shoulder. “So, the captain, Evans, and Ritter will stay in the engine room. It’s safer there, and they can control the ship as well as direct us to hull breeches, fires, or anything else by radio.”

The captain eyed Ritter, sitting handcuffed in the backseat of the BMW. “Who is this man?”

“He works for the people who built the drones-and he might be able to help us find out who they are. So keep him safe.”

Smokey produced the key and unlocked Ritter’s handcuffs. The man barely responded. “Morty! Go with the captain.” He pulled a now staggering Evans over to the BMW’s passenger seat and pushed him in as the captain started the turbocharged engine.

The Swede looked grim. “And what if everything goes wrong?”

“You mean we start to sink? We rally up in the ship’s galley. That’ll be our Alamo. They won’t be taking prisoners.” Smokey gave him a thumbs-up. “Stay in touch by radio, Captain.” Smokey pounded the roof, and the BMW took off down the ramp, screeching through the garage levels.

Mooch, Ripper, and Smokey then stood side by side at the ship’s railing watching the dark, writhing cloud coming toward them from the south, like bad weather.

Ripper checked the action on her pistol. “I don’t know about you guys, but I am really starting to hate these fucking drones.”

Smokey headed back toward the Bentley. “Best we can do is keep them too busy chasing us to cut up the ship. Deck three is the least crowded, so use that for speed. And for godsakes, Ripper, don’t run that shovel into the hull walls below the waterline.”

They ran for their vehicles even as the black cloud grew.

Smokey revved the Bentley. With tires screeching, he fishtailed down the loading ramp into the depths of the ship as the howling of a thousand small jet- and two-stroke engines became a deafening clamor-and the bodies of the drones blotted out the sun.

E vans sat unsteadily on a desk chair in front of several computer monitors in the spotless engine control room. He’d expected a dark and noisy place, but there were several sections to the ship’s engine room-the engine itself was the size of a semitruck and occupied a cavernous three-story-tall space crisscrossed by piping, but there were also several smaller auxiliary engines that were idle, banks of large generators, cooling water and fuel pumps, fuel filtration systems, oil and fuel ports. The place was massive.

The captain and Ritter came back into the control room. “You shouldn’t have drank so much. You’re going to be useless.”

Suddenly there was an explosion somewhere, and the deck vibrated.

Evans sat up straight as alarms went off on the control board. “What the hell was that?”

A klaxon sounded and red fire strobes started flashing.

The captain shoved the wheeled chair aside and starting clicking through screens. In a moment he brought up a surveillance camera on one of the monitors. It showed a downward view of the starboard hull near the bow of the ship. As they watched, several small aircraft raced into the frame and “landed” on the hull near the waterline in a shower of sparks, leaving long scars in the orange paint. Even as the first ones came to a stop, a dozen more were already screeching to land next to them-like leeches.

The captain watched, utterly confused.

Evans searched fruitlessly for cigarettes. “They’ve got electromagnetic landing gear, Captain. They’ll stick to your hull like fucking barnacles. And that’s when the fun really begins.”

“Madness. Absolute madness!”

Ritter watched, shaking his head.

On-screen the first arrivals were already sending a shower of sparks into the passing waves as their steel-cutting torches kicked in. Their wing acted as a cowling to cover them as they worked, and they began cutting downward below the waves.

“My God! They’ll gut us like a fish.”

“That’s the general idea.” Evans was still patting his empty pockets for cigarettes.

Suddenly all three men looked up to trace a scraping sound as it passed fast along the hull wall opposite them. It was quickly followed by several more beyond the steel.

The captain clicked through still more control screens. “We have a double hull. It will take them some time to cut through.” He grabbed the radio. “There are numerous drones cutting into the hull below the waterline, and there’s a fire on deck one. Port side, compartment three.”

The sound of gunfire and screeching rubber came in over the radio, along with Smokey’s voice. “We’ve got our hands full at the moment, Captain!”

M cKinney stepped carefully around scurrying wire-cutter drones, and then leapt the eight feet over a ten-story chasm to the last container block separating them from the control tower, which now loomed right above them. She landed next to Odin and Foxy, who caught hold of her to prevent her from tripping on still more winged drones and the hovering, lawn mower-sized quadracopter drones roving about.

They could barely hear each other above the mind-numbing noise of thousands of small engines. She watched as several of the quadracopter drones rubbed past each other, their sensilla antennas brushing together-an exchange of information.

Odin sprayed her and Foxy with more pheromone and leaned in to her ear, shouting, “These quadracopter drones seem to be more aggressive. Unless we keep spraying, they start following us.”

McKinney watched one doing just that. “Those look like larger versions of the human-hunters we faced in Colorado.” She noticed the twin gun barrels bolted into the frame. “These gas masks might not be helping us much. We’re still exhaling. It probably requires a lot of pheromone to overcome the aggression score we’re receiving from our other chemical signatures.”

Odin motioned for them to keep moving. “Then let’s speed up.”

McKinney and Foxy followed toward the edge of the container field over the backs of winged drones.

Odin keyed his radio and shouted, “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual. What’s your status?”

There was a pause, and then the sound of engines roaring and staccato gunfire came in over the radio. “Our status is that they’re cutting up the ship like we’re not even on it. We’re too busy dealing with the hunter-killers to do anything about the hull-cutters. Fire suppression systems kicked in, and the hull’s penetrated in two places. So far the pumps are keeping up.” More gunfire. “How about you? Over.”

Odin looked out to the horizon at the indistinct outline of a ship in the distance. “We need ten more minutes. What’s your current position?”

“About sixteen miles north-northwest of you.”

“If you think the ship can’t make the distance to the Maersk, abort and head out of the colony’s territory.”

“So far we’re holding up. But I copy that. Out.”

They reached the end of the container field and looked at the bridge tower across a thirty-foot-wide chasm. McKinney peered over the edge at an eight-story drop to the ship’s deck and a tangle of machinery.

Odin pointed and shouted over the din of the drone engines, “Crew didn’t get a chance to abandon ship.”

McKinney followed his gaze toward the ship’s bright orange free-fall escape boat. It was suspended, angled downward in its launch chute on the starboard side. The boat was easily forty feet long and fully enclosed.

Foxy nodded. “Bad for them, good for us. But we’re going to have to climb down. This gap is too big to jump, and we don’t have ropes.”

Odin started lowering himself over the side. “The containers have enough cross-braces and handholds for a free climb.” He looked up. “You okay with this, Professor?”

McKinney was already lowering herself down, searching for a leg hold. “I’ve done my share of rock climbing in the field. Let’s do it.”

All three of them started the long climb down, keeping close together and receiving frequent sprays from the pheromone canister. It was already more than two-thirds empty. It took them a good five minutes to descend to deck level.

When they hopped onto the deck, Odin led them toward a watertight door at the base of the massive white-painted steel bridge tower.

Foxy grabbed his arm and pointed to the escape boat a hundred feet to their right. “I’ll get it ready for launch while you redirect the ship.”

“What about the pheromone?”

“That escape boat should be nearly airtight. I’ll probably be safe in there. Just give me another dose for the run over to it.”

Odin glanced at McKinney. “Is he making sense?”

She nodded. “We’ll go through less pheromone, and if the boat’s watertight and he’s quiet, he should be okay.”

Odin nodded to Foxy. “Do it.”

“I’ll be ready to launch when you head down.”

McKinney sprayed him a double dose and watched him race off toward the starboard side.

Odin pulled her along, and in a moment they undid the latch on a waterproof door and entered the stairwell of the tower. McKinney pulled the door closed behind them with a clang. Almost immediately the deafening noise of the drones dropped to a tolerable level.

“God, that sound is from hell.” She gazed up the stairwell.

“There’s an elevator, but I don’t think we should risk it.” Odin smeared partially dried blood with the toe of his boot. The trail of blood led into the elevator lobby. He drew his pistol and motioned for her to follow him up the stairs.

Since they were both physically fit, they made quick work of the eight-story climb, and could now hear the penetrating hum of the drone engines return, along with a salt-laden breeze. Odin climbed the last stretch of stairs warily, with McKinney close behind. They emerged near the center of the ship’s bridge and could see the entire place was spattered with blood, broken glass, and bullet holes. A dozen small quadracopter drones and an even greater number of wire-cutter drones moved in and out of the control room through the blasted-out windows. A twenty-mile-an-hour wind was blowing through it, sending loose papers flying.

Odin led her up to the central console, but half the computer screens here were shot out. There were literally hundreds of bullet holes peppering the walls and equipment. “Goddammit…”

They stepped around the console to find a dead crewman on the floor. McKinney caught her breath at the sight of his mangled body. He’d been shot so many times in the face and upper torso that most of that portion was spattering the walls and floor around him, along with a five-foot-diameter pool of half-dried blood. What humanized him to her in a disturbing way was the man’s Felix the Cat wristwatch and bright green sneakers.

McKinney ducked down as one of the smaller quadracopters hovered toward them. She sprayed her and Odin with pheromone again, her fear coming back.

Odin spoke into the intrateam radio. “Foxy, the nav computer screen’s been shot out. Half the bridge controls are fucked. I’m going to redirect the ship manually.”

“Got it. Escape boat’s ready to go when you are.”

“I’ll be here awhile. I need to make sure we’ll hit those rocks.”

“Standing by.”

Odin stood up and started tapping buttons to disengage the autopilot. Chimes sounded. Then Odin moved to the ship’s surprisingly small rudder wheel. Closely watching the ship’s compass, he started spinning it to port. Slowly the ship began to lean slightly to the right as its massive length turned left, toward the east.

McKinney came up alongside him, looking down the length of the massive ship, covered and alive with the colony of drones.

He looked at her. “Take the pheromone capsule and get to the escape boat.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He regarded her and shook his head. Then he grabbed the MBITR radio. “TOC, this is Safari-One-Six actual. We have successfully redirected the Ebba Maersk. Abort your attack run. Repeat. Abort your attack run.”

“H allelujah! Hey, Mooch, Ripper, you hear that?” Smokey brought the powerful Bentley slaloming down a ramp and screeching around a pillar, while several of the lawn mower-sized quadracopters hovered down the ramp after him, opening up with machine guns as he passed. Seven or eight more drones were already on this deck, and their streaming bullets raked across lines of plastic-covered BMWs strapped in tight rows and pinged off the steel plating covering his windows and doors. “Goddammit!”

He keyed the radio. “You hear that, Captain Jonsson? Turn us to the mainland!”

There was a pause, and the captain’s voice came in. “We’ve got two feet of water in the engine room. We’re taking on water in three compartments. There are fires on four decks!”

Smokey cringed as he passed a garage compartment with dozens of sedans fully engulfed in flames-smoke billowing up through the powerful vents and fire sprinklers engaged. “Will the damned thing stay afloat?”

A pause. “It’ll stay afloat.”

“Then turn the damned boat!”

Smokey screeched around a corner, smashing a drone against the wall and smearing it to pieces in a shower of sparks. But then something caught under his wheel and the Bentley veered sharply and flipped onto its side as it slid down a ramp onto the heavy equipment deck.

“Dammit!” Smokey held on as the car rolled and landed against another pillar at the base of the ramp. It finally came to a stop, and already bullets were raking its sides. He keyed the radio. “Ripper! Mooch! I need help. I’m rolled!” He tried to kick the top door open, but the deck ceiling was too low with the car on its side to open the door.

Ripper’s voice came in. “Coming.”

Smokey tried to shrink his body to as small a silhouette as possible as hovering drones riddled the Bentley with gunfire. He grabbed the key and turned the engine off. Then he aimed his MP5 through a narrow view port in the steel, raking a quadracopter drone.

He heard a large engine headed his way and moved to the other side just in time to see the bucket of the front loader lowering and smashing into the side of his car, spinning it free of the ramp and sliding it across the decking on its roof before raising the bucket and flipping it right-side up. Inside he went sprawling against the door.

Smokey crawled back toward the front seat, shouting into his radio, “Goddamn you, Ripper!”

“You all right?”

“Yeah.” He watched the front loader smash its bucket down on top of a quadracopter drone firing at her, crushing it against the floor.

“ Die, fucker! Die!”

“You’re a sick lady, Ripper.”

E vans followed the captain up a narrow flight of steel stairs and gazed back behind them at rising, bubbling seawater amid thick pipes and machinery below. Adrenaline had by now made him almost completely sober.

The captain grabbed his sleeve, practically dragging him up the steps. “We need to seal this compartment. Where the hell is that other man?”

“He locked himself in the generator room.”

The captain stopped and pointed back down. “Go get him! I need to manage the bilge pumps to make sure we don’t capsize.” He shoved Evans. “Do it!”

The captain raced ahead and through the watertight door. Looking down again, Evans realized he could now see actual underwater cutting torches in the dark bubbling water. “Oh, no way…”

Suddenly Ritter scrambled through a side door some distance below. He was shouting, “Which way is out of this goddamned place!”

Evans nodded and started racing up the stairs. Ritter took off in his direction, mounting the steps as well.

Once he got to the watertight door, Evans turned to see the ocean surging upward now.

Ritter shouted, “No! Don’t close the door!”

Evans grimaced. “Nothing personal, asshole. Just business.” He slammed it shut and locked it down with the turn bolts. The metal was so thick he could barely hear the screams on the other side.

M cKinney and Odin remained on the bridge of the Ebba Maersk for nearly twenty minutes. The pheromone canister was getting low, but up ahead was the unmistakable outline of waves crashing against rocks. It stretched in a line across a third of the near horizon.

Odin had been manually adjusting the wheel back and forth for the entire run.

“Are we close enough to jump ship?”

“Just a bit more-we’ve come this far. We need to be sure. How we doing on pheromone?”

She shook the canister. “Not much. Maybe an inch left on the bottom, but at our consumption rate that should be plenty.”

The quadracopter drones were even then starting to investigate their human breath again. McKinney depressed the nozzle to spray another dose on them.

But nothing came out.

She shook it and tried the nozzle several more times.

He noticed her efforts. “What’s wrong?”

“Propellant. There’s no more damned propellant.”

They exchanged deadly serious looks and looked out at the thousands and thousands of drones around them. McKinney could see a quadracopter edging up over the windowsill of the control room, headed straight toward them.

Odin aimed the pistol and shot once, knocking it out of the air where it disappeared below the window. “Dammit!”

They could both see jagged rocks foaming in waves several kilometers ahead. He picked up a pair of range-finding binoculars in a holder on the console. He focused them on the rocks. “Two and a half kilometers. We just need to stay alive for about four more minutes.”

McKinney pointed as a dozen quadracopter drones in two sizes started gathering around the bridge. She turned back the way they had come, to see that direction being closed off by twice as many more.

Odin grabbed the canister and threw it onto the console. “Stand back!” He aimed the pistol obliquely at the metal and fired several shots in succession, finally causing the canister to rattle across the floor.

McKinney grabbed it, only to find the dents hadn’t penetrated.

Odin leaned down next to her. “Lean it against the wall.”

McKinney carefully placed it and glanced around to see now six or seven dozen quadracopter drones gathering around the control tower. “Odin!”

He was busy aiming at the nozzle tip of the canister. He fired a shot that sent it rolling across the floor again. He scrambled after it, only to pick it up and find the nozzle pinched completely closed. He swung it around, trying to drain anything out of it. But nothing came.

He pointed at her backpack. “Anything at all?”

She unzipped it to show the detector-which showed fairly high levels of perfluorocarbon-and the metal canister of oleoresin capsicum. “This just induces the attack signal.” She glanced around them as the quadracopters closed in. “And there’s about to be plenty of that around here already.”

He took it from her, then keyed the radio. “Foxy. If you don’t hear from us in two minutes, launch the boat.”

There was a pause of static, then: “Fuck you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Foxy, listen to me.”

“You’re breaking up.”

He sighed and looked to McKinney.

They couldn’t help but notice the solid wall of drones closing in around them. Their path to the stairwell was already blocked.

McKinney moved toward him, watching the drones move in.

Odin held her. They stood with their faces just an inch apart. The horrendous sound of the drone engines still hummed deafeningly all around them. A glance forward and she could see the rocks looming larger. “We did it. We stopped them-for now, at least.”

Odin nodded and kissed her.

McKinney felt tears welling up as he kissed them away. “I wanted a chance to know you, David.”

He nodded. “Then know this about me.” Odin hefted the canister of capsicum. “I don’t ever give up.”

He kissed her quickly, then turned and smashed the nozzle end of the capsicum canister against the console, breaking off the tip. With the full canister under pressure it started hissing madly.

“What the hell are you doing? That’ll enrage them!”

“I’m counting on it.” He turned and hurled the canister out the window on the opposite side of the ship from the rescue boat. The canister tumbled end over end, falling ten stories into the canyons of the shipping containers below-gathering a swarm of drones in its wake, even as it fell. The unprecedented concentration must have been like a beacon, because the power of the attack signal spread quickly and the entire host around the ship’s bridge plunged down after it, creating a dense, mad crowd that jostled each other in pursuit.

Odin grabbed her by the arm. “Run like hell!”

McKinney smiled in surprise even as he pulled her along. Odin shot two small lingering drones out of the air near the stairwell and motioned for her to take the lead as he covered their rear. As they descended the stairs, McKinney could see through the portholes as hundreds of drones streamed past outside the bridge tower in pursuit of the canister. McKinney couldn’t wipe the grin off her face as she circled down the stairwell. “Very clever, mammal!”

“Just keep moving.”

At deck level they pushed through the watertight door and sprinted across the crimson-painted deck. The roar of drone engines coming from the far side of the control tower had risen to a crescendo by now. The air there was black with drones. They dashed across the decking and up to the sealed door of the rescue boat. There was a round porthole above the door near the words 38 Persons. Odin undid the latch and opened the door to reveal Foxy staring at him from the pilot’s seat.

“You’re such a drama queen…”

Odin helped McKinney inside. “Careful, it’s steep.” He held her hand as she climbed in.

She had never seen such a boat. The seats were heavily padded and facing backward like a theme park ride. Only Foxy’s seat faced forward, looking through what appeared to be a reinforced pilot’s window. Otherwise there was only one other forward-facing window to let light in. The thing resembled a big orange torpedo angled downward at forty-five degrees.

Odin glanced toward the bow of the ship, and then ducked inside, slamming the hatch shut and throwing the bolts.

Foxy peered through the narrow side window. “If I’m not mistaken, those are rocks up ahead. Get seated, people!”

McKinney was already strapping herself in as Odin climbed into a seat across the aisle from her. He raced through the fasteners, and then shouted, “Hit it, Foxy!”

Foxy pounded a release button, and they dropped in free fall for a second or two before plunging into the sea, fully submerging. The impact knocked the wind out of her. The rescue boat rolled and bobbed like a cork and finally surfaced, as the roar of drones and something even deeper came to them.

Then she heard a water jet engine kick to life and saw Foxy push the throttle lever forward. “I don’t give us much chance of outrunning them.”

Odin unbuckled from his seat. “I do. They’re otherwise occupied.”

McKinney unbuckled as well and joined him to look out the narrow porthole above the rear entry door. She held her breath as the massive container ship, swarming with drones, thundered past behind them-a wall of blue steel the size of a shopping mall.

She craned her neck to look ahead, toward rocks rising ten meters out of the sea in a swirl of crashing waves.

And then the bow of the ship crumpled and ripped apart as it steamed full speed over itself along the line of jagged rocks. The water reverberated with the horrendous shrieking of metal, but the momentum of two hundred thousand tons of ship and cargo going twenty miles an hour just kept it plunging forward, rippling the bowline and spilling thousands and thousands of forty-foot shipping containers into the sea and over the shoals.

The cloud of drones dispersed, while many were caught in the collapsing towers of containers. The ship was already grounded up to its center tower when it started to break in half, flames erupting as the crash continued for nearly a minute more before the wreckage finally came to a stop.

The whole time Foxy roared away at full speed from the scene, increasing their view of the wreck.

The stern of the ship settled back against the shallows, and the bow remained buried under a ridgeline of multicolored shipping containers crawling with thousands of agitated and completely disorganized drones-some now flying around on fire. Billowing clouds of black smoke climbed into the sky, marking the spot.

McKinney nodded to herself. “Looks like colony cohesion has collapsed. That’s not precisely how it works in the real world. I’ll have to look at the model.”

Odin just glared at her. “The hell you will…”