Polaris

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Pete’s small fleet of experimental drones could fly, and they could even kill, accurately dropping their small bombs on targets of all shapes and sizes. But they couldn’t talk. This final problem was critical. With their small, ten-pound bombs, they could work effectively only in swarms. They were designed to overwhelm their targets with sheer quantity, pouring hundreds of bombs on targets from hundreds of directions. At the same time, any kind of traditional radio communication could be jammed or intercepted by the enemy, making the drones useless or, worse, able to be turned against the Alliance. After a brief but fantastically expensive failure with laser communications — one drone convinced another to crash into a boathouse on the coast of Northern California, near the testing range — Pete left the smoldering wreckage on the beach too tired even to feel defeated. He was nearly ready to declare the entire dream a failure while it was still in the experimental phase. His career would be ruined, but the Alliance would be saved a few million dollars, and they could move on to more promising weapons platforms.

He’d begun working on the autonomous drone five years earlier. At that time, it was a highly experimental project that the Pentagon had indulged with a few million research dollars. That indulgence was largely the result of Pete’s imaginative proposal, in which he envisioned an autonomous armada of low-cost drones that could dominate a battlefield, region, or, perhaps, an entire ocean. Drones had been around for decades, so putting an unmanned plane in the sky was no longer extraordinary. But Pete Hamlin prophesied a day when hundreds of them would work together with deadly effectiveness, and this promise was enough to ensure a steady trickle of research dollars.

Two years into his project, the war began, followed soon after by the formation of the Alliance. The trickle of dollars turned into a river of money. The Allies had been startled to discover at the start of the war that they’d lost control of the seas. They had giant, advanced ships, planes, and submarines, but Typhon had numbers, seemingly endless flotillas that quickly seized control of the sea lanes from their outnumbered opponents. So long had the Allies gone without a meaningful shipbuilding program that even the shipyards had disappeared, taking with them the welders, engineers, and mechanics who actually knew how to construct ships of war. The smallest Allied ship took almost a year to build. Typhon turned out a ship a day from its noisy shipyards. The paltry Allied construction program couldn’t keep up with the losses they were taking at Typhon’s hands. For lack of alternatives, Pete’s old proposal steadily rose to the top of the Alliance, a potential way to seize the initiative without building a thousand ships.

But as the money and the focus increased, so did the pressure, and the disappointments. Pete simply couldn’t get his drones to communicate intelligently with each other, a failure that was represented vividly by that smoky crater on a California beach.

Back at his hotel, he ordered room service: an overpriced rib eye steak and a beer. It was an extravagance, but he didn’t want to leave his room, knowing the drone crash had made the news — he didn’t want to see it on television or overhear any local speculation. While he waited for his food to arrive, he logged on to his personal computer, something he rarely did both because he was nearly always at work and because it wasn’t secure. His life hadn’t had room for leisurely Internet browsing.

He was about to check out college football scores when he noted curiously that his Internet browser suggested to him a series of articles about someone named Tom Healy. Healy was a Cornell professor who was making waves in popular culture with his books about honeybees. His most recent had the catchy title Hive Democracy. It was his browser’s mistake, Pete realized with a smile, brought to him by the word “drone,” common in both his work and the work of Professor Tom Healy. He almost skipped the links, but it was late, and he didn’t have the energy to look up anything on his own. He clicked through and began reading. Pete read the introduction to Healy’s book, and watched a video in which the professor explained the sublime, efficient ways that bees communicated.

It was called the waggle dance. Supremely simple and elegant, engineered by millions of years of evolution, the bees could communicate the exact location of a food source, or a potential hive site, with amazing accuracy. Moreover, they could actually vote on hive locations, invariably picking the best, most strategic location. All of this strictly with their movements and their vision.

At some point, Hamlin let the room service waiter in, and the food grew cold on the room’s small table as Pete continued to read.

At 3:00 A.M., he had booked his flight to Ithaca, New York.

Pete had actually been to Cornell once before, recruiting engineers for his program as he had from all of the nation’s finest schools. He remembered it being filled with Gothic architecture, a beautiful place, a Hollywood set designer’s idea of what a college campus should look like.

The Dyce Laboratory for Honeybee Studies was nothing like that.

It was a thoroughly utilitarian building, one story of turquoise-colored corrugated metal, with garage doors on one side and few windows. It looked more like a small-town welding shop than it did part of a prestigious university, and in fact, it was well north of the campus. There were no ivy vines in sight, no clock towers, just pine trees and rolling hills. And everywhere, a low but persistent buzzing.

“Professor Hamlin?” The professor was walking toward him as Pete got out of his rental car on the gravel drive.

“Just Pete,” he answered. “I’m not a professor.”

Tom Healy shook his head. “I wasn’t sure,” he said, smiling. “And some people get uptight about those things.” The professor’s appearance suited the plain surroundings: rumpled shirt, cargo shorts, thin hair grown long and combed over a balding scalp. Pete knew his rumpled appearance masked a stellar academic career: he was a world-class authority on neurobiology, a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, in what he claimed was his most enduring honor, he had a species of bee named for him: Neocorynurella healyi.

The professor led him to his small, cluttered office and offered him a cup of tea, which Pete declined.

“Come on!” said the professor. “It’s just an excuse to use some of our fresh honey! I’m not helping you until you try it.”

He pulled out a small decanter, and Pete relented with a grin. The professor poured into his steaming mug a generous dollop of honey.

“God,” said Pete after a taste. “That really is good.”

“Told you,” said the professor. “That’s our ‘last taste of summer,’ batch, you’re lucky you got here in time.”

Pete put down the mug on the corner of the professor’s worn desk, and pulled out his copy of Hive Democracy from his briefcase.

“Ah,” said Healy. “Another fan.”

“It was fascinating,” said Pete. “Truly. Obviously I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

The professor waved his hand in the air. “It’s my third book on the subject, but the first time I’ve ever been asked on the Today Show. I’m the beneficiary of a provocative title, and I can thank my editor for that.”

“But you believe it, right?” asked Pete. “You believe the bees actually practice democracy like we do?”

The professor nodded his head skeptically. “Actually, I think they practice it a little better than we do. They almost always make the right decision, as a group; I’ve proved it experimentally.”

“And why do you think their system works so well?”

“This is something I’ve thought a lot about,” said Healy. “For one thing, the bees all have a common goal: survival. They are making life-and-death decisions together. And secondly, while they don’t all have the same information, they all have the same preferences. So when they truthfully communicate their information to each other, they always agree on the correct path.”

Pete nodded, waiting to hear more.

“This is your area of interest, correct?” said the professor.

“It is,” said Pete.

“And you’re with the Department of Agriculture?”

“Yes,” said Pete, almost forgetting his cover story. The Department of Agriculture had a sizable presence at Cornell, and provided large amounts of funding to the university. It was both a plausible cover story and one that would encourage Healy to cooperate.

“How long have you been there?” asked the professor.

“Less than a year,” said Pete. “And I’m a consultant. Haven’t really learned my way around the bureaucracy yet.” He was trying to head off any obvious questions about the agency that he wouldn’t be able to answer.

“I see,” said the professor, nodding. “Well, you must be important. Or working on an important project. I’ve worked with a lot of Ag Department folks over the years, and this is the first time one of them was able to take a charter jet to see me on one day’s notice.”

Pete didn’t respond. He doubted he could bullshit a man as smart as Healy, so he decided to let it hang there, and let the professor decide whether he wanted to help or not. While Pete’s motives might be a little mysterious, the professor couldn’t doubt his influence, or the power of his backers.

He sipped his tea and continued to look Hamlin over. “How about we go for a walk?” he said. “I can’t leave them alone too long out there,” he said.

“The bees?”

“No,” said Healy. “Grad students.”

They walked across an expanse of grass to where a path entered the woods. Pete followed the professor into the trees. The air cooled instantly when they stepped into the shade, and Pete could tell that just as the name of Healy’s honey had indicated, the end of summer in upstate New York was rapidly approaching.

“How much do you know about bees?” asked Healy.

“What I read in your book,” he said. “Queens, workers, and drones.”

A bee flew by them in the air.

“So what kind is that?” said the professor lightheartedly, pointing.

“A worker?”

“Good guess!” he said. “Odds are very good. Queens rarely leave the hive, and drones wouldn’t be flying around out here looking for pollen.”

“They don’t?”

“No. Drones are the only males in the hive,” he said. “Their only role is to impregnate a queen. Consequently, they are the only bees in the hive without a stinger.”

“Really?” said Pete. He was struck by the irony, the drones of the hive being the only “unarmed” members. Without giving away his real reason for visiting Cornell, that made him curious. “So how did the word ‘drone’ come to mean—”

“What it means now? In ancient times, we thought drones were lazy, because they didn’t leave the hive to seek food or do any work. The term came to be synonymous with a lazy, idle worker. Subsequently, the name ‘drone’ was given to mindless machines. Of course now—”

“Drones have evolved.”

“And the term along with them.” The professor was staring hard at him now, and Pete was eager to keep the conversation moving.

“What happens to the drones after they impregnate the queen?”

“They die. The penis and abdominal tissues are ripped out after successful mating.”

“Jesus.”

Healy knelt down and pointed to a bee on a purple flower.

“One of yours?” asked Pete.

“It’s not marked, but quite possibly.” They watched it climb over the outside of the flower for a few seconds, and then take off. It spiraled into the air and flew down the path.

“My old mentor, Professor Martin Lindauer, used to actually run after the bees when he observed them. They fly about six miles per hour, so you can keep up — although it’s not easy running through the woods while trying to keep your eye on a bee.”

“I can imagine,” said Hamlin. “Do you do that?”

“I used to,” he said. “Not so much anymore.” He stood up from the flower, and looked Pete up and down. Assessing him. “So you want to learn the language these bees use to communicate?”

Pete nodded. “I do.”

“You know what we call it?”

“The waggle dance.”

“Good!” said the professor, happy with his pupil. “That’s exactly right. But the waggle dance was discovered decades ago. By Karl von Frisch. He won a Nobel Prize for it. It’s been studied thoroughly ever since, well documented, debated, revised. You’ve got decades of research to draw from. What do you need me for?”

“My understanding,” said Pete, “is that the waggle dance is how they communicate the location of food supplies. But I want to know how they make decisions as a group, decide on objectives, prioritize their work. The democracy of the hive, so to speak. That’s what I want to learn about.…”

The professor nodded, and seemed to think it over. Another bee landed on the flower, and they again watched it collect pollen and take off, flying the same route as its sister.

“OK,” said the professor. “Let me show you a few things that might help.”

The path came out of the woods. At the edge of the clearing ahead was a wooden structure, looking much like a small road sign — although there were no roads anywhere near them, not even the sound of cars. Two scruffy graduate students stood by it, both with clipboards. Between them was a small video camera on a tripod, aimed directly at the board. As they got closer, Pete thought the board appeared to be moving.

Then he realized it was covered in thousands of bees.

“This is called a swarm board,” said the professor. “A swarm is group of bees that has left its hive. The swarm has but one job: to find a new location for a hive. And it’s a life-or-death decision.” Bees came and went from the swarm, a cloud of them swirling around the buzzing mass. Pete had always pictured beekeepers draped in white, protective clothing, with pith helmets and protective face masks. But everyone present other than him seemed unbothered by the tens of thousands of stinging insects that undulated in a mass in front of them. Everyone was dressed like the professor, shorts and T-shirts, not even gloves to protect them.

“Are they looking for a new home right now?” asked Pete. “They don’t look like they’re doing anything.”

The professor nodded. “The swarm is made up of about ten thousand worker bees. Of that, the oldest, most experienced bees — about three hundred — become scouts. They go out, look for suitable locations, and come back and communicate the location to the swarm.” Pete wanted to get a better look at the swarm but didn’t want to stick his face any closer.

“With the waggle dance?”

“Exactly,” said the professor. “But then they collectively decide, over a day or so, what the best location is.”

“And they get it right?”

“Always,” said the professor.

“What makes one location better than another?”

The professor nudged one of the grad students, who was staring into space. “Will, you tell him.”

“Height,” answered Will. “They want to be high off the ground so animals can’t get into it. Ideally, they want a small entrance, also to keep predators away. And volume. The bigger the better.”

“Good!” said the professor, slapping him on the back. The professor was obviously brilliant, Pete knew from his credentials. But he also clearly enjoyed working with young people.

Suddenly a bee stung Pete on his forearm.

“Ouch!” he said, sweeping the dead bee away. It fell to the ground. The pain spread through his arm as he looked down at the small black stinger that still protruded from his skin. He plucked it out and looked at the painful red spot that the bee had given its life for.

The professor smiled. “OK, now you’re really one of us!”

“You guys get stung too?”

“All the time,” said Will. “We’re just used to it.”

Another bee landed on Pete’s arm. He stayed perfectly still until it flew away.

“Feel like moving somewhere else?” said the professor.

“Sure,” said Pete.

“Let’s go look at their potential homes.”

They walked back into the woods down another path, Pete occasionally rubbing his arm where he’d been stung. When they came into a clearing, Pete saw another wooden structure, this time a box. A lone grad student was sitting in a chair beside it, sheltered from the sun by a large multicolored umbrella. She was in a beach chair, relaxed, her long legs crossed.

“We have four boxes set up like this all around the woods,” said Healy. “They’re all identical, except for size. One is forty liters, the others are fifteen.”

“This one?” said Pete, pointing.

“This one is not the forty-liter dream home,” said Healy. “This one is the small fixer-upper.”

“Do all the scouts look at all the sites?”

“No,” said Healy, “and this is what’s fascinating. The same scouts will visit this site over and over, bring that information back to the swarm. But in their communications, which are always truthful, the swarm will choose the right site.”

“How do you know which scouts go to which site?” said Pete.

“I’ll show you!” said Healy, and they marched forward.

The potential home was a small wooden box inside a three-sided shelter. But Pete couldn’t tear his eyes away from the young woman in the beach chair.

“Pamela!” said Healy. “My star pupil.”

She rolled her eyes at the praise.

“Tell our guest what you are doing.…”

“Watching and waiting…” she said, making a dramatic flourish with her hand. She then leaned back in the chair, folded her arms, and waited for Pete to react. She was blond, and tall — he could tell, even with her sitting down, by the length of her tanned, athletic legs. She had piercing blue eyes that she trained on Pete without mercy. He could tell that she was used to paralyzing guys like him with a glance, enjoyed the sport of it. The professor, an experienced observer of all things living, recognized what was going on and was amused.

Suddenly, she leaned forward. A bee had landed on the sill of the box, in front of the small hole that was the entrance. As it wandered inside, Pamela placed a small net in front of the opening.

When the bee came out, it was trapped. She pulled it away and gripped the bee by its wings. With her free hand she took a tiny paint brush, the kind you might use on a model airplane, and painted a tiny yellow dot on the back of the bee. She released the bee, and it flew away. The entire operation had taken extraordinary delicacy.

“That’s how we know, back at the swarm, which bees come from which box. Each has a different color.”

Pete felt pressure to say something, anything, to look intelligent, as Pamela leaned over to catch another scout bee that was leaving the hive.

“Doesn’t that bother them?” he said. “Getting held and painted?”

“No,” she said brightly, looking up at him and waiting for the bee to enter the net. “They don’t even know they’ve been caught.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Quality versus quantity is an ancient military debate. Is it better to have a few expensive weapons systems with exquisite capabilities, or vast quantities of less capable systems that can be thrown at the enemy en masse? Overwhelmingly, the history of combat teaches that quantity almost always wins over quality. Put three noisy, slow submarines against a quiet, modern submarine, and the slow submarines will probably win. Raise the ratio to 5:1, and the modern sub is doomed. It might shoot the first enemy, maybe even the second, but in doing so it will reveal its position and deplete its torpedoes. Similar logic can be applied to tanks, planes, and even platoons of infantrymen. This idea was first quantified in World War I by British military theorist Frederick Lanchester, who created Lanchester’s law: all things being equal, a twofold increase in combat units will result in a fourfold increase in combat power.

World War II proved the truth of Lanchester’s law again and again. The Germans produced better planes and tanks than the Allies. The Panzer and the Stuka were superior to anything the Allies could put together, especially early in the war. But the Allies’ sheer quantity, driven primarily by American manufacturing might, overwhelmed any German advantage. By 1944, the Allies were producing a ship every day, and a plane, incredibly, every five minutes. The Russians, too, always believers in the power of numbers, outmanufactured their enemies to the point that any German technological advantage was negated. The spectacle of the Soviet May Day parade was an annual manifestation of this philosophy, endless columns of men and munitions. Stalin summed it up memorably with his quote: “Quantity has a quality of its own.”

After World War II, however, the United States backed away from this proven philosophy. Unable to produce either vast quantities of arms or massive standing armies, due to both political and budgetary limitations, the United States banked on its technological prowess. The result was fewer and fewer platforms of ever-increasing power. This was true across all branches, as the Pentagon procured ever-more-expensive tanks, submarines, and airplanes. In a vicious cycle, as the cost of each platform went up, the number of them procured went down. Norman Augustine, former under secretary of the Army, theorized only partially tongue-in-cheek that by 2054, at the historic rate of increase, the entire US defense budget would be used to procure a single airplane. He suggested that it be used three and a half days a week each by the Navy and the Air Force, with the Marine Corps getting it once every leap year.

Study after study, and war game after war game, showed the preeminence of quantity over quality. A 2009 RAND study about an air war with China over the Strait of Taiwan speculated that the newest US plane, the F-22, was twenty-seven times more capable than the Chinese plane. The study further assumed that the F-22’s missiles, eight per plane, would be 100 percent effective, every one of them finding and destroying a Chinese plane. No matter. In the study, the Chinese launched eight hundred sorties of their vastly inferior jets on the first day and won the battle easily. But still the United States went on buying its incredibly complex, incredibly expensive, and incredibly scarce weapons platforms while their enemies built weapons that were more crude, but infinitely more deadly because of their sheer numbers.

The advent of drones and the escalation of the Typhon threat forced the United States and her allies to reconsider. Unmanned craft could allow the United States to leverage huge quantities of munitions without putting millions of men in uniform. American manufacturing once again asserted itself, manufacturing thousands upon thousands of simple, low-cost drones. No single system in the drones was revolutionary; it was all tested and relatively low-cost technology. Each flew with relatively few sensors, a single bomb, and an elegantly reliable power plant. A single drone was not a formidable opponent; it was never designed to be. But hundreds of drones were terrifying. A swarm of thousands was unstoppable.

Teaching the drones the language of the bees proved the final piece of the puzzle. While it was by no means easy, Pete could see from the outset that it would work. He soon recruited many of the world’s greatest apiculture experts, although not Professor Healy himself, who seemed immune to the Alliance’s generous offers of support. Pamela, too, stayed at Cornell, but Pete saw her often when he visited the campus to pursue the mysteries of the bees’ language.

Soon they had converted the entire language of the bees into a grammar, and that into logic that they could program into the drones. It was an extraordinarily rich language, Pete found, and one that suited their purposes perfectly. Like the bees, his drones were all identical; they shared a complete unity of purpose, and they were making life-or-death decisions. They soon taught the drones to communicate with each other clearly, without radio signals of any kind, just with the motion of their flight. Where the bees sought sources of pollen and debated new sites for their hive, the drones sought targets, and prioritized the biggest and best of them before swarming upon them and killing them.

Pete first trained two drones to talk to each other at the Atlantic Test Ranges, one drone finding another so they could coordinate an attack on a target being towed by a Navy destroyer. Two months later, a swarm of twenty drones performed flawlessly at the Atlantic Test Ranges, taking down three remote-controlled ships and penetrating a cloud of countermeasures.

In parallel with the test flights, Pete scouted locations for the Pacific drone station. The ideal spot would be located centrally, would have at least three hundred days of sunshine a year, and would be isolated, so that no one would become curious as they constructed the airfield. It seemed like fate when he found Eris Island, an obscure medical research station that was already part of the federal inventory.

Pete suddenly found himself speaking to groups of Navy admirals. Seabees would land on Eris and construct his airfield. The second group focused on hurriedly transforming the entire Pacific fleet into a submerged force. The submarine construction program accelerated, and plans were made to route surface ships to the other side of the world. If Pete’s drones worked as he promised they would, submarines would soon be the only ship that could safely cross the sea.

Pete Hamlin walked through the rows of drones at Eris Island. He took a deep breath and contemplated the culmination of all his work: years of solitary research, followed by his modest research program, followed by the frenzy that came with the war and the Alliance’s pressing needs. Just one year had passed since he’d discovered the language of the bees at Cornell, the final piece of the puzzle that made the whole system work. Since then, his drones had behaved like bees in ways beyond their language. Like a swarm of bees, the drones had found the ideal home, landed their scouts, and multiplied prodigiously.

Pete admired the perfect, parallel rows of drones as he walked between them, but he knew that order would soon be gone. Randomness was an important component of their every algorithm, in the air and on the landing field where they would refuel, soaking up the island’s dependable sun, and rearm by ingesting bombs from the magazines that surrounded them. Randomness made them harder to track, harder to shoot, harder to predict. It was what military planners called a “force multiplier.” If the enemy didn’t know precisely where each drone would be, they would have to plan for them to be in multiple places at multiple times, magnifying the drones’ effectiveness. Soon they would be scattered randomly across the airfield and in the sky, in a pattern that was never a pattern — impossible to predict, shoot down, or counteract.

The drones had proved themselves in test flights of growing size and complexity, but now they would take to the air en masse, a live weapons system. It gave Pete pause to think about it like that — if everything worked, these drones before him would soon take human lives. He hoped that in short order they would become a deterrent, a force that would keep the enemy at bay. But before that, if he was to be successful, they would inevitably have to sink ships and kill people.

A control room full of people, unseen behind the tinted glass of the control tower, would witness the launch in person. Beyond Pete’s gaze, in the sea that surrounded Eris Island, six Alliance submarines waited somewhere, submerged, also to observe, and to keep the enemy at bay. If one believed recent intelligence reports, an enemy submarine was lurking out there, too — watching, waiting. While the Navy brass fretted, Pete hoped that was true, relishing the thought of a Typhon commander trying to describe in a terse message what he was seeing. But as Pete walked among the drones on the eve of their mass launch, he worried that one variable he’d failed to account for would defeat them like the enemy never could.

Seagull shit.

As the first squadron of one thousand drones had arrived on the island, so had a relentless flock of gulls. No one knew for sure what brought them, but it was probably a result of the increased human activity at the island, and the inevitable stream of refuse that the gulls fed on. The birds found a hospitable home on the island, and as their numbers grew, they began to defecate prodigiously all over Pete’s armada of drones. The white droppings showed up dramatically on the drones’ black wings, and every day the coverage grew, far faster than the cleaning crews could keep up with. It mixed with the white dust of the island and turned into a kind of paste that dried like cement. It demanded scraping, but scraping could harm the composite material that made the drones. So instead crews went from drone to drone with large, damp sponges and tried to wipe them off while the excrement was still soft and fresh. And while it did indeed look horrible, the thick splotches coating nearly every aircraft, this was much more than a cosmetic problem. The accumulated seagull residue was heavy, and could add as much as a pound to the forty-pound weight of the drones: a 2.5 percent increase in mass. The dull blobs detracted from the aerodynamics of the drones, further impacting their range and speed. Finally, and worst of all: the bodies of the drones were covered in solar cells, and Pete was seriously worried that the opaque shit of the gulls might impair their flight, perhaps even grounding them if they couldn’t charge their batteries in the bright sun.

Seagull deterrence wasn’t something he had studied before, but he found that there was a large body of work on the subject, the result of a few high-profile disasters of commercial airlines ingesting seagulls in their engines during takeoff. (There was also the oddity that worldwide, many airports were located near garbage dumps, exacerbating the problem.) Following the advice of experts, they first tried scaring the birds away with shotgun blasts and sirens, but the canny gulls soon realized that the noises weren’t lethal and returned to the island, spreading their waste all over the bodies of Hamlin’s highly engineered drones as they ignored the noise. Next, the Alliance imported a family of spirited Brittany spaniels to chase the birds off, but the dogs soon grew lazy in the island heat. Throughout, Pete’s engineering team took careful readings of the solar cells and battery charges that confirmed that the batteries were slow to charge and that the situation was getting worse as gulls continued to manufacture excrement at a rate that seemed nearly supernatural.

Pete had no doubt that once the drones took to the air, the problem would fix itself. The drones were designed to stay aloft for long periods of time, landing only when they needed to refuel or rearm. Having the whole fleet on the ground at once for the gulls to attack would never happen again, and hopefully the continuous takeoffs and landings would frighten the birds away. More important, the drone force would be largely autonomous. Once the initial launch was complete, most of the island’s human residents would depart, taking with them the bread crumbs and pizza crusts that the gulls found so appetizing. Once the drones deployed, Pete was confident, the bird problem would go away. But in the meantime they had a thousand stationary drones on the tarmac, and their batteries needed to be charged, which meant their solar cells had to be clean. Which was why he was standing in the middle of the tarmac with a fake falcon in his hands.

“Are we ready?” asked Admiral Stewart.

Pete jumped, and smiled. “You startled me.”

“I can tell,” he said. Admiral Wesley Stewart had been Hamlin’s opponent at first, an intense one at times, but he was fiercely intelligent and possessed a brilliant military mind. Hamlin was glad he was here for the launch. He realized that men like Stewart, even if they were beholden to an older style of warfare, would be vital in the coming fight. And to his credit, Stewart, once he had his orders to mobilize a submarine fleet such as the world had never seen, had fulfilled his mission with heroic speed and effectiveness.

He pointed at the bird in Pete’s hands. “This sounded like something I would want to see in person.” Gulls swooped and soared around them, leaving a small bubble of space around the two men but covering all the other drones that weren’t immediately in reach. Pete held out the fake falcon so the admiral could take a look. Even up close it was a convincing fake, lovingly painted to look like a peregrine falcon, from its painted-on tail feathers to its menacing, sharp eyes and pointy beak.

“You really think this is going to work?”

“The brochure said it would,” said Pete. The admiral laughed.

Pete turned to the tower and waved. The Robobird had arrived just the day before, so, mercifully, they’d had no time to develop a detailed procedure for what they were about to do. This would be an operation of pure trial and error. Pete was certain that, should the Robobird be successful, its success would be followed by many pages of Alliance doctrine and formalized procedures.

“Power it up?” asked the admiral. Pete nodded. The admiral pushed the green central button on the remote control he held, and its big wings began to flap. Pete was surprised at how much force it now took to hold it in place, the robot straining to take flight. Before he lost control of it completely, remembering what he’d read in the Robobird’s scant instruction manual, he threw the fake bird up and away, with a motion like he used to throw paper airplanes as a child.

It immediately flew away, wings pumping, looking for all the world like a real falcon. Pete took the controller from the admiral.

The Robobird had been invented by an eccentric pair of brothers in the Netherlands. They’d originally designed it for farmers, who hated seagulls for the way they could pick a freshly planted field clean in hours. But the Robobird had quickly found a following in the aviation community, for reasons that Pete immediately understood.

“My goodness,” said the admiral as the fake bird took flight.

“Pretty good replica, right?”

“I’d say so,” said the admiral. “What is that thing made out of?”

“Glass fiber and nylon composite,” said Pete.

“Like…”

“Yes,” Pete said, smiling, “just like our birds.”

When the bird reached altitude, Pete made it stop flapping. It banked and glided into the wind — just like a real falcon. Pete had spent his life studying machines that fly, but he’d never seen anything like this. He pulled it around into a tight loop, then with a couple of flaps propelled it upward again.

“Having fun?” said the admiral.

“Even if it doesn’t scare the gulls, I’m keeping this thing,” said Pete.

It was high above them now. “Let’s see if can scare a seagull.” Pete turned the bird into a dive and had it fly straight down toward a pack of loitering gulls.

“Here we go!” said the admiral.

The Robobird dived sharply with its convincing fake wings tucked behind it. It dropped right over the center of the airfield and then pulled up.

Fifty seagulls scattered instantly, in a squawking panic.

They landed a few dozen feet away, on another column of Pete’s grounded drones, but he had the Robobird follow them; this time they flew away with even greater urgency, sensing they were being pursued. They in turn alerted every bird they passed, until the skies were filled with noisy, panicked gulls.

Some peeled off from the group and tried to return, but Pete turned the Robobird and chased them back into the fleeing group. Pete had, in ten minutes, mastered the operation of the Robobird.

Within thirty minutes, there wasn’t a single seagull on the tarmac.

“I think that thing works!” said the admiral.

“And,” said Pete, chasing off a small pod of birds, “it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”

“My turn,” said the admiral, reaching for the controller.

“Take it,” said Pete, hating to give it up but eager to proceed. “I’ll get a crew down here to wash these drones.”

The next morning at dawn he walked the tarmac once again, among the orderly rows of now pristine drones. Some of them were still damp from the efforts of the crew that had spent all night washing their black, composite skin, and they gleamed in the early sun. They seemed to throb with potential energy as they gathered up sunlight and stored it deep in their batteries. He stopped and put his hand on one of them. It was low enough that he had to kneel. Just five feet and six inches long, and almost exactly twice as wide. The long, swept wings made it look like a glider, which, in fact, it was designed to be whenever possible to conserve energy. But a small, rear-mounted propeller provided the real thrust, the killing speed. On a bright day, with no targets to pursue, it would actually gain energy in the sky, storing more power from the solar cells that covered its wings than it burned by turning the propeller. The entire drone weighed just forty pounds, and carried a single bomb that weighed ten. It could soar as high as twenty thousand feet, and fly as fast as 80 knots. In a dive, it could go even faster. Its composite material was at once featherlight and incredibly strong; it felt warm against the palm of his hand, almost alive.

That composite had been one of the biggest engineering challenges they had handled in the design phase, but even that didn’t take them long. Making a material lighter and stronger: it was the kind of challenge that engineers lived for, especially when they had the benefit of attacking it with a virtually unlimited budget. Once the drones had learned the language of the bees, those engineers had to teach them every contingency, from avoiding typhoons to bombing submarines to attacking targets by crashing into them, once its lone bomb had been dropped. It quickly became a philosophical exercise as much as an engineering challenge, with generals, politicians, and ethicists joining in. At this point in the program, because of his own vast workload, Pete had to cede some control, allowing a team of Alliance engineers to encode the final program. Soon enough they’d taught the drones how to fight, how to kill, and how to survive. Underlying it all, they’d taught them how to talk to each other.

He saw movement in the corner of his eye; the admiral again approached.

“You looked lost in thought,” he said.

“I was.”

“You should take that as a good sign,” said the admiral, pointing upward. The Robobird was making a lazy circle in the sky, on autopilot, keeping the terrified seagulls away. “An auspicious start to the dawn of drone warfare.”

Hamlin smiled at that. “Let’s hope my drones work as well as the Robobird.”

“So… we’re ready?” asked the admiral.

“I know the machines are ready,” said Hamlin. “But are you asking me something more philosophical?”

The admiral smiled. “I know you’re not fond of philosophizing.”

“There’s a war going on,” said Hamlin. “And what we do today will make the difference.”

“Let’s hope so,” said the admiral. But Hamlin could hear the doubt in his voice.

“I’ll show you.”

They walked side by side back through the rows of drones all awaiting the signal from the tower to start their lives. The admiral looked comfortable in his khaki working uniform, all of his numerous medals and awards removed, only his prized gold dolphins, the mark of a submariner, still on his chest. Although twenty years older than Hamlin, he was fit, and Pete had a hard time keeping up without breathing hard. I’ve spent too much time behind a desk, he thought as they approached the base of the tower.

The admiral started to reach for a keypad that would recognize his fingerprints and give them entry, but Pete stopped him.

“Here,” he said, “I wanted you to see this.”

He removed a red key from around his neck, and held it up for the admiral to see.

“A key?” he asked, smiling.

“You told me how much you liked them,” said Pete. “I took it to heart.” He moved a small, nearly hidden access plate by the keypad to reveal a keyhole.

“For forty years, we used keys on the Trident submarines,” said the admiral, repeating a story he’d told Pete several times. “To control the missiles. Three different keys in three different hands. The system never failed.”

“We’ve got a dozen other electronic security measures,” said Hamlin. “All the latest in access control. But I thought if nothing else — it can’t hurt. I even painted it red, like you said the keys were on the Tridents.”

“Yes, the firing-unit keys. I appreciate that, Hamlin: an unexpected tribute to an old submariner.”

“Old-fashioned but reliable,” said Pete as a relay deep inside the blast-proof door turned, and the door swung open.

They entered a small, cylindrical elevator that took them up the short distance to the top of the tower. The tower, while the tallest structure on the island, was not all that high, because it was positioned so well on a natural rise that gave it a commanding view of the entire island. On one side of the tower was the tarmac, covered by buzzing drones. The rest of the island fell away from that, toward the far southern end where the old medical research station still resided. On the other side of the tower, the near side, a rocky outcropping dropped straight down to the sea. A crevice ran between them and that bluff, and was sometimes filled by the sea depending on the tides and the weather.

The elevator doors swept open, revealing a control room full of diligent workers. All possessed the same sense of earnestness, and the same barely contained eagerness. The room itself was a perfect hexagon, with broad windows on all six sides. With the tower’s ventilation system allowing the island’s warm, dry air inside, and the vague smell of new carpet in the air, it felt almost too luxurious to be a military facility. Pete knew that during the design phase, the admiral had insisted on hiding a rack of shotguns somewhere in the control room, but Pete was glad he couldn’t see them and couldn’t imagine a contingency that would require them. This was a new era of warfare, one that would depend on artificial intelligence and nylon fiber more than on cordite and lead. The admiral nodded at the small group of military personnel in the room who snapped to his attention as he entered. The rest of the team, civilians, nodded to acknowledge him and Hamlin before returning to their computer screens and their calculations. They had their companies’ logos on the backs of their shirts so that the various teams could be identified easily: Boeing, General Electric, Westinghouse, IBM. Together again, the military and America’s industrial giants, fighting a war.

The view was magnificent. They could see for miles in all directions, even straight above them, since much of the tower’s ceiling had been made of thick, blast-proof glass. Eris had begun life decades before as an obscure medical research station, little known by anyone outside the community of people who studied highly infectious diseases. A set of small medical laboratories still operated on the other side of the island — the only buildings on the island that looked weathered at all, every other structure thrown up hastily, with no expense spared, in the last twelve months. Pete had chosen Eris for some of the same reasons the surgeon general had chosen it fifty years before — it was nearly perfectly isolated, a small volcanic rock hundreds of miles from anything. In addition, it was also a true desert island, which made it an ideal candidate for Hamlin’s program: nearly 365 days a year of perfect, dry weather. Even with all the climate change they had witnessed in the past years, the rising oceans and the killing storms, Eris remained an enclave of temperate weather, which was key for Pete’s mission and the performance of his machines.

Not counting that odd report of an enemy submarine snooping in the area, their best intelligence told them that Typhon had thus far failed to recognize what they were up to. Admiral Stewart had been able to put his amphibious landing craft on the beach unopposed and begin the construction project that was about to culminate. Far over the horizon, a ring of Alliance ships surrounded them, out of sight, keeping the adversary at bay while they finished their work. Inside that perimeter, but also unseen, were those six nuclear submarines that lurked beneath the waves, a last line of defense and witness to Pete’s achievement. If the drones worked as designed, only submarines would be able to approach closely enough to observe.

Hamlin took three steps forward, to the front of the tower, to get a better look at the drones. The sight still took his breath away.

Below them, as far as they could see, were rows of the military drones that he had designed. The glint of the solar panels on their wings made them look vaguely like dragonflies, their wings shimmering in the sun as they absorbed power.

Hamlin was pleased to hear the admiral also react, despite himself, to the breathtaking sight.

After he’d had a chance to gather himself, the admiral started asking questions.

“How many?” asked the admiral.

“One thousand,” said Pete. “Many more on the way — we’ll have more room after the first wave launches. We think no more than twenty percent will ever need to be on the ground here at one time; that means we could easily launch twelve thousand, just from Eris.”

“Each just has a single missile?”

“Not a missile,” said Hamlin. “A bomb — a rather simple bomb, in fact. But across the island are autoloading magazines. Each drone can come back, arm itself, and return to the fight, as often as necessary. Completely without human intervention.”

“What if they can’t rearm?”

“If the drone senses that it can’t fly far enough to rearm, it will turn itself into a kamikaze… it just crashes itself into the target. The planners call that a ‘kinetic weapon,’ but it’s basically just a forty-pound piece of metal falling from the sky. Enough to destroy a lightly armored vehicle or structure.”

“And they’re solar powered?”

“One hundred percent. If they start to lose power, they just need to find a place to touch down and charge their batteries for a while… like all these are doing.” He waved his hand over the armada of lazily buzzing drones.

“How long can they operate?”

Hamlin shrugged. “We’re not sure. We’ve had one in the air, circling Detroit, for eighteen months now, and it shows no sign of wearing out. And they can land and recharge — rest, so to speak. The design life is five years but we’re pretty sure they can last longer than that.”

“And they use infrared?”

“Multispectral targeting. Infrared and visible imager. That’s in the nose. Along the underside of the wings are the MAD units.”

“And they’ll target anything that moves?”

Hamlin heard the hint of accusation in his voice. “Yes — for all the engineering in them, they’re a ‘dumb’ weapon, designed to destroy anything that moves. Think of them like land mines. We avoid them until their work is done.”

“And the minefield?”

Pete held out his arms. “The entire ocean. From here to one hundred miles from the American shore. Anything that shows itself will be a target.”

“And that’s where I come in,” said the admiral.

“Correct,” said Hamlin. “Submarines will be safe from the drones, as long as they stay submerged. That may be the only place. Even at periscope depth, the drones can find them.”

“Using MAD?”

“That’s right,” said Pete. “At shallow depths, the drones will ‘see’ their magnetic signature.”

“What about here? What’s to stop them from bombing us?”

“A safe zone. Part of the reason the area is so heavily guarded by your fleet. This is where the drones come to rearm, and recharge if necessary. For this tiny island, and a five-mile radius around it, the drones won’t attack. It’s the one safety that’s hardwired into them. Although we can adjust that distance, as you’ll see.”

“What’s to stop the bad guys from just moving underwater as well?”

Hamlin shrugged. “We’re hoping we’re ahead of them on that; we know our submarines are more capable. Part of the gambit here was to get underwater faster and more completely. And the island itself is ringed by shoals; it would be nearly impossible to approach closely submerged. If they try to get close, they’ll have to surface, and the drones will destroy them. Protection of the hive is the highest priority in their programming.”

“The hive?”

An engineer in a lab coat approached them and spoke to Pete. “Sir, we’re ready for the first wave.”

Hamlin smiled and breathed deeply, excited and apprehensive at the same time. “Green lights across the board?”

“Yes, sir. All green for launch.”

“No Alliance ships within twenty miles?”

“No, sir, no ships.”

“No surface ships,” corrected the admiral.

“OK,” said Hamlin. “Arming the central computer.”

Hamlin inserted his red key into a lock in the central computer and turned it. A row of lights above it came to life. He entered a passcode, and the lights turned green.

He exhaled deeply. “Launch the first wave.”

The order was relayed, and everybody in the tower who wasn’t monitoring a radar screen or a computer approached a window.

It started slowly. A few drones began buzzing and then slowly rose from the runway. They took off, not quite vertically but in tight spirals. Once in the sky, they began making lazy circles around the field. The tower was soon filled with the sound of their buzzing engines.

Once a few drones had taken to the air, the others followed. They orbited around each other in swooping circles, diving and swerving with an agility that a manned aircraft could never match. Gradually a cloud of them hovered above the island, with more on the ground. Their actions in the air reminded the admiral of the flocks of swallows he’d seen migrating as a child.

Suddenly an alarm buzzed, and a jolt of concern ran through the control room. Hamlin looked behind him to a row of consoles where operators busily studied their displays, then back out onto the airfield. “Individual malfunction,” reported one of the operators.

“I can see it,” said Hamlin, pointing out the window, something odd in the movement of one drone catching his eye.

“One of the drones is off program,” said the operator behind him. “CPU is red.”

“Still ascending,” said Hamlin grimly.

Stewart didn’t see it until it veered away from the lazy circling of its kin and headed right toward the tower.

Everyone in the tower involuntarily ducked as it buzzed overhead. It was close enough that the admiral could actually see the bomb that clung to its underbelly, like a mother bird with an egg. It was behind them suddenly, everyone turning like spectators at a tennis match to see what the rogue drone would do next.

“Bad processor,” said the operator behind them.

“No shit,” said Hamlin. “Is it following its self-destruct protocol?”

The operator looked at his console again. “Can’t tell, sir.”

“Goddammit,” said Hamlin.

“Can you recall it?” said the admiral.

“We don’t communicate with them like that. If we could disable them with a radio signal, so could the enemy. They’re completely autonomous — they react to only two things: targets and other drones. It’s supposed to self-destruct if it meets certain criteria.…”

The errant drone reached the shoreline, and then suddenly shot straight into the air. At about five hundred feet, it gracefully turned, and seemed to shut off power as it fell straight toward the ocean. It crashed with a surprisingly small splash.

“One drone down, sir,” said the operator.

“Pull the telemetry,” said Hamlin.

“Yes, sir.”

Pete walked behind the operator and looked over his shoulder at the screen. He tapped a key and pulled up the data package for that specific drone, scanned the programming. He was disturbed at how much the programming had changed since he’d delegated that to others; there’d been a time when he could have spotted an anomaly instantly, he’d known the programming so well. Now, the fingerprints of a dozen others were all over it, making it opaque.

“Send me the entire package,” Pete said, not knowing when he would have a chance to analyze it in the depth required.

He looked at the admiral and shrugged. “That’s why they call this a test,” he said. “And that’s why we’re building so many. We have a built-in failure rate of about one percent.”

Some of the still-airborne drones flew over to the splash zone of the errant drone and swooped low, as if to investigate their fallen comrade.

“Are they… curious?” said the admiral.

Hamlin laughed. “No — when it crashed, the other drones registered the object with their own sensors; now they’re seeking it out.”

“To kill it?”

“They might, if it wasn’t inside the five-mile safe zone of the island. Now they’re just checking it out.”

One of the drones that swooped closest to the water took off, flew back toward them and the island. It soared straight away from them in an odd zigzagging pattern, then returned to its original position in a figure eight maneuver. Above the others, it tipped its wings and dipped dramatically.

“What’s it doing?”

“Telling the other drones what it saw — that’s why none of them are following. It’s telling them there’s no target to pursue.”

“With those movements?”

“Yes. There’s no radio communication between the drones, which means there’s nothing for the enemy to intercept, nothing to jam. We emulated the ways honeybees communicate, the ‘waggle dance’ they do to communicate locations of nectar to each other with really remarkable precision. Bees use the bearing of the sun as a reference angle. We use true north. The drones ‘waggle’ on an angle from straight vertical; the magnitude of that angle indicates how far from true north the target is.”

“And the length of the waggle indicates the distance?”

“Almost,” said Pete. “It actually indicates the amount of energy needed to get to the target, so it takes into account headwinds, the strength of the sunlight, all those factors. So each drone can calculate whether or not it can make it, given the state of its energy reserves.”

“Fascinating,” said the admiral.

A petty officer entered the control tower. “Sir, two hundred drones are now in the air, ready to commence the test.”

“Very well,” said Hamlin. “Reducing the safety radius to one mile,” he said.

Warning lights came alive inside the control room. Pete once again used his key to complete the procedure.

“We’re temporarily reducing the safety radius for this test,” said Hamlin.

“I thought you said there was no communicating with the drones?”

“This is the one exception: the safety radius signal. But the drones can tell, by distance and bearing, that the signal has to emanate from this island. From a transponder at the very top of this tower, actually. It would be impossible for the enemy to jam, or duplicate, without actually sitting in this tower.” He turned a small knob, and a bright green circle on his display shrunk inward.

“Release the target,” said Hamlin, excitement in his voice.

“Aye, sir,” said a petty officer at the corner of the room, who spoke into a microphone.

Outside, a small cutter suddenly sped directly away from the island. It startled the admiral; it looked for all the world like someone was trying desperately to escape Eris Island. But no one reacted inside the tower, and he quickly discerned that it was part of the test. It was a beautiful white cutter, seemingly brand new. He guessed it was thirty-six feet long, a rigid-hull inflatable powered by water jets. Broad black crosses had been painted on its sides and deck, and the admiral knew these were markings to aid telemetry and observation; he’d seen similar markings on missiles during ICBM test shots years before. Huge rooster tails flew out behind the cutter; he estimated it was going at least 30 knots. While he knew suddenly it was a target, as a lifelong mariner, he found himself pulling for the boat.

Hamlin had binoculars to his eyes but was smiling broadly. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s unmanned.”

“Drones hunting drones,” said the admiral. No one reacted.

“Target is one hundred yards from shore,” said a petty officer at a radar screen.

“Very well,” said Hamlin.

Already the drones in the sky were reacting. They veered off, the whining of their engines increasing in pitch and volume. It wasn’t the roar of a military jet but the buzzing of a stinging insect. In seconds, six of them were zooming down the wake of the cutter, accelerating urgently. Soon they were directly over it, about twenty feet above its deck, in a V formation.

“Two hundred yards,” said the petty officer, counting down the distance as the ship raced away. “Fourteen hundred yards… sixteen… eighteen…”

With perfect timing, at the exact moment the petty officer would have said “two thousand yards,” the lead drone dropped its bomb. It exploded with a flash, and the crack of high explosive reached the tower a millisecond later. The front drone immediately veered upward, and the two behind it dropped their payloads on the ship even as it was exploding into pieces and sinking. The final drones dropped their bombs on what tiny pieces of floating wreckage still remained. It was over in seconds.

The drones, even faster and more nimble now without the weight of their bombs, immediately flew back toward the tower, to the cloud of drones that whined above them. The lead drone went through an elaborate dance: swoops, twitches, and rolls. The swarm of drones beneath it reacted to whatever news it was communicating, the urgency of the engines and their movements increasing in what, to the admiral, looked for all the world like a celebration. Their shadows crisscrossed the carpeted floor of the control tower as they flew overhead.

A few of the drones peeled off from the cloud and went back to the site of the explosion, but nothing remained, not a single shard of wreckage. The attacking drones, their message communicated, flew to an unseen part of the island. To reload, the admiral realized.

Hamlin put the binoculars down, and looked at the admiral with an ecstatic smile on his face.

“You’ve just seen the future of warfare,” said Hamlin, pointing straight up to the swarm of drones above them.

“Maybe so,” said the admiral, pointing out to sea. “But in the meantime, you’ve driven us all underwater.”

Eight miles away, an enemy submarine watched. Commander Jennifer Carlson was on the periscope.

“Something happening?” asked Banach, her second-in-command. He didn’t yet have her patience — a hunter’s patience.

“Yes,” she said. “Something.”

“Shall we get closer?” asked Banach.

She wanted to, badly. She could barely see the island from this distance, even with the scope in high power and raised as high as she dared. The electronic sensors in her boat were so crude as to be almost useless. But she needed to see what was going on. The island was ringed by jagged shoals, but she’d studied the charts, thought there were breaks she might slip through at periscope depth, get her right up to the beach. From there, she could snap some pictures, take some video, chart the locations of underground cables. It was sorely tempting. All submariners were born snoops. Next to shooting at things, it was the most fun you could have on a submarine, looking through the keyhole and seeing things you weren’t supposed to see.

And there was definitely something forbidden there, no matter how many times her clueless commanders dismissed her concerns. According to the few charts they had of it, the island was a medical research station, and had been for decades. They even had a few ancient satellite photos of it, showing two small buildings at the south end with animal pens and a small dock flying the yellow flag for quarantine. Old italicized warnings on the chart told vessels to stay away because of the presence of contagious diseases. While it seemed like dated information, this, more than the shoals, worried Carlson. Like Banach, she’d grown up in an area that was regularly ravaged by disease, and had an almost superstitious fear of infections and viruses. Her crew, who once a week cleaned everything to a sanitized gleam, would attest to it. She preferred targets she could shoot torpedoes at. Was the Alliance creating something smaller and more sinister?

They were definitely up to something. Farther out, past the horizon, were dozens of enemy surface ships, standing guard in a twenty-mile ring. But none of them dared come as close as she had. She wasn’t remotely worried about being found out here. No one, not even her own command, expected her to operate this far out to sea, sailing the deep blue water. To them, submarines were not strategic assets; they were designed to patrol coastal waters and pluck off an occasional container ship, or deploy a landing party of saboteurs to blow up railroad bridges and other quaint targets. The Alliance submarines carried ballistic missiles; she carried a platoon of marines with rifles and hand grenades.

“Here,” she said, handing off the scope to Banach. “Tell me what you see.”

He turned his hat backward and stooped over, adjusted the eyepiece, and looked toward the island. He stared a bit, and then turned slowly, a complete circle, looking around them.

“No surface contacts,” he said.

“They are keeping their distance,” said Carlson.

He was pointed back at the island now, his eyes refreshed. “It looks like…”

“What?”

“Something is flying.…”

She took the scope back and stared on the same bearing. She now saw it, too.

“You have good eyes, Lieutenant Banach,” she said.

It looked almost like a flock of birds, but she could see the sun glint on parts of them. They were too big to be birds, if they could see them at this distance, but flew with too much agility to be airplanes, swirling and looping into the air.

“Some kind of airplane?” she said.

“Surveillance craft maybe? Cruise missiles?”

“Too many of them,” she said. She tilted the right handle of the scope toward her, tilting the lens to look upward. She saw nothing but clear blue sky.

When she turned the scope back down to the waterline, she was startled to see, directly in front of them, two plumes of water erupting from the sea, a deep V of spray and foam: a fast surface ship. Heading right for them.

“Surface contact!” she said. “Arm tube one, prepare to fire!” She pushed the button on the scope, marking the bearing and sending it to fire control. She was down to five torpedoes, and badly wanted to save them for something big — a carrier or, better yet, another submarine. But this little shit was heading right for them, and she might not have a choice. How had they found her? They might have sensors mounted on the seabed, she thought, or perhaps their silhouette, just a few feet beneath the surface of the clear, tropical water, had been spotted by surveillance in the air, a plane or even a satellite. The white boat was hurtling toward them, going at least 30 knots.

“Solution is ready!” said Banach. “Ready to fire!”

She watched the boat approach, still debating whether or not to fire. It was small, she noted, with a shallow draft, shallow enough to pass right over the shoals. “Prepare to fire on this bearing…” she said.

Suddenly, she noticed a formation of those small, odd planes flying directly behind the craft. Pursuing it.

“Wait!” she said. She looked down to confirm that they were recording the scene through the scope, for later study.

The planes were closer now, and they were like none she’d ever seen. They were small, and there was something odd about them. She realized they had no windows.

“Captain…”

At that moment, following some unseen cue, the planes attacked the speeding boat. The ship disappeared in a series of bright, small flashes. None of it stayed afloat long enough to burn. After a short delay, she felt the concussions of the explosions reach the hull through the water, a rapid series of dull thumps.

The planes pulled up, maneuvered excitedly, and returned to the island.

“Captain, what did you see?”

She took her eye away from the scope and looked at Banach. “I’m… not sure.”

They stayed at periscope depth for six hours after that, Banach and Carlson taking turns on the scope. Carlson watched the sun go down, and a few lights began to twinkle on the Alliance’s odd little island.

“Tea, Captain?” Banach had appeared at her side. She handed over the scope so she could have a drink. It was strong and heavily sweetened, like she preferred.

“Thank you,” she said. “You might make commander after all.”

“You flatter me, Captain.” He adjusted the scope, took a quick swing around, made sure nobody was sneaking up on them. “Have you figured it all out yet? We’re all waiting for you to tell us what is happening.”

“You’ll have to keep waiting,” she said. “I have no bloody idea.”

“Oxygen has drifted down to sixteen percent,” he said. “Shall we ventilate, Captain? As long as we’re up here?”

She knew it was a good idea. Her oxygen generators were overtaxed, and fresh air was good for morale. It was dark, they were quiet, and nobody seemed to know they were out there. They could raise the snorkel mast and let the ship take a deep breath of the warm, tropical air that surrounded them. But like she told Banach: she didn’t know what was going on. And she remembered those satellite pictures of the island, with its animal pens and medical scientists. Maybe breeding murderous germs and bacteria…

“No,” she said. “Not this time.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They flew Pete to a drab Alliance office building near Atlanta, and for two days they debriefed him. Quickly, Pete could tell, they deemed him unreliable. The funny thing was, in the entire time, no one told him directly his wife was dead; no one said a word about it. They showed him photographs of the destroyed resort. They showed him a breakdown of all the people killed, listed by nationality. Pamela was on the list, just one name among many. They explained, in abstract, how the human remains would be disposed of and the cover story that they’d come up with: natural gas explosion. It was in their eyes, he could see it; they knew that his wife was among the dead. But it was as if everyone assumed that someone else had said the words to him, a legion of psychiatrists, engineers, and generals. No one offered a word of apology. Or asked him for contrition.

Another sure sign of his fall was the reduction in his access. He wanted to look at the drone programming, to see where it could have gone so wrong. There was no way a drone should have traveled that far, and that far inland. There had to be a glaring error somewhere in the program, and he was certain he could find it if they would just let him. But the Alliance suddenly isolated him from the drones, from the team, from any of the technology that he once knew so intimately. It was a new level of autonomy, Pete thought wryly. Now the drones operated without even the participation of their creator.

Suddenly idle, with more spare time than he’d had in years, Pete began looking for reports of other rogue drones. He had a solid Internet connection in the temporary office where they’d stashed him, and he could see the videos as they popped up. He watched them until they were suppressed, usually within minutes. A bomb dropped on a ferry near Seattle. The video showed screaming commuters in suits scrambling to climb the sides of the boat as it turned over. Another bomb fell on a cargo terminal in Los Angeles, setting it on fire. That clip was of unusually good quality, showing the lone drone swooping in gracefully, dropping its bomb, then peeling away. Most were on the West Coast, although Pete saw a reliable clip from as far inland as Reno, Nevada, where a drone dropped a bomb on a truck stop, igniting a spectacular fire as the fuel tanks exploded. The drone then recognized how far it was from Eris, and the impossibility of rearming, and went into self-destruct mode, flying directly into a semitruck that was trying desperately to drive away on Interstate 80.

Pete was shuffled in and out of a number of remote offices, always well away from the drone program. At first he thought he would be assigned to a place where he would be closely watched. But instead, the Alliance, in its bureaucratic wisdom, just gave him a series of meaningless assignments where he could do little harm while still remaining under their control. All were within the Alliance’s vast research apparatus. He worked on a team studying the effects of paint colors on a submarine crew’s mental health: dark orange was best, red the worst. He worked briefly on a program that was evaluating the use of airships as surveillance platforms: their slow speeds and steady movements allowed for a kind of high resolution that wasn’t possible from planes or satellites. After that, he was given orders to a research detachment in Frederick, Maryland. He scanned his orders at a hotel bar as he drank his third overpriced martini. Something to do with the flu.

The next morning, he walked the two blocks to his new office, hoping the cool air would mitigate his hangover. He checked the address twice when he arrived. The military leaders of a past era had sought to intimidate and impress with their structures, the Pentagon being the ultimate example: a city unto itself in a mythic, magical shape. The Alliance, Pete had learned, sought the opposite; they wanted to disguise and obscure the true scope of their power by distributing their vast resources across anonymous leased offices and buildings across the land. Like the drones, the Alliance sought security in redundancy, and vast, wide distribution. Such networks, Pete well knew, were almost impossible to kill. The building where Pete reported had just six stories, of which the Alliance occupied only the top floor. The ground floor contained a Subway sandwich shop and a dentist’s office. One of the other tenants in the building was a financial advisor, whose darkened windows and security door looked far more secretive than the Alliance office where Pete found himself that morning, with its unlocked front door, unmanned reception desk, and new carpet smell.

Inside the suite, he found his way to office 16-E, where the door was locked. There was a keypad, but he had no code. He rang a buzzer, and could hear movement inside. He could tell the door was solid; he’d been behind enough serious security doors to recognize one when he saw it: the heavy weight, the precise balancing, the hidden hinges. He heard a click within the door, and he pushed it open.

Inside were two men, looking up at him somewhat suspiciously from their drab metal desks. They were at opposite ends of the small office, as far apart as they could arrange: Pete sensed instantly that the two men didn’t like each other. A large, tattered world map had been hung from the center wall, a series of colored pins pressed into it. Above one man’s desk was a small flat-screen television, tuned to one of the news channels that was favorable to the Alliance, with the sound muted. The screen periodically seized and pixelated, as if the cable connection was poor.

“You the new officer in charge?”

“I am,” he said. “Pete Hamlin. Pleased to meet you. Is this the whole team?”

The younger man stood and raised his hands dramatically. “This is it. I’m Reggie Strack,” he said, walking over with a hand extended.

“You’re the doctor?”

“I am — your resident physician. Epidemiologist. Serving the Alliance by combatting the flu.”

“How long?”

“Fighting the flu? My whole career. But I’ve only been working for the Alliance six months.” He had an earnest look, and a friendly, open manner.

The other man had made his way over. “Steve Harkness,” he said. “I’m an Alliance communications specialist.” Harkness was the kind of young man who exuded ambition. His clothes were casual, but neatly pressed and well tailored, the kind of garments worn by a man who occasionally expected, or hoped, to be photographed. “I’m here to get the word out, raise awareness both about the flu and the Alliance’s efforts to help the sick and find a cure.”

He stopped. Pete was aware that both men were sizing him up, deciding whether or not they could trust him.

“So,” said Pete. His mouth was still dry from his hangover, his voice scratchy. “Is this a real disease, or a propaganda operation?”

Harkness winced at the word, but Strack laughed. “It is a real, frightening disease,” he said. “And this is a massive propaganda operation.”

Pete did the minimum amount of work he could do to get by, and spent the rest of his time alone to mourn Pamela. While he still wanted to figure out what had gone wrong, he was glad in a way that the Alliance hadn’t assigned him to anything to do with the drones. He loathed himself for his part in Pamela’s death, and had vivid nightmares in which he would follow a drone, in his mind, from Eris Island, where he had probably cheered its departure, to Mexico, where it dropped the single, ugly bomb that ended her life. He tried to fight it off, but he couldn’t help but imagine her final moments. Was she beside the pool, in one of the prized lounge chairs near the bar? Or was she in the water, lazily paddling back and forth as the men poolside watched her through their sunglasses? Maybe she was wading in the ocean, up to her knees in the sea, and saw the drone fly in. Perhaps she thought it was Pete’s plane in the distance, returning him to their honeymoon. He imagined her squinting at it curiously when she realized that this plane had no windows.

Pete’s team had weekly meetings in Silver Spring with other research groups, where they presented their findings to an indifferent panel of officers led by General Cushing, who always sat in the middle of the group and nodded his head, his strong hands folded in front of him. He rarely spoke, but when he did, the room always fell respectfully silent. He had a chest full of ribbons on an Army uniform, ribbons that Pete could tell, even from across the room, were regular Army commendations, not Alliance. He had a combat infantry badge and jump wings, and the ribbons themselves were the kind that you saw only on regular military officers. Alliance ribbons had a smooth appearance, colors that looked like they had been chosen carefully by focus groups and laid out by designers. Real military ribbons had a knotty, disorganized look, like combat itself, a random assortment of colors and patterns, here and there adorned with dark stars or a bronze V that Pete learned stood for Valor. Just as Alliance officers were being given military commands to demonstrate that they were all, in fact, one team, combat officers like Cushing were being given Alliance commands. He scowled continuously at their weekly meetings, like it was a duty he had accepted grudgingly, and he couldn’t wait to get back into a position where people were shooting at him.

Their weekly meetings took place every Tuesday, along with three other detachments. Each group was given fifteen minutes to talk, five minutes for each man on the team. Pete had no idea how many of these meetings the generals had to sit through in a week, how many well-polished five-minute speeches they had to endure. It was amazing, sometimes, how much information a man could cram into five minutes, and at times it was amazing how little. But the schedule never varied.

Strack, in his five minutes, would detail the latest outbreak numbers, emphasizing that the problem was uncontained. Harkness would describe, and occasionally show, the media campaigns that his group had created to promote hand washing and the idea that only the Alliance could find a cure. After they were done, Pete was offered a chance to elaborate, a chance he always declined, opening up five minutes on the agenda to someone more eager than he to kiss the ass of a table full of generals.

It was a forty-mile drive from Silver Spring back to Frederick. In bad traffic, it could take well over an hour, and Pete usually welcomed the time alone in his car. “Alone with his thoughts,” would be inaccurate. He preferred to be without thought entirely, his guilt-ridden mind wiped clean at least for a moment. Inching along in traffic was one of the few places he could actually achieve this thoughtless state. Most times he didn’t even turn his radio on.

Somewhere near Germantown, he got off of I-270 to get a cup of coffee. Traffic was inching along, and no one was expecting him back at the office anyway. Even off the interstate, though, traffic still crawled. It was starting to rain a dreary, light mist, and Pete wasn’t able to let his mind drift the way he wanted to in the stop-and-go traffic.

He came to realize that this was no normal traffic jam brought on by the daily commute; something was going on. Cops at intersections were directing traffic; barricades lined the road. Crowds of people were walking, all in the same direction he was driving, all traveling at roughly the same speed, allowing Pete to track the small groups that walked hand in hand down the sidewalk. It was the same kind of foot traffic you might see before a sporting event, a walk to the stadium — except this was a weekday, and these people didn’t look excited, they looked grim.

Many of them wore surgical masks.

He came to a complete stop by a low, brick building: the Germantown Community Recreation Center. Hastily made signs declared that PEOPLE WITH SYMPTOMS SHOULD NOT GET VACCINATED — SEE YOUR DOCTOR. Officials in masks directed people to various lines that came out of the doors and wrapped around the building. They were handing out masks, so everyone in line was wearing one. Paramedics waited lazily by ambulances; volunteers took down information with clipboards. Pete could see, inside the center’s double doors, hundreds of people in a dozen lines, or maybe it was just one line winding throughout the building. On the sidewalk near him, a mother was frantically talking to a bewildered volunteer. Her child, a girl maybe four years old, stared at Pete, only her eyes visible above a mask that was far too big for her small face.

A car behind him honked. Traffic had opened up. He pulled forward and found his way back to I-270.

Back in the office in Frederick, Pete flipped through Strack’s presentation from that morning.

“Do you realize you’re looking at my slides?” said Strack.

“I do,” said Pete.

“You’re going to ruin your reputation around here if you start participating.”

“It looks like it’s getting worse,” said Pete, stopping on a chart with the last six months of data.

“That’s why you’re in charge,” said Strack. “You read a bar graph like none other.”

Pete smiled. “Is it getting… deadlier? It seems like, looking at these numbers, the mortality rates are climbing.”

Strack shrugged. “The flu is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. Other diseases — lots of diseases — have higher mortality rates. Like Ebola. Or rabies. If rabies is untreated, you die, almost every time. But year after year, for most of modern history, the flu kills more people than anything else in terms of sheer numbers. And historically, it thrives during times of war, when people are traveling all over the place, food supplies and medical supplies are scarce. The 1918 flu pandemic, a direct result of World War I, might have killed a hundred million people: five percent of the world’s population. So yes… if that’s what you’re asking me. It’s real.”

“I wasn’t asking that,” said Pete.

Strack laughed. “Of course you were, don’t be shy. It’s hard to know what to believe right now, god knows. Hell, we’re at the heart of the bullshit machine right here in this office. But I’ve got the data, I’ve been to the hospitals, I’ve looked at the blood. This is real.”

“But just because it’s real—”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not propaganda,” said Strack. “Which is why, I’m sure, we’ve been given these luxurious accommodations and a communications specialist. And you.”

“So it is deadly. But is it anything new?”

“The flu is always new, that’s the devious nature of it. Each strain is unique. But overall — no. It’s not remarkably different in deadliness or virulence than any flu we’ve seen in the last hundred years. More deadly than some historical strains, less deadly than others. But no question we should be wary of it. Which is how I’m able to get to sleep at night.”

“How so?” said Pete.

Strack shrugged. “I’m not a dumbass. I know we’re milking this for propaganda value somehow, keeping the people in a panic. But maybe the work I do—we do — will help prevent the spread of it. Maybe we’ll stumble on something that helps keep influenza at bay from now on — it wouldn’t be the first time that a war effort has led to some concrete, lasting good. So that’s how I sleep at night.”

“I see.”

“How about you?”

“Me?” said Pete. “I don’t sleep at night. Ever.”

Strack chuckled nervously, but stopped when he saw that Pete wasn’t laughing with him.

Pete broke the silence and shoved a stack of a paper toward Strack. “Look at this.”

Strack looked them over. “Evacuations?”

“Mostly in coastal areas. To prevent the spread of the flu.”

“Where did you get these?”

“I’ve been requesting them for weeks, finally somebody slipped up and sent them to me.”

“But these don’t even… these areas have nothing to do with the flu. There’s no correlation at all.”

“I know,” said Pete. He’d already made some crude comparisons between the evacuations and Strack’s latest projections.

But they did correlate to areas that had been hit by drones, at least according to the radical blogs he was following now from Internet cafes across town.

“Weird,” said Strack. He squinted at the data again, and then back up at Pete, with newfound respect. “So let me ask you a question. As long as we’re being chummy with each other.”

“Go ahead,” said Pete.

“Why are you here? I mean, I looked you up. I know you were the hero of the drone program for a while. You’ve done more network news interviews in your life than anybody I know personally. Way more than Harkness, which I’m sure galls him, by the way. So how did you end up in this backwater of the Alliance?”

Pete thought it over for a long moment. “I think in part they put me here to get me out of the way. They didn’t think they could trust me anywhere near the drones anymore.”

“But why here, though? Why working on an obscure flu project? You used to be one of the chief badasses in the Alliance. Surely they could use you somewhere else.”

“Have you ever heard of Admiral Hyman Rickover?” asked Pete.

“No.”

“He was the father of the nuclear submarine. An engineering genius. Dreamed it up, fought for a decade to make it a reality while virtually everyone in the Navy and the Pentagon told him he was crazy. He’s a hero of mine.”

“Did he send you here?”

Pete laughed, something he didn’t do much anymore, but Strack had that ability. “No. But he once said something I think about a lot. ‘If you’re going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.’”

“So which did you sin against to end up here?”

Pete paused. “Both. But my point is: don’t make the mistake of trying to attribute too much logic to the bureaucracy. There might not be any good reason I’m here. I think they probably thought I could do very little damage here, while at the same time they could keep an eye on me.”

Strack shook his head. “As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit.”

“How so?”

“You’re an inventor, right? You invented the drones. Now they want you to invent a flu epidemic. You convinced everybody that the drones were a game changer. They want you to do the same thing with the flu.”

Pete looked down at Strack’s slides again and pointed.

“Not me,” he said. “You’re the resident genius here, Strack.”

The young doctor held his arms up. “That’s what I keep telling everybody!”

“Are you the only one working on a cure for this thing?”

He shook his head. “No, not at all. My mission is really the epidemiology — the actual victims, the rates of transmission, things like that. Empirical data about the actual disease.”

“But somebody’s working on a cure, right?”

“Of course,” said Strack, shuffling through some papers on his desk. “Teams everywhere, in every Alliance country. But if you ask me, based on the reports I’m getting, the most promising work is being done here.” He handed Pete a black-and-white aerial photo of an island. “This is our most productive research station. They’re working in almost total isolation, and we have reason to think they’re getting close.”

Pete stared at the photograph of the barren island. The photograph was old, taken before his work there, before they’d carved out the airstrip and erected their tower. But he still recognized the kidney shape, the rocky bluff at the northern end, and the two flat buildings on the other side.

“I’m waiting for them to send me there,” said Strack. “Maybe they’ll send all of us, the whole team.”

“I’ve already been there,” Pete mumbled in shock.

“You have?” said Strack, confused. “When?”

Just then the door burst open and Harkness walked in, his blue suit immaculate, a broad smile on his face.

“Hello, team! What are you guys up to?”

“Defeating the enemy,” said Strack, turning back to his computer.

“Good,” said Harkness, failing to read the sarcasm. “I’ve got good news… they just doubled our funding. And they’re moving us across the hall to a bigger office, getting three more people on the team!”

“What happened?” said Pete.

“West Coast governors are freaking out. Two hundred people have died in San Diego this month.” He was beaming.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The new office reflected the rising importance of their project, with twice as many desks and even a small kitchen. The smells of fresh coffee and new carpet blended together pleasantly, along with the murmuring of the new team members, whose names Pete struggled to remember. Strack’s tattered world map had been replaced by a digital Mercator projection of the world that took up an entire wall, with red pinpoints of light to indicate flu hotspots. Harkness’s single flickering monitor had been replaced by a bank of six flat-screens against another wall, all of which he controlled and watched with rapt attention.

Pete came upon Harkness on one of those first days, watching the news on an Alliance-friendly channel as the anchor recited the dangers of the flu and the strides the Alliance was taking to defeat it. Pete was fascinated to see that Harkness was practically mouthing the words as she spoke, as if reading a script that he had written.

Pete watched for a few moments before speaking. “Do they…?”

“Work for us?” Harkness said matter-of-factly, not taking his eyes from the screen. “No, not anymore. We used to do that. But we found that the really fire-breathing Alliance guys in the media did a better job on their own. Honestly, they are purer and more driven to the party line than guys on our payroll were.”

In fact, the woman on the screen did stare at the camera with studied intensity as she spoke. She was blond with blue eyes, red lips, and teeth so white that they seemed almost predatory. She was stunningly beautiful. Harkness, pleased by Pete’s interest, grabbed a remote and turned up the volume so they could listen.

“Travelers returning from Hong Kong should be quarantined,” she said. “It’s just common sense. Our soldiers have to observe twenty-one days of isolation when returning from hot zones. If it’s good enough for them, why not for the rest of us?”

The camera turned to a tired-looking academic type who started to respond but was soon cut off by the gorgeous anchor.

“Here, look at this,” said Harkness, pointing to a screen right below the newscast. Against a black background, fifty words were jumbled together like a huge crossword puzzle, except all the words were changing in size and position. The biggest word, in large red letters in the middle of the screen, was FLU. Around it were dozens of associated words, like PANDEMIC, OUTBREAK, STOCKPILE, and INFECTION. Suddenly, HONG KONG appeared in small letters at the edge of the cluster. Harkness eagerly tapped the screen.

“There, see? It’s trending now.”

“Is this a representation of the words in her broadcast?”

“No,” said Harkness. “It’s all the terms associated with influenza discussions, across the whole Web. These are the top fifty words, so you can see Hong Kong just broke through.” As he spoke, the words grew bigger and moved closer to the center of the cluster.

“Just because she said it?”

Harkness shrugged. “It was trending before, we knew that. But it doesn’t hurt. A mention by her, on a broadcast like that, all the chattering voices want to chime in.”

“And that’s good for us?”

“Absolutely,” said Harkness, nodding vigorously. “We need people to be aware of the dangers, and these dangers necessitate quarantines.”

And quarantines have other uses, too, thought Pete. They allow people to be gathered up and locked away without trials or lawyers. They keep people afraid, and compliant. But he kept those thoughts to himself.

Pete stood there for a little longer, watching the cloud of words shift and change in front of them — there was something hypnotic about it, all these flu-related words moving around each other, forming patterns, growing and shrinking as the whole world tried to figure out what to do about the epidemic.

Harkness worked tirelessly as the epidemic spread, always carefully inserting the story of a potential cure. The war (and by implication, the enemy) had brought them the flu, the storyline went, but the Alliance would bring them the cure. For all his faults, he was the perfect man for the job, a relentless worker coupled with ruthless ambition. Pete soon learned how to read those screens along the wall, and saw that their work was having the desired effect, keeping people at once terrified and hopeful, and convinced that only the Alliance could save them.

While Harkness worked to create the mythology of the cure, Strack worked day and night, too, doing what he could to bring about an actual remedy. He had visualizations on his computer similar to Harkness’s, but instead of words and trending topics, Strack dealt with deaths and mortality rates, secondary infections and quarantines. His screens were more difficult to interpret than Harkness’s, but he assured Pete that despite whatever level of Alliance bullshit accompanied it, the flu was very much real. And, he said, for the time being, damn near unstoppable.

Pete looked closely at the sporadic communications he got from the rest of Strack’s extended team, especially those on Eris Island. The war was making it difficult to communicate, and impossible to get them the supplies they needed. Nonetheless, they were making progress on a cure, the reports said. Harkness dutifully sanitized the reports, elaborated where necessary, and published the results in their weekly meetings. Pete himself began presenting during his allotted five minutes, explaining how they were using their new resources, where the anticipated trouble spots were. He’d adopted Strack’s philosophy: they were curing a disease, and no matter what, that was a positive thing.

One morning, Pete came into their new, lavishly appointed office to find everyone hushed. Strack was standing at the front of the group, with Harkness at his side. He held a message in his hand in a red TOP SECRET folder.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Strack.

“What happened?”

“They did it,” said Strack, so quietly Pete could hardly hear him. “They’ve got the cure.”

“And it’s just in time,” said Harkness. “They’re evacuating the island.”

“What?” said Pete. “Why? That place is a fortress.”

“They’re almost starved out. We can’t get them supplies, and we’ve got intel that there might be enemy submarines in the area. Typhon puts commando teams on their subs, this is what they’re good at: raids, search-and-destroy missions. If they land a team on Eris Island, those researchers, and everything they’ve done, could be at risk.”

“They’ll never get a detachment on that island,” said Pete. He felt an old pride rising up in him. “It’s unapproachable. The drones will get anything on the surface, and shoals on all sides prevent a submerged boat from getting close. That’s why we picked it.”

“We can’t take that risk,” Harkness said. “The military detachment on Eris evacuated weeks ago. We’re sending a small plane out to get the medical team. It’s probably already in the air.”

Pete walked across their large new office, to the map of the world that covered almost an entire wall. With his finger, he traced the journey of a West Coast plane to the spot where Eris Island would be, if it showed up on the map. “Flying at night, I hope,” he said, almost to himself.

“They did it,” said Strack. He was brimming with pride. “They really did it! We found a cure!”

“And the information pump is primed,” said Harkness. “As soon as that plane gets back on Alliance soil, the story will start to flow: the Alliance has cured the scourge of our age.”

Harkness walked to his stack of consoles and pushed buttons on a remote until all the major news sites were on-screen. Every channel was talking about the flu. Hospitals were turning away patients in Jacksonville. Schools were closing in Indiana. Public swimming pools had been ordered closed by the surgeon general.

Pete was still staring at the world map. He looked at his watch and did some rough math in his head. “It’s almost sunrise on Eris Island,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Commander Jennifer Carlson was in the wardroom enjoying a rare moment of solitude when the phone buzzed at her knee. She jumped; her instincts were humming. Maybe it’s the storm, she thought; the rare squall blew through the area around Eris and made the ship rock in a way that she hadn’t felt in weeks. The heavy weather seemed to announce that something was about to happen, and she wasn’t inclined to ignore her instincts. They had served her well.

Because of her past success, Typhon had grudgingly allowed her vast free rein. Even her marines had stopped asking her when they might form a landing party and start blowing things up. Instead, they just continued to work out in the makeshift gym they’d created in the crew’s mess, ate constantly, and cleaned their many, many weapons. Carlson had heard that Alliance boats carried no small arms, some philosophical statement on the purity of the deterrent nature of their submarines. It was typical of their mealymouthed moralism, she thought. Carrying rifles and grenade launchers would be too dirty for them, but nuclear warheads were somehow acceptable.

Almost all blue-water shipping had been eliminated by the scourge of the drones, so other Typhon sub skippers had taken to the brown waters off the coasts, picking off an occasional cargo barge or garbage scow, or lobbing a cruise missile at a factory. She had stayed near Eris Island, certain that at some point, the war would turn on that tiny speck of land. This despite the fact that they hadn’t gotten a whiff of anything from the Alliance since she tried to kill that enemy submarine with a life raft.

Once every two days, they came to periscope depth to shoot trash and receive the broadcast from command. Increasingly, those messages were from impatient admirals wondering what she was doing out there. She didn’t give two shits. Sooner or later, she knew, the Alliance would try something important at Eris Island. And she would blow it to hell.

“Captain,” she said, picking up the phone as it buzzed a second time.

“Captain, please come to the bridge.” She could hear the excitement in the officer of the deck’s voice. It was Lieutenant Banach, and he wasn’t prone to overreacting. She rushed to control.

The ship was bobbing at periscope depth, the diving officer and the ship’s automated system doing an admirable job of keeping depth control in challenging conditions. They had come shallow as a matter of routine. In addition to shooting trash and transmitting messages, they ventilated briefly, bringing fresh air onboard. She was still wary of Eris and the medical work they did there, so she always insisted that the ship be upwind of Eris Island and at least ten miles away when they took a breath, lest they inhale some dangerous microbe invented by their enemies.

They’d also been delayed slightly by the storm, not wanting to stick their nose up in rough seas. Coming to PD was always fraught with danger. Like an animal at a watering hole, the submarine was at her most vulnerable at periscope depth, slow and exposed. While their titanium hull made them invisible to the magnetic detectors of the drones at periscope depth, if they broached the surface, and the deck of the submarine came out of the water, they would be visible to the drones’ other sensors. The swarm would be on them in seconds in a frenzy. But periscope depth was also when you could see the world through human eyes, via the finely crafted lens of the periscope, a sensor far more deadly than any of the electronics they’d been entrusted with. When she stepped on the conn, Banach stepped aside immediately and yielded the periscope.

“Do you see it?” he asked as she focused.

She took a moment, waiting for a rogue splash that had fallen across the lens to fall. And there it was.

“I do,” she said, although it was difficult in the early dawn light: a plane, flying close to the ocean and painted in dappled gray camouflage. Her officer of the deck was to be commended for spotting it. She automatically centered it in the scope, pushed a red button on the right handle, entering its position in the fire control system.

“Alliance?”

“It is,” she said. “A small transport plane, though, not a combat plane.”

“What a fool!” said the OOD. “At that speed and altitude? In this part of the ocean? Permission to ready a missile, Captain.” He had already raised the surface-to-air missile mast, behind the scope.

“Wait,” she said, smiling grimly even as she looked through the scope. She felt the roll of the ship in her feet, rare at this latitude, and it spoke to her. “His low altitude and speed are deliberate,” she said. “He’s trying to look like a drone heading for Eris. He wanted to land before sunrise, but was delayed by the storm, just like we were.”

She heard Banach step to the chart and confirm it.

“He’s smart,” he said. “An hour ago, it was completely dark, and we would have thought just that: that he was a drone, even seeing it on radar. But I saw the asshole.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Don’t we still want to shoot it?” he asked.

It was tempting. At this range, with a clear visual, they would knock that plane right out of the sky. All she had to do was point the missile, and push a button. But something stopped her, a hunter’s instinct for a bigger prize, a risk worth taking.

“No,” she said. “Let’s wait. If he’s going to Eris, he’s not staying there — he’s going to pick something up.”

“You’re sure, Captain?”

“I’d rather shoot down a full plane than an empty one.”

“Aye, Captain,” said Banach. He stepped to the chart and began plotting a course toward the island. “When do you think he might leave Eris?”

“My guess? Sunset.” She smiled. “To the island at ahead flank, on this bearing.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Dr. Manakas waited in the dark for the plane, but it was delayed by a rare bit of bad weather near the island. His mind created images as he stared in the darkness and worried; at one point he thought he saw a man over the hill, watching them. That was impossible, he knew; they were the last human beings on the island, the military detachment having long since left. But he kept staring, and when dawn finally arrived, the man (or mirage) was gone.

The plane landed soon after. The doctors who remained on Eris, eight in all, cheered as it touched down and deftly dodged the pockmarks on the runway. The plane was smaller than Dr. Manakas had expected, painted with splotches of camo, barely bigger than the drones that investigated it curiously before darting away.

They greeted the dashing pilot as a hero, even more so when they learned that he’d brought food: a cooler of steaks, two dozen eggs, potato chips, and real Coke. They’d been living on leftover Army rations and instant coffee for a month. They cooked on the charcoal grill that had been languishing for months for lack of real meat.

“We were expecting you before sunrise,” said Manakas as they ate steak and eggs for breakfast at the picnic table outside the research building. He was careful to say it away from the group, not wanting to convey his concern.

“Bad storm fifty miles east of here,” said the pilot. “Delayed me about an hour while I went around it.”

“See anything out there?”

“Nope,” he said, looking past him to the ocean. “Not a thing.”

But Manakas could hear the note of resignation in his voice.

They were scheduled to leave the island at sunset; they had all day to prepare. But they had long since staged the small amount of personal gear they were allowed to take, stuffed into seabags and dusty suitcases. The results of their research were packed more carefully, in five tightly sealed watertight plastic containers. They were transparent, and you could see the rainbow of hanging files within some, hard drives and carefully swaddled vials and beakers in others. The five plastic containers made a small tower inside the plane, a monument to years of effort. The plane was loaded quickly, so they just sat and waited for sunset, and watched the drones.

The medical team had learned every habit and sound of the drones, as they were the only type of life that could thrive on Eris Island. They knew the buzzing sound of an engine revving up prior to takeoff; they knew the difference in the engine note of an unarmed bird returning to the island and the more baritone sound of a drone fully weighed down by a bomb. They knew the sound of the dance they made in the sky, the herky-jerky noise they made as they moved rapidly back and forth. And they knew the cool, liquid clicking of a drone that was picking up a bomb. The pilot was fascinated as he watched, and asked for explanations from the researchers of drone behavior that they had long since become bored with.

Dr. Manakas, the head of the detachment, was leaving behind a cache of personal effects in his small office; they’d told them that weight would be limited on the small plane. He had packed a few photographs, the ones of his wife and children that had sustained him. He had a shelf full of novels that he loved but would leave behind. A closet full of lab equipment that had served him so well would also be abandoned. He would even miss the view, he thought as he looked through the window behind his desk. It was starkly beautiful, in a way — rocks, water, and sky — and looking in that direction, the view wasn’t too polluted by drones or their bombs. He hadn’t taken enough time to enjoy that view, he realized. Had been too busy trying to find the cure. But they had done that much, at least.

“Are you ready?” It was his protégée, Dr. Sandra Liston, from Columbia, a brilliant doctor ten years younger than him, who did more for the cure than any of them. She was beautiful, with jet-black hair that had grown long during her two years on the island, and legs that were toned from the hikes she took up the island’s leeward hills every day before breakfast. In one of his books along the wall, Graham Greene had written about the “love-charm” of bombs during the blitz in London during World War II. As the noose tightened around Eris Island, Manakas knew exactly what Greene had meant.

Inevitably, after a year on the island, he and Liston had begun sleeping together, a poorly kept secret in their tiny community and a failing that seemed to be largely forgiven by their peers despite their families at home. Somewhat more recently, he had fallen in love with her, and that, he knew, was a better kept secret and far less forgivable. He had told Sandra one night, as they lay on the bed in his tiny room, moonlight washing over them, the sound of surf coming through his open window. She hadn’t been able to say it back to him. They both knew that one way or another, the beginning of their escape marked the end of their affair.

“I’m almost ready,” he said to her. “Go ahead. I’ll be right out.” She nodded and left him to say goodbye to his small office.

He sighed and waited until he saw everyone board the plane — he had to make sure he was the last one to leave. What he was about to do might well be construed as treason, and he didn’t want to implicate anyone else, although he was at peace with it. He pulled out a thick manila envelope from his desk, one that was filled with a sheaf of papers that summarized their work and a flash drive that contained all the key findings and DNA sequencing. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough, a summary of the trickiest parts, and should be enough for a skilled team of doctors to replicate their results. He just could not, as a doctor and a man of science, see their entire body of work leave Eris Island on a small plane in the middle of a war zone. If what he left behind fell into enemy hands, then so be it. At least it might still cure somebody. He looked at the envelope and tried to think of a way to label it, so that anyone coming into the office would know it was worth salvaging. Finally he pulled out a red marker and wrote across it in large letters: THE CURE.

He left it centered neatly on the middle of his otherwise empty desk.

Commander Carlson called the submarine to battle stations an hour before sunset, ordering the officer of the deck to stay on the scope continuously. They weren’t within sight of the island, but they were close enough to be wary of drones. If their scope was spotted, and attracted a swarm, that might be enough to alert a clever transport pilot. Carlson had positioned them right along the flight path on which the transport plane had come in, and there they sat, going in a slow clockwise circle, waiting for the sun to set. She’d checked; it would be nearly a full moon for them that night, a lucky break. And a curious decision by the Alliance, to fly any kind of important mission with visibility so good. They must be in a hurry, she thought. Or confident that no enemy subs would venture this close to Eris Island. The control room was blood red, all the regular lights turned off to aid the officer of the deck on the nighttime scope.

She saw something, a glint of the dying sunlight on a wing. She blinked, and flipped the scope to high power to confirm.

“Contact,” she said, pressing a button on the scope to mark the direction.

“It’s on the bearing to the island,” said Banach, excitement in his voice.

“Raise the missile mast,” she said, and heard the switch thrown behind her.

She turned the scope and watched the mast rise up: a black, thick tube with concave oblong hatches on either end of it. It looked something like a nineteenth-century cannon, but was really just a watertight container for the three surface-to-air missiles inside. It looked wildly out of place, as if it had been bolted onto the submarine. Which, indeed, it had. Historically, submarines had always been vulnerable to attacks from the air, especially from helicopters, which turned the predator into prey. Choppers could dip sonar into the water, blanket the sea with sonobuoys, kill submarines with airdropped torpedoes and depth charges. A fast submarine went 30 knots; a slow helicopter could travel at 150 knots. Helicopters were the only natural enemy a submarine had.

At their last refit, however, their boat had been equipped with a missile launcher armed with three pencil-shaped heat-seeking missiles inside. It rose from the conning tower just like a periscope. When they pushed the firing button, the missile would take off on a bearing they selected, looking for the infrared signature of anything that was generating heat. Ideally, the engine of an enemy aircraft. The system was originally designed to be a defensive weapon, to use in a counterattack against an ASW helicopter. But, what the hell, thought Carlson. If there’s a plane full of Alliance VIPs, she was going to shoot it down. You don’t get medals for playing defense.

The weapon was useless against drones — their little solar engines didn’t generate enough heat to register in the missile’s homing mechanism. And the launcher came with only three missiles, so even if it did score a hit against a drone, it would soon run empty as the swarm came down on them. Once, Carlson had been part of a group that tested a variety of defenses against an earlier generation of drones. They tried every projectile, laser, and missile that Typhon could come up with. The most effective thing, to her amusement, was the most primitive: a deck-mounted Gatling gun. Hundreds of dumb bullets flying through the air actually did well against a few drones, shredding them to pieces. But the problem, everyone in the fleet knew, wasn’t one drone. Or even three drones. The problem was a dozen drones, or fifty drones, and all their friends.

“Visual?” asked Banach.

“Yes,” said Carlson. “Something.” She could just see it, a reflection of sunlight on the wing. “Ready the launcher.”

The ugly concave doors on each end of the missile mast flipped open, and she could feel the dull thunk in the handles of the periscope. The launcher swung toward the bearing she was facing. It was getting dark fast; she hoped she would be able to see the target well enough to make the call. While every OOD had fired dozens of missiles in the simulator, they had fired only one real missile, on the range. She remembered the satisfying blast of flame from the launcher, the way the missile seemed to dip dangerously close to the ocean as it took off, the way it screamed toward the target on a bright, sharp triangle of fire. They had surfaced immediately after, and they could still smell the sharp tang of rocket fuel in the air.

She blinked to clear her vision. The control room was silent as they waited for her command. Finally, the target came close enough that she could make out the cockpit. A cockpit with no windows.

“Drone,” she said, disappointment in her voice.

“Shit,” said Banach.

“Lowering number one scope,” she said, turning the ring. “Lower the missile mast.” She kept her hands up on the ring as it went down, stretched her back and blinked her eyes. “We’ll go back up in five minutes,” she said. “After he passes. We’ll keep looking. All night if we have to. Let’s get some tea up here. Sooner or later, we’ll get our chance.”

The transport plane took off ten minutes after sunset. Only the drones remained on Eris, taking off and landing, ingesting their bombs and dancing for each other. It was dark onboard, but still Liston and Manakas didn’t hold hands, or even sit next to each other. They sat across from each other and pretended like nothing was wrong.

Eris disappeared immediately as they took off; within seconds it was all water, in every direction. It was a long flight to the mainland, and Manakas vowed not to look at his watch at least for the first few hours. They’d chosen the small, slow plane deliberately, he knew, to mimic the movement of a drone to anyone who might spot them on radar. But up in the air, the plane felt slow and vulnerable. It rumbled, but none of the research team spoke after the first few minutes. A few fell asleep immediately, and Manakas envied them.

He stared out his window. Moonlight was glinting on the surface of the ocean, illuminating the interior of the plane with a dim, blue glow. They were flying into a vast nothingness, a tiny pod of doctors who had studied the flu a thousand miles from home. Home. He thought about what that even meant, what must have changed since he’d left. What had changed in him.

Something caught his eye as he looked out the window; a flash on the surface. It was easy to see in the darkness. He saw two flashes, diverging, then realized that one of them was just a reflection on the ocean surface. His heart sank as he knew instantly what it meant. Thank god he’d left that envelope; he could take some solace in that. At least their work wouldn’t be in vain. The flash focused into a V-shaped jet of pure white flame, propelling a missile toward them at the speed of sound.

Manakas turned and looked at Dr. Liston across the aisle, wanting her face to be the last thing he saw before he died. She saw the pure sadness in his eyes and forced a smile, trying to make him feel better.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Carlson surfaced her submarine among the wreckage, after verifying that no drones were in the immediate area. She kept the ship rigged for dive and took a minimum number of the crew topside, in case they needed to submerge quickly. But she wanted to see the wreckage herself, verify the kill, and pick up anything that would make for useful intelligence. Or a good trophy.

She climbed onto the main deck while Banach drove the ship from the control room; she wouldn’t even put anybody on the bridge, wanted to be able to submerge quickly if they had to. Among her team topside were three of the marines, including their sergeant. One of them held a long, curved hook, exactly like those used by lifeguards, to pull any compliant survivors from the sea to be interrogated. The others carried the short carbines that they so loved, in the unlikely event that a survivor wanted to fight to the end.

But, as she expected, no one had survived. Only tiny traces of the plane remained, a few thin seat cushions floating in the water, some empty plastic bottles, a tire from the landing gear. They steered silently among it, the flashlights from the commandos illuminating the detritus.

“Confirmed kill,” she said, almost to herself.

“I wonder what they were doing,” said the sergeant.

Carlson shrugged. “Me, too. Not delivering the mail.”

She heard a slight scraping along the hull beneath her feet. One of the commandos shined his light on it.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

She squinted. It was almost impossible to see, but she could hear it. Then she saw it; a transparent plastic container, bobbing at the waterline.

“There!” she said. She sensed it was important. Two of the marines got down on their bellies and tried to reach it, but it was impossible. The sergeant tried with the big metal hook, but there was nothing to grip on the plastic container.

Suddenly, the radio on her belt clicked to life. “Drone,” said Banach from the control room. “Port beam.”

Shit. “How far out?” she said.

“Maybe ten minutes,” said Banach. “Heading straight for us.”

“Shall we secure, Captain?” asked the sergeant.

“No!” she said. “Get that box!” He resumed frantically batting at it with his hook, but it was futile.

“Looks like four drones in all,” said Banach on the radio. “In attack formation.”

Carlson looked at the sergeant. “Get that box,” she said again.

Without a word, he handed her the hook, nodded, and dived off the side of the submarine.

“What the hell?” said Banach from control. He’d heard the splash. “Do we have a man overboard?”

The sergeant grasped the floating container with both hands and kicked himself over to the side of the sub. Carlson lowered the hook around him, so it grabbed him beneath his arms, just as designed. The two other commandos got behind her and helped pull him up, plastic container in hand.

“Visual on drones!” said Banach. He had the 4x magnification of the scope on his side; they still couldn’t see or hear them topside, but Banach’s visual meant they were very close. “Get below!”

The commandos ran for the hatch, plastic crate in hand. Carlson followed them, her eyes to the dark sky.

At the hatch, they tried to go below, but the crate wouldn’t fit.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” she said. The commandos were frantically turning the crate, trying to find an angle at which the rectangular container would fit down the round hatch.

She could hear the drones.

“Move!” she said, stepping between the commandos. She tore the lid off the sealed crate, threw it into the sea, and dumped the contents of the container into the submarine. A torrent of paper poured down the hatch.

“Down, down, down!” she yelled. The first drone was in sight now. The marines jumped down the ladder, landing and slipping on the pile of Alliance paperwork. Going last, she slid down two rungs of the ladder, and slammed the hatch behind her.

Without waiting for her order, Banach performed an emergency dive. Water poured around the hatch as she spun the locking ring, sealing the ship shut. They had just made it. Banach, she knew, would have submerged with them still topside if that’s what he needed to do to save the ship. She had trained him that way.

After a few minutes, Banach made his way aft, wild eyed. She saw him do a quick count of everyone before he met her eyes with relief.

“Disappointed?” she said. “You almost got to take command.”

He nodded. “Maybe next time, Captain.”

“Any damage from the drones?”

“We heard the lead drone drop its bomb. Hit the surface of the water and sank without detonating.”

“Good,” she said, the adrenaline rush subsiding. She held her arms out, indicating the pile of paper at her feet. “Get somebody down here. We need to start scanning this shit.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The three original members of the team, Hamlin, Strack, and Harkness, were all sitting at their desks awaiting word about the flight to Eris Island.

Harkness had the propaganda machine ready, waiting to unleash it the moment the plane touched down safely. He passed the time by nervously watching the ever-changing word clouds on his monitors as they told him what people were saying about the flu and the Alliance, and no doubt fantasizing about how the displays would change when the cure was announced. Strack nervously shuffled papers at his desk, the latest mortality reports, also no doubt hoping that his daily diet of statistics was about to change radically.

As for Pete, he busied himself with rough calculations using approximate speeds of transport planes. He didn’t know the exact plane or its speed, of course, but had a feeling it might be trying to approximate a drone, meaning it would travel very slowly — at least until it was a safe distance away, or closer to areas that the Alliance controlled. He kept adding variables to the equation, wind speed and rates of fuel consumption for a plane fully loaded with passengers, but soon the results all started converging on a single number. It was a complicated problem but allowed Pete to use his extensive knowledge of military aircraft, and gave him a comforting refuge to occupy himself. His slowest estimate had the plane touching down on US soil in twelve hours. The fastest: six.

That’s why Pete felt a stab of dread when he heard someone buzzing their office door for access after just three hours. He knew it had to be bad news.

Especially when General Cushing himself walked in.

They all stood up, automatically. Cushing was in a dress uniform, a step more formal than what Pete saw him in weekly at their Tuesday briefings in Silver Spring. He carried nothing but his hat. His face was grim. He was alone, without the aides that were as much an insignia of his rank as the stars on his collar.

He looked them over for a moment before speaking, and cleared his throat. “They’re gone,” he said.

Harkness almost jumped. “Gone? What do you mean? General?”

“Missing without a trace,” he said. “The plane from Eris Island. Missing and presumed dead.”

“Shot down?” asked Hamlin.

“We have no direct evidence of that,” said the general. “But they were a warplane, on a strategic mission, flying unescorted in a war zone. They went missing a few minutes after takeoff. Draw your own conclusions.”

Strack went pale. All that work in pieces over the ocean, or drifting to the bottom. Colleagues of his, too, now dead. Scientists killed by the war machine they had all tried to avoid.

Harkness, too, looked stunned. More than Strack, he looked bewildered. A huge, enthusiastic consumer of his own propaganda, he couldn’t believe the Alliance could suffer a defeat like this. “Maybe it was a mechanical failure,” he said, wanting to believe it.

“Maybe,” the general said. “Doesn’t make a difference to me. To us.”

Pete looked up at that. Even as his two colleagues digested the news in their own way, he realized that the general wasn’t there just to deliver bad news. He was there to tell them what was next. And he was staring right at Pete.

“What now?” he asked.

“There’s a chance there’s still usable information on the island. The plane was small, and the medical team couldn’t bring much with them. They were supposed to bring just the essentials, and destroy everything they left behind. But they didn’t have much time. Maybe they left something useful behind. If they did, we have to get it. We need it, and we need to keep it away from our enemy.”

Pete shook his head. “You’ll never get close, General. And neither will Typhon. It’s surrounded by drones, and shoals, and thousands of miles of open ocean. If there’s anything of value on Eris, it couldn’t be in a safer place.”

“No fortress stays secure forever.”

Again Pete noticed that the general was staring just at him, not the other two members of his detachment. He wasn’t surprised. A realization dawned on him. In a way, it confirmed a feeling he’d had ever since he learned that the flu research was being done at Eris — he would return to Eris. It was his destiny.

“You want me to go there.”

“You’re the only man who can,” said the general. “You’re the only man in the Alliance with a working knowledge of the drones, the island, and the epidemic.”

“How?” asked Pete. “Want to put me on the next transport plane? Because that didn’t really work out so well.”

“Not a plane this time,” said the general. “A submarine. The Polaris.”

The thought of flying a plane there had seemed reckless to Pete, but the mention of a submarine sent a chill through him. All the stories he’d heard about life onboard a nuclear submarine — the stale air, the bad food, the claustrophobia, the constant risk of death. He’d personally worked on the drones’ anti-submarine algorithms, and the MAD sensors that made them work. He’d rather take his chances on a plane, where at least the end would come quickly.

“It won’t work,” said Pete. “The drones won’t let you approach on the surface, or at periscope depth. The shoals won’t let you approach submerged.”

“We think there’s a way in,” said the admiral.

Pete shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a suicide mission.”

“I feel that way about every submarine patrol,” said the general. “But we’ve spoken to the best minds in the submarine force. They think there’s a way.”

Pete laughed out loud. “Sorry, but you’re talking to a guy who knows better, General. I picked that island, I’ve studied the charts probably more than any man on earth. I programmed the drones that surround it on how to kill submarines.”

“We think there’s a way,” the general said again.

Pete scoffed, looking at his two colleagues for support. “Care to share the details?”

“In due time,” said the general. “But first… we have to teach you how to drive a submarine.”

The door to their office burst open again, and a small man in a khaki uniform limped inside. He was wearing a black leather patch over his left eye, the same half of his face covered in pink wrinkled scars, the distinctive scars of a man who’d lived through a ferocious fire. He had the oak leaves of a commander on his collar, but the front of his uniform was devoid of military decoration save for two things: the gold dolphins of a submarine officer, and below that, a war patrol pin. His nametag said ASE.

He nodded at the general and then stared down Pete with his one good eye. Pete felt an old, rebellious urge to say something sarcastic, to show he wasn’t intimidated by this show of military brass.

“Is that pronounced ‘aze’?” he said. “Like purple haze?”

“No,” said the submariner. “It’s pronounced ‘ace.’ As in: I’ve killed a bunch of people.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Pete stared at the sonar screen, his eyes burning from fatigue. The two bright, parallel bars of the degaussing range came into view, as he knew they would.

“Dive, make your depth six hundred and thirty-two feet,” he said.

The diving officer acknowledged the order, and Pete felt the angle in his feet as the ship dived. He pictured the bottom of the ocean rising toward them as their depth increased. It was flat there, he knew, and sandy. But he still didn’t want to touch bottom.

“Left five degrees rudder,” he said, steering the ship slightly, putting it right in the middle of the range. They were easing toward it, right on track. When they lined up perfectly, he gave his next order.

“Ease your rudder to left two degrees.” There was an unusually strong current at the range that day, pushing them sideways, or making them “crab,” in the words of Commander Ase. The small rudder would keep them moving right on track, right down the middle. Unless something went wrong.

Right on cue: a screeching alarm, a swirling red light. “Stuck dive planes, sir!” yelled the diving officer. They suddenly tilted forward steeply. Pete had to grab on the periscope ring over his head to stay on his feet.

“Right full rudder!” he ordered. “Switch to manual control!”

The diving officer complied, but the ship continued to dive. The big rudder was having the desired effect, the ship would dodge the electrified walls of the degaussing range, turning right in front of the entrance at Point Alpha. But he wasn’t sure they would miss the ocean floor.

“Emergency blow!” announced Hamlin. “Forward main ballast tanks!”

He grabbed the right-hand lever and pulled it toward him. He heard the tanks gasp as the valve turned and high-pressure air shot into the forward MBT and expanded, instantly expelling thousands of tons of seawater. The angle of the ship came off instantly, the huge air bubble in the tank overwhelming the force of the stuck planes. For a moment, the ship was level; then the angle started going up. “We caught it!” said Pete. He went from leaning forward to leaning backward as he watched their depth change. The ship was now soaring toward the surface.

The diving officer counted down their depth as they ascended. “One hundred feet,” he said. “Ninety… eighty… seventy…”

The angle leveled off suddenly as the ship broke through the surface, and crashed back down. They were bobbing on the surface.

“Sir, the ship is broached,” said the diving officer, stating the obvious. Pete could hear waves breaking against the side of the hull.

Immediately, drone alarms began screeching from the ESW console. The floor shuddered as bombs rained down on them. “Emergency deep!” shouted Pete as alarms indicating fire, explosions, and flooding lit up the control room. He scanned the alarms, prioritizing, identifying a reactor scram as his most pressing concern because it would kill their propulsion.

Then, with a pneumatic sigh, the control room shuddered and the alarms went silent. The lights surrounding them came on, revealing that they were not in the control room of an actual Polaris-class submarine. They were on a simulator, a perfect replica of a control room perched atop hydraulic pistons and a bank of computers that could simulate every possible catastrophe. It belonged to the Navy’s submarine school in Charleston, South Carolina, but it seemed to Pete that every other student had been sent home so the facility could be devoted entirely to his brief, intense apprenticeship.

Commander Ase limped to the edge and dropped a small steel gangplank that linked the simulator to the surrounding, three-story platform.

“Well, I didn’t hit the bottom that time,” said Pete as Ase made his way in. His heart was racing.

Ase nodded. “Aye, that’s true,” he said. “But you’ll be on the bottom soon enough. After the drones take care of you.”

“So what was I supposed to do?” said Pete, too tired to sound frustrated.

“You’re supposed avoid the bombs,” said Ase. “These submarines cost a lot of money. Reset!” he yelled into the shadows. The simulator shook with a thunk as unseen operators prepared it for another run.

And so they ran it again, Pete trying to squeeze the ship through the degaussing range during fire, flooding, every variety of stuck planes, and attacks from both above and below. When not on the simulator, he was in the classroom, learning from a string of submariners, all of whom seemed to worship Ase, about all the systems that would keep him alive and get him to Eris Island. Even in his exhaustion, Pete soon learned to appreciate the elegance of the submarine’s design, the engineering that had gone into it. Every feature and system had evolved over time, many in battle, to make the ship at once both safe to her crew and deadly to the enemy. His education in aeronautical engineering was more useful in the process than he’d expected. Underwater, the submarine moved more like an airplane than like a surface ship, as the water moving over her control surfaces positioned her just like the air flowing over a plane’s wings. Thus he was comfortable with the principles that kept a submarine submerged. Ase and his followers rarely spoke about how a submarine operated on the surface.

Much of his training revolved around great submarine disasters. They called it “lessons learned,” and in fact, the fleet did an admirable job of adapting their machines and their tactics by studying the wreckage of their martyrs. But it was more than that. His instructors in Charleston were indoctrinating Hamlin into a brotherhood. And part of being in that brotherhood, he learned, was an understanding that every time you left port in a submarine, you were going in harm’s way.

The USS Thresher was the first great nuclear submarine lost, commissioned in 1960 and lost in 1963, with all 129 men aboard. It was during a post-overhaul dive trial, about two hundred miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The ship was in constant communication with the Skylark, a submarine rescue ship that cruised above her, a safety measure that ended up doing no good at all. At test depth, one thousand feet beneath the surface, flooding began in a place and for reasons that were never determined. At that depth, Pete learned, the force of the water would have been like a cannon, the noise alone would have been debilitating. For reasons not completely understood, the ship’s emergency blow system failed to save them. There was some speculation that the rapidly expanding pressurized air froze the valves that were designed to channel it. At 0915, the worried commander of the Skylark transmitted on the “Gertrude,” his underwater telephone, the message, “Are you in control?”

In response, the Thresher transmitted back this garbled, incomplete message: “Nine Hundred N.”

Those were the last words anyone ever heard from them.

The second disaster Pete studied was another US nuclear boat, the Scorpion, lost under more mysterious circumstances in 1968. The boat had been diverted to observe a group of Soviet ships near the Azores in the Atlantic. Commander Francis Slattery, the commanding officer, radioed on May 21, 1968, that he had made contact with the Soviet group and was surveilling them at 15 knots and a depth of 350 feet. No one would ever hear from him again. When the boat was five days late returning home to Norfolk, Virginia, the Navy finally announced that there was a problem and initiated a search. Ninety-nine men disappeared along with the boat.

There were a number of theories about the fate of the Scorpion. Some thought the ship had been done in by one of its own malfunctioning torpedoes. Many others, given the nature of the mission, suspected the Soviets. Incredibly, for a ship that was lost under such mysterious circumstances, the US Navy actually had audio of it sinking. SOSUS arrays, highly sensitive hydrophones mounted to the seabed at critical places throughout the world, had recorded it. Hamlin’s education in submarine disasters finished with that tape, as an instructor pointed out the sounds of air banks bursting and bulkheads collapsing as the great ship imploded on her way to the bottom of the sea.

One disaster they never spoke of in Charleston was the more recent fire onboard the Regulus, the sister ship of the Polaris. Pete thought maybe it was too recent, that the men around him might have known sailors onboard, many of whom did not escape with their lives. He remembered seeing news video of it limping into port at the time, damage visible to its sail and hull, scorch marks and jagged metal. He remembered a later report that the ship was deliberately destroyed, having been declared a total loss, too damaged to repair. But the men with dolphins on their chests in Charleston never mentioned it. The Regulus disaster was still a tragedy, Pete thought, not yet mythology.

The evening after Pete heard the sound of the Scorpion being crushed by sea pressure, he waited on the conn of the simulator for his normal four-hour shift. He reviewed procedures as he waited; there was some problem with the computers and they had to wait while the entire software package was reloaded by the simulator’s operating crew. Commander Ase leaned on the rail and watched him as he paged through the procedure for flooding. First immediate action: ahead full. Maximizing speed maximized the flow of water across the planes, the force that would pull them to the surface.

“What did they teach you today in the classroom?” said Ase, emphasizing the world “classroom” with disdain.

“More submarine disasters,” said Pete. “Lessons learned from the Thresher and the Scorpion.”

“Lessons learned?” He laughed theatrically at that, the sound echoing in the cavernous space that held the simulator. “What did they tell you to learn from the Thresher?”

“Don’t screw around at test depth,” said Pete.

Ase nodded appreciatively, but it was hard to tell if he really approved, his scarred face frozen in its permanent sneer. “That’s not bad,” he said. “Good advice, actually. But I’ll tell you the real lesson.”

“Please do.”

“It was an unlucky boat! They had a scram pierside in Puerto Rico in ’61. Then the diesel wouldn’t work, then the battery crapped out. Got so hot inside they had to evacuate the crew. The Cavalla had to pull alongside so they could draw electric power from her. If that had happened at sea, they would have sunk. In 1962, a tug ran into her in port; she had to go to the yards in Groton to get that fixed. You want a lesson from the Thresher, there’s your lesson: stay off unlucky boats.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Pete. “What about the Scorpion? What’s the lesson there?”

“The lesson of the Scorpion?” Ase pointed a long finger at Pete. Pete noticed for the first time that even the tip of his finger was scarred, the skin waxy and wrinkled, the nail deformed. “Here’s the lesson of the Scorpion. Don’t ever trust the Russians,” he said. “No matter what anybody says.”

The simulator reset with a thud, startling Pete.

“OK,” said Commander Ase, rapping his academy ring against the metal guardrail on the platform. “Let’s get to work.”

Pete drove the simulated ship down to the depth of the range, 632 feet.

“All stop,” he ordered. The engine order telegraph dinged its acknowledgment as the ship slowed, creeping right into the range.

Pete zoomed in on his console, checked the motion of the ship. Current was a negligible .2 knots. That was, Pete knew, the exact value of the historic average current in that area, although you would never know it by the consistently apocalyptic conditions they usually thrust upon him in the trainer. The ship drifted into the degaussing range as Pete waited on the balls of his feet for the next, creative disaster to befall them.

A yellow light came on the diving officer’s panel; the lights dimmed slightly.

“Degaussing is active,” said Pete. He looked out into the darkness, where somewhere Ase and his crew of tormentors were preparing to spring something on him.

The ship slowed slightly near the exit of the range. “Make turns for three knots,” Pete ordered, needing the slight additional thrust to maintain ship control and complete their passage through the range.

The yellow light went off. “Ship is clear of the range,” Pete announced.

He waited, but still no disaster. He walked to the chart. It wasn’t the first time they had allowed him to get this far, but it was rare, so it took him just a second to recall the next step.

“Ahead two-thirds!” he said. “Right fifteen degrees rudder.”

The ship sped up and turned, driving Pete to the position where they’d determined they might squeeze through the shoals at periscope depth, the seven o’clock position, if due north on the island’s clock was high noon. “Make your depth one hundred feet.”

At the shallow depth, Pete slowed and executed a slow right turn to clear his baffles: peeking behind him to make sure no enemy boat had crept up in their sonic blind spot. Sonar reported no contacts.

He stepped to the conn. “Dive, make your depth eight-zero feet,” he ordered, at the same time turning the orange ring of the port periscope. The cylinder rose up smoothly, and Pete flipped out the handgrips as it came up, quickly putting his eye to the soft rubber eyepiece.

He was staring in the ocean now, looking up as far as the scope would let him, turning slowly, watching as they ascended. Even a fishing boat dragging nets could screw things up, although he doubted in real life a fishing boat would be operating here, in the land of the drones. But the simulator crew had never let realism stop them before in their endless pursuit of creative disasters that could stop Pete on his quest.

The view through the scope was a perfect simulation, taking into account weather and time of day. It was calm and bright. Pete watched the water get lighter as they came shallow, expecting the whole time to hear that a fire had erupted in the engine room, or a scram had shut down their power plant, or that a torpedo had appeared out of nowhere and was screaming toward them.

But nothing happened.

The scope broke through, and Pete executed three slow turns, verifying (once again to his surprise) that they were alone. “No close contacts!” he said. And he trained the scope on Eris Island.

It was right where it was supposed to be. Drones flew above it, some lazily making their way toward him. Pete knew that they were randomly searching, that they hadn’t seen his scope at this distance. And the degaussing had made the ship invisible to their magnetic sensors at periscope depth. They moved slowly toward the small break in the shoals. Pete’s heart raced; they’d never allowed him to make it this far.

Right before the shoals, one of the drones drifted right on top of them. Pete knew immediately they’d been seen. It soared into the sky. At this proximity to the island, it attracted a legion of followers.

“Right full rudder!” he ordered. He was too close to the island to go deep, however. The ocean bed was right beneath him. An attack formation of five drones was heading directly toward them. Pete braced himself for the impact of their bombs.

The simulator stopped moving with a pneumatic gasp. The lights came on around them. Pete heard Ase approaching first, and then saw him at the edge of the platform, throwing over the small bridge onto the simulator.

“I thought the degaussing would make me invisible?”

Ase shrugged. “I guess it didn’t take.”

“Didn’t take?” said Pete, his frustration rising. “What am I supposed to do? Swim out there and fix it?”

“Calm down,” said Ase. “You did fine. I would just recommend verifying the effectiveness of the degaussing before you make your approach to the island. That range hasn’t been used in five years. If it doesn’t work, you can always make another pass.”

“Verify it?”

“Give the drones a peek before and after you degauss. Do it while you can still go deep and evade if necessary, see how they react. That’s all, Hamlin.”

“OK,” said Pete. Ase was being unusually constructive in his criticism. It was every bit as unnerving as his quiet approach to the degaussing range. Pete found himself bracing for the next catastrophe.

They did three more runs, these a more traditional series of flooding, fire, and every variety of ship control casualty. Pete had learned that the outcome of the training wasn’t necessarily to bring the ship through the degaussing range every time. Indeed, he was convinced that given the complexity of some of the casualties being thrown at him, recovery was often impossible. Rather, they were looking to see if he had completely absorbed the procedures and the doctrine that they were throwing at him all day, so that even in a catastrophic situation, he was still making logical choices, making the best of whatever bad options he had.

“You’re getting there,” said Ase, after a particularly challenging run through the range in the simulator. He was sitting on the dive chair with a clipboard, going through his critique.

“High praise,” said Pete. He’d been in Charleston for four weeks. The last week they’d abandoned the classroom entirely, and he’d spent full days in the simulator, eight hours with a short break for lunch. At night, it was back to his room to study procedures and try to relax enough to fall asleep.

“Well, don’t let it go to your head,” said the commander, smiling with the half of his face that still worked. The dim lights in the simulator exaggerated the ripples of his scars. He was truly a frightening man.

“Want to do that one again?” asked Pete. “Maybe throw in a couple of helicopters?”

Ase shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “That’s it. You can practice more when you get to the boat.”

Pete was startled. He’d stopped asking when he was actually going to report to Polaris. “When is that?”

“You leave tomorrow for the coast.”

Pete nodded, trying not to look nervous in front of Ase. “Tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Pack your shit. The driver will be there at 0600.”

“Will do.”

“Here,” said Ase. He pulled a tablet computer that had been hidden beneath his clipboard. “That contains your orders, and the patrol order for the Polaris that takes effect when you get onboard. You’re the only one that can open that thing, but you’ll have to show Captain McCallister when you report.”

“You know him?”

“He’s a good man,” said Ase. “Smart.”

“Is he lucky?” asked Pete.

“Up to this point,” said Ase, not quite smiling.

The silence grew as Ase continued to stare at him. The support crew had left, and all the lights on the surrounding platform were off, making it invisible. The simulated control room was now a small cube of dim light suspended in darkness, supported by unseen forces. Soon, Pete realized with a chill, he’d be sitting in a real submarine, suspended in an endless ocean.

“I was out there,” said Ase after a long pause.

“Out there?”

“Where you’re going. Near Eris Island. We’d caught a whiff of a Typhon submarine on a SOSUS array; they sent my boat out there to check it out. I was skipper onboard the Regulus. Heard of it?”

Pete nodded. “Were you there…?”

Ase did his scary half smile again. “Yeah, I was there during the fire. We went out there to sniff around for this enemy boat, and soon enough we found her. She was noisy as hell, the way those Typhon boats all are — we heard her from five miles away. They don’t build them for stealth. A fifty-hertz tonal in a sound channel on the towed array… remember what all that means?”

Pete nodded. The enemy ship’s electrical system operated on 50 Hz, unlike the 60 Hz of Alliance ships. A 50 Hz tonal, or any of its harmonics, was one of the surest sonar signatures of an enemy boat. A sound channel was caused by different temperature layers in the ocean, causing sound to travel many times farther than it normally would, like light being reflected by parallel mirrors.

“We worked hard to get close, creeped up on her baffles,” continued Ase. “She went quiet, drifted in and out, but we had a solution we were pretty confident in. By the time I was ready to shoot, we’d been at battle stations for twelve hours.

“We shot two torpedoes with a twenty-degree spread. Instead of running away, she turned right toward us. Launched a couple of countermeasures and came right at us. Her countermeasures worked, our torpedoes peeled off. And then she shot one of her torpedoes right down our throats.”

This was news to Pete. He’d only heard about a fire on the Regulus, a heroic damage-control effort. No one had ever told him that the boat had been hurt in battle.

“Her torpedo went right by us, exploded about a hundred yards past. We were so close to each other, it was like a knife fight in a telephone booth. The torpedo missed us, but the shock wave blew out one of our main seawater valves — the engineer called away flooding in the engine room. I fired two more torpedoes back at her and came shallow, trying to slow the flooding.”

“You surfaced?”

Ase shook his head. “Hell no. There were drones everywhere. We stayed at periscope depth and hoped they wouldn’t see us. She did the same.

“Anyway, my boys did good work, flood control worked, we slowed the flooding soon enough, but we’d taken a tremendous amount of water onboard — we had to stay shallow while we pumped it off. And it seemed like my torpedoes had done the job; nobody was shooting back at us. We thought we were lucky with the drones, too; none had spotted us at that point with just our periscope raised, although we could see them darting around in the distance. I thought we might live to fight another day. Then the OOD called me to take a look.” He took a lengthy pause, as if he were once again looking out a periscope.

“It was a life raft,” he said. “Drifting right toward us. The goddamn thing just appeared in the ocean. One of those big, orange, covered ones, a completely enclosed inflatable. At first I thought maybe we’d gotten lucky and sunk the bastard, even though we hadn’t heard an explosion, and they abandoned ship. We were just starting to debate what we should do about it, whether we should take them prisoner or leave them adrift, when it got close enough for me to see it was empty. I stared for a minute longer than I should have, trying to figure out what it meant. Then the drones saw it.”

“Shit.”

“The Typhon boat had positioned themselves with the current and launched the raft so it would drift right toward us.”

“Why didn’t they shoot you with a torpedo again? You were sitting ducks.”

He shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to conserve their torpedoes. I think they didn’t want to give away their position again; we would have shot right back. Who knows? Maybe they just wanted to see if the lifeboat attack would work.”

“And it did?”

He nodded. “The raft kept drifting nearer, and by the time the drones spotted it, it was right next to us. We couldn’t dive, the engine room was still flooded. The down angle alone would have fucked us, about eleven tons of seawater rolling forward. Propulsion was screwed up because of the flooding, with the emergency propulsion motor we could barely make three knots against the current. The first bombs landed on the raft, blowing it to hell. But everything on that raft was made to float — the drones just kept hitting it, shredding it. Finally, one of them hit the scope.”

“While you were on it?”

He nodded. “That’s how I got this,” he said, tapping his eye patch. Pete winced at the click of his mangled fingertip on the leather. “Blew the optics right though the scope, shot the glass into my eye.”

“Jesus.”

“A second bomb fell a few feet underwater, hit the conning tower and exploded, breached the bridge trunk. Started a fire in external hydraulics. That’s about five hundred pounds of pressure, caught fire immediately. We lowered everything, submerged, even though that made the flooding start again in the engine room. Took local control in shaft alley, guys standing waist deep in water, controlling the planes with wrenches while the control room burned. Killed half my crew,” he said.

“My god,” said Pete. He’d never heard any of this.

Ase shrugged again. Pete realized he’d told the story many times, both in the brightly lit halls of power where he had to explain the disaster to his admirals, and in the dimly lit bars of Groton and Norfolk, where submariners told their real stories.

“We managed to get the fire out. Limped back to Pearl, at periscope depth the whole way. Saved the boat, somehow. Not that it mattered. It was too much to repair. As soon as they finished their investigation, they dragged her out to sea and scuttled her.”

Pete took it all in. It was the most Commander Ase had ever spoken to him.

“You know why I’m telling you all this?” he asked.

“So I know to lower the scope during a drone attack?”

“Yeah, I do recommend that. Highly. But in general — fuck the drones. The drones are like the weather, or…” he said with that weird smile curling onto his broken face, “the current. It’s something out there you all have to be concerned about, something you should use to your advantage, just like the Typhon boat did. But that’s not the reason I told you that story. That’s not what you need to know.”

“What do I need to know?”

“There’s an enemy submarine out there. And somebody onboard really knows what they’re doing.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Commander Carlson carefully dried and scanned every page of the documents they’d plucked from the sea. Almost all of it was readable, although that didn’t mean it was understandable. Much of it she’d read while holding the damp sheets in front of a hand dryer in the crew’s head.

It was medical research, she could tell that much. Something about the flu, which made sense given the history of the island. She knew about the flu, they all did, they’d been getting increasingly serious messages about hygiene and hand washing, and they’d all been required to get flu vaccines during their last port call, vaccines that clearly no one expected to be effective. That was confirmed in the captured documents — the scientists wrote about the futility of the present vaccines, and the virulence of the new strain. There were frightening classified briefs from the Alliance about the spread of the disease, the death rates, the unrest in the cities where it was doing the most harm.

She concluded that the crate of paper she’d grabbed represented some of their earlier work. Some of it contained dates. The earliest date was three years before, the most recent about a year earlier. But she could tell, even without any medical training, that they were getting close to a cure. There was an excitement in the more recent documents, a certainty that an answer was at hand.

She wrote a brief, one-page memo that summarized their findings, the dates that the paperwork spanned, the paragraphs and charts that seemed the most important to her untrained eyes. She consolidated these into about a five-page message, with the relevant scans attached, and sent it to squadron headquarters. It was as large a message as she dared send; she didn’t want to stay at PD any longer than necessary in the zone so close to the island where she chose to linger. They came to PD and sent the message to their satellite in a sixty-second, encrypted burst. They submerged the instant they received confirmation that the message had been received by the satellite.

Then she went to the wardroom, shared a microwave pizza with Banach, and waited for two hours, the amount of time she thought it might take for her bureaucracy to partially digest the information.

At sunset, they rose again, and a message was waiting for her. The OOD held the scope while she went to radio, reading it one line at a time as it came out of the printer.

Jennifer Carlson was a woman who had seen much during the war. But what she read on the message made her jaw drop. She walked back down to the wardroom, where Banach was enjoying a post-pizza cigarette.

“Sorry,” he said, starting to snuff it out on his plate. He knew his commander didn’t like smoking, and he did it only when she wasn’t around.

She waved her hand dismissively. “I have word from our illustrious leaders.”

“Did they congratulate us on shooting down the plane? Or chastise us for deviating from doctrine?”

“They express their congratulations,” she said, reading the message. “And they confirm that it was a high-value kill.”

“Oh?”

“The Alliance is sending out another rescue mission to the island, this time by submarine.”

“Smart.”

“The boat they are sending is the Polaris,” she said. “She’s on her way.”

Banach raised an eyebrow at this. “They know exactly which boat is coming? They know the name? How could they know that?”

“Because,” said Carlson, holding the message in front of her. “We have a man onboard.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

They flew Pete on a commercial plane from Charleston to St. Louis, where he boarded a military transport. The pilots seemed mildly put out to be hosting him, in the way military pilots always did, barely saying a word to him on the flight from St. Louis to Spokane, Washington.

At the Spokane airport, Pete was met on the ground by a military vehicle that was flying a small Alliance flag from the right corner of its hood. The drivers, however — two sergeants — were regular Army, and had numerous battlefield commendations. They weren’t talkative, with Pete or with each other, but they seemed happy to have him, to have duty on the mainland, for which Pete, as their cargo, got part of the credit.

“Seat belt, please, sir,” said the driver as Pete settled into the small backseat. As soon as it clicked, they were off with a roar of the vehicle’s heavy engine, heading west.

Pete realized that he’d been in the Alliance’s bubble for a long time. Outside the walls of the military bases where he’d spent so much of his time in the past few years, it seemed like things were starting to break down. In the hardscrabble towns outside of Spokane, a few people stared at them accusingly from their porches as they passed. Almost every store was closed. A few gas stations were open, but cars were lined up, most of them parked: they looked like they were waiting for gas to arrive. Lines also snaked out the doors of government clinics and pantries. A light mist began to fall, obscuring the view. The people in lines stood still, their faces blank, oblivious to the rain. Not long ago, Pete had associated poverty with obesity, a bad fast-food and junk-food diet accompanied by plentiful television and video games. The poor had transformed, he saw, back to an earlier version of want, where they looked gaunt, like images of dust bowl farmers during the Great Depression. Soon they were in the prairie, and Pete fell fast asleep as the sergeants murmured to each other about battles fought and comrades lost.

When they crossed the Northern Cascades and neared the coast, the area became increasingly militarized. A vehicle similar to their own sat alongside the road, charred, burned out.

“What happened to them?” asked Pete.

The solider in the passenger seat looked back at Pete without saying anything. He pointed to the sky.

After three hours of driving, they stopped suddenly on a deserted strip of highway, and the soldiers checked their tablet computer.

“Orders are updating,” said one of them.

“We should be OK,” said the soldier who wasn’t driving. “Looks like we’re meeting your boat in Bangor. Puget Sound is deep enough there for your ride, but pretty far inland. Improves our odds.”

They waited ten minutes until the tablet beeped. The driver read the orders, and then handed it to his partner to verify.

“We’ve got an hour to kill,” he said. “Looks like they want us to do the rest of the drive in the dark.”

“Sounds good,” said Pete. He was about to ask the soldiers if they had any food, but they had both already fallen asleep in their seats, trained, like soldiers everywhere, to sleep whenever an opportunity presented itself.

After fifteen minutes, he let himself out of the vehicle to urinate, and to stretch his legs. He walked a few feet away, not sure if he would be violating some kind of Army etiquette by peeing too close to their vehicle. It was a still, cool night, and Pete noticed for the first time that the soldiers hadn’t even pulled over: they’d stopped in the middle of the highway. It didn’t seem like any kind of martial arrogance; he assumed they must have good reason to believe that no other drivers were coming along. And, come to think of it, Pete hadn’t seen one in a while, in either direction. Not even another military vehicle. The interstate must be closed to civilian traffic, he realized.

Something caught his eye to the north, in the sky. A dark form, flying silently toward them. He felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck, and fought the urge to shout out to his companions until he was certain.

It swooped low, and then curved back into the sky, too high for him to see in the blackness. He kept his eyes up, and saw it again, blocking out its silhouette in the stars.

It was a vulture.

He exhaled loudly with relief. Any other time in his life, the appearance of a lone vulture on an empty highway might fill him with silent dread, a dark omen. But under the circumstances, he almost laughed with relief.

The vehicle behind him erupted with alarms. The driver threw his door open.

“Get in!” he screamed.

Pete dived for the door. Before he even had the door shut, they were spinning their tires, speeding down the highway.

The soldier in the passenger seat reached up and silenced the alarm in the overhead console that was blaring. “Drone,” he said. “Directly behind us. Flying west.”

“What the fuck were you doing out there?” said the driver.

“Taking a piss,” said Pete.

“Did you see it? Why the fuck didn’t you say something?”

The driver had switched on a center console that showed the drone as a tiny, bright green blip to the east in the center of a small screen.

“Gaining on us,” said the passenger. “Radar says he’s going about one hundred knots.”

“That means he’s not armed,” said Pete. “That’s too fast for an armed bird.”

The two soldiers looked at each other, assessed Pete’s knowledge without saying anything to each other.

“So you think we should just go back to sleep?” he said. They were roaring down the highway, hitting potholes with jarring force.

“No,” said Pete. “It’s in suicide mode. Unarmed, far from home. He’s going to try to crash into us.”

“I’ve heard about that,” said the soldier in the passenger seat. “Kamikaze mode.”

“Well, fuck me,” said the driver. He was scanning the roadside, looking for some kind of natural cover, but there was nowhere to hide.

“Wait until he’s in his dive!” said Pete. “Once he starts free fall, he doesn’t alter course. Everything shuts down.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“I wrote the program,” said Pete.

“Did you also write the program that’s supposed to keep them from attacking on Alliance territory?”

“Five hundred yards,” said the soldier in the passenger seat, looking at the radar screen. “But he’s climbing.”

“It wants to gain altitude before diving,” said Pete.

“So what should I do?”

“Keep driving straight,” said Pete. “Let it commit to a solution.”

They roared down the highway. The driver suddenly veered to avoid a massive crater in the center of the road. Pete could feel the vehicle coming up on two wheels. They crashed back down.

“That’s a new one,” said the driver. “Not on the chart. Probably where our friend there dropped his bomb.”

“Bombing what?” said the other sergeant.

“Unlucky farmer?” he said. “Who knows. Maybe a mule or a goddamn enemy possum.”

Other alarms began beeping on their overhead console. “One hundred yards and diving,” he said. “Heading right for us.”

“Keep driving,” said Pete. He was counting down in his head, running the numbers, knowing the drone wouldn’t correct its free fall in the last ten seconds of flight. “Slam on the brakes when I say so.…”

They could see on the radar that it was directly behind and above them. They still couldn’t see it. Pete watched the two dots on the radar screen converge, their truck and the enemy drone. The two dots were almost on top of each other.

“Now!” he said.

The driver slammed on the brakes, and the truck skidded to a halt, going completely sideways. They sat for one pregnant moment, and then the drone crashed directly on the stretch of road in front of them, right outside the driver’s side window. There was no explosion, as the drone carried no fuel. Just sparks and the concussion.

They waited a moment, made sure there were no more blips on the screen, and then all three men got out to look at the wreckage.

Debris was scattered everywhere, centered on a small crater the drone had created in the asphalt. None of the pieces had any kind of markings or identification on them. Both sergeants took pictures. It was the closest Pete had been to a drone since leaving Eris Island. After a few minutes of catching their breath and walking around the wreckage, they got back into the truck without a word.

The driver drove slowly around it, into the median, to avoid the destruction.

The soldier in the passenger seat was the first to speak. “Those things are bigger than I thought.”

“We’re almost there,” said the driver. They’d driven about another hour since the drone attack and were approaching the submarine base. They’d slowed down to an almost leisurely pace to make the rendezvous at the exact right time, which seemed painfully slow after their brief one-hundred-mile-per-hour sprint.

The soldier in the passenger seat turned and shook Pete’s hand. “We’re not going to hang around after we drop you off, I’m afraid, so let’s say goodbye now.”

Pete took his hand.

Suddenly they were at the head of the dock. They exchanged documents with two men in a machine gun nest that was topped by a heavily camouflaged metal shield. He waved them on and then ducked back below his cover after a quick survey of the sky.

“Go,” they said to Pete. “Good luck.”

He jumped out of the vehicle with his seabag, and as soon as he did, his companions sped away inland, as fast as they could drive.

Pete looked around. The soldier in the machine gun nest was deep inside his shelter, invisible.

“Is there a submarine around here somewhere?” Pete yelled toward him.

“That way,” said the soldier. His hand appeared out of the shadows, and pointed down the pier.

Pete didn’t see a submarine, but he started walking in that direction anyway.

After a few minutes it came into sight, a dark shape emerging from the ocean. When he got to it, the brow and a single set of lines were the only things that connected the vessel to shore. Water still dripped from the dark steel of its hull; Pete got the impression that it had surfaced just moments before his arrival. A man waited for him topside, in a full captain’s uniform.

“Welcome aboard,” he said.

“I’m happy to be here,” said Pete, extending his hand. The captain was wearing regular Navy ribbons; Pete thought he probably wanted him to notice that.

“I’m Captain Finn McCallister,” he said.

“Pete Hamlin,” he answered, taking the captain’s extended hand.

An alarm screeched belowdecks. “Let’s get going,” said the captain. “Sounds like they’re near.”

“Who?”

The captain looked at him like he was making a bad joke. He pointed at the sky, just like the soldier who had driven him there a day before.

“The drones?” asked Pete.

“Of course not,” said McCallister, striding toward the ladder. “The drones are perfectly engineered to defeat the enemy and protect the Alliance. But all the same we should get submerged before they start dropping bombs on our heads.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

At the bottom of the ladder, a young officer was waiting for them, a weary smile on his face and a stack of linens in his hands.

“Lieutenant Ramirez will show you to your bunk,” said the captain. “He’s your new roommate.”

“There’s a uniform here, too,” said Ramirez, patting the top of the stack. “So you can look like a submariner. We even put your name on it.”

“Sorry for all the trouble,” said Pete.

“Don’t apologize,” said Ramirez. “This is the first time I’ve seen the sky in five months. I’ll be forever grateful.” He gave the hatch a longing glance as the captain spun it shut, preparing the big submarine to go to sea again.

“I’m going to control,” said the captain. “I need to get us to the dive point as quickly as possible. As soon as we get in deep water, I’ll bring you to my stateroom so we can have a look at your orders.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“In the meantime, Ramirez will show you around.”

“Come on,” said Ramirez, no longer interested in lingering now that the last sliver of sky had been shut off to them. “First stop, our stateroom.”

As it turned out, it was right around the corner.

There were two bunks, one of which had been stripped bare revealing its thin, Navy-issue mattress.

“Here,” said Ramirez, handing him the stack of sheets and pillowcases. For the first time, Pete noticed that a pamphlet was sitting on top: WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS.

“What’s this?”

“That? A little bit of a joke. A thing we used to hand out to visiting bands of Cub Scouts and Rotarians. A memento of happier times. But there is some info that might be useful to you in there. Ever been on a submarine before?”

“Never,” said Pete. “Spent a lot of time in the simulator in Charleston. But this is my first time on a real boat.”

“You get used to it after about five years,” he said. The fatigue from all the years showed in Ramirez’s face, but his smile was genuine. Pete thought Ramirez was one of those guys who could suffer through anything, probably a job requirement for a career in the submarine force. Or maybe he was just glad to have somebody new to talk to.

“Well,” said Pete. “Hopefully this won’t take that long.”

There was a sharp knock on the stateroom door, and a strikingly beautiful woman appeared, with commander’s insignia on her collar.

“Already hanging out in your stateroom?” she said. “Looks like Ramirez’s bad habits rubbed off on you fast.” She had shoulder-length blond hair and a turned-up nose. Her body was small but powerful, athletic, reminding Pete of a cheerleader. Her eyes were hard, though, and she stared Pete down.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Ramirez, unfazed. “Now that I’ve shown him his rack, I’ll show him where we watch movies and take showers.”

“That will cover a normal day in your life,” she said with a snort. She extended her hand to Pete. “Commander Hana Moody,” she said. “I’m the XO.”

“Pete Hamlin,” he responded.

“I know,” she said. “You must be important.”

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s all about the mission.”

“Which is?”

There was a pause as she waited for Pete to disclose something. Anything.

“Ma’am, I’m not really at liberty to say. I haven’t even reviewed my orders with the captain.”

She tossed her head and exhaled loudly. “Jeez, some manners from you. A guest on my ship, given this prime bunk, and you’re keeping secrets from a superior officer.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Once I tell the captain, it will be up to him to share with anyone on a need-to-know basis.”

“I’m familiar with the requirements,” she snapped. She was looking him up and down now. “Ever been on a submarine?”

“Never,” he said.

“Are you Navy? Alliance?”

Pete shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass. I’m told you have officer of the deck training?”

“Correct, ma’am.”

“Then I guess we’ll treat you like an officer. We can use the help.”

“Only got four on the entire crew right now,” said Ramirez. “Captain, XO, me, and Frank.”

“You’re forgetting somebody,” said Moody.

“Oh, the doctor!” Ramirez said in a teasing way, as if he knew it would irritate her.

“He gets a stateroom to himself and no duties on the watch bill,” she said. “But you won’t get off that easy. I’ll need to observe you before putting you on the watch bill, of course.”

“Of course,” he said, and their eyes locked.

“It’ll mean spending a lot of time with me,” she said. “Hours and hours.”

“Looking forward to it,” said Pete.

She laughed loudly. “Sure you are, hotshot. All right — I’m going forward to take the watch from the captain.”

She turned and left without another word.

“She’s pretty hot, right?” said Ramirez.

“Sure,” said Pete.

“Beautiful,” Ramirez said a little wistfully. “But deadly.”

They spent a few minutes talking about hometowns, and what was going on ashore, as Pete unpacked. Ramirez was eager for news about the epidemic and the Dallas Cowboys. He had a girlfriend who had dumped him recently, and clearly he still pined for her. She hadn’t written to him in months; Ramirez worried about her.

Pete pulled out a Lucite block, one of the only personal items he’d thought to pack.

“What’s that?” said Ramirez.

Pete handed it to him. He turned it over in his hand. “Is that a honeybee?”

“It is,” said Pete. “At every stage of its life cycle. There’s the larva,” he said, pointing. “The pupa, the adult.”

“Very cool,” said Ramirez, staring at it curiously.

“It was a gift,” said Pete, feeling it necessary to explain.

“Let me guess,” said Ramirez. “From a girlfriend.”

Pete shook his head, trying to hide his sadness.

“Wife?” said Ramirez.

Pete shook his head again, and carefully took the Lucite block away.

“Ex-wife?” said Ramirez.

Pete didn’t have it in him to clarify, so he let that stand.

Ramirez shook his head ruefully. “Join the club, my brother. The Submarine Force Lonely Hearts Club.”

Pete placed the honeybee memento above his desk, and continued unpacking.

After a few minutes, a sound-powered phone on the wall of the stateroom chirped, and he was summoned to the captain’s stateroom. On the way there, he passed a muscular lieutenant with HOLMES on his nametag. He nodded gruffly in Pete’s direction, his only acknowledgment. I guess not everyone here is happy to have a new shipmate, he thought.

“Come in, shut the door,” said the captain when Pete arrived. He scooted over to make room in the small stateroom.

“Aye, sir.”

“Listen,” said the captain, as they both sat down. The cramped quarters made for a kind of instant intimacy. “I suspect you’re a civilian — maybe I’m about to find out. So, if that’s true, why don’t you call me Finn, and I’ll call you Pete. At least when it’s just the two of us.”

“Sure… Finn.”

The captain smiled broadly at that, as if he was pleased and surprised at the effort. “OK, let’s take a look.”

Pete pulled out the small tablet that he’d been holding, and powered it on. He swiped his finger across it, and the patrol order came to light. The first few pages were all boilerplate, long descriptions of responsibilities and secrecy requirements. The captain scanned through it all quickly, swiping ahead with the confidence of a man who had read a great many patrol orders and knew how to get to the good parts. He watched the animated projections of the epidemic, his eyes growing wide. Finally he got to a paragraph that offered a summation of the mission and he read it, and Pete watched him go back to the top and read it again before he offered any kind of reaction.

“Eris Island,” he said. “You can get us in there?”

“I can,” said Pete. “It won’t be easy, but I can.”

“One time we got within about two hundred miles and it was hot as hell. Drones everywhere.”

“We’ll stay submerged as long as possible. Degauss and cross the shoals at PD.”

The captain nodded while making eye contact. “And that’s where we’ll find the wonder drug?”

“Yes, sir,” said Pete. “We hope so.”

The captain tapped the icon on the screen that contained Pete’s personnel file. “I’ll read this in a minute, after we get through the nuts and bolts here, but are you a doctor? A scientist?”

“I’m an engineer,” said Pete. “With extensive experience on Eris Island and with the drones. That’s my expertise.”

“Aha,” said the captain, nodding, thinking it over. “There’s someone I’d like to share this with,” he said.

“You have that authority, sir.”

The captain picked up a microphone over his desk, and turned a switch. His voice boomed across the ship. “Doctor Haggerty, report to the captain’s stateroom.”

He hung up and waited for the doctor to arrive. Pete knew that somewhere close, Commander Moody was fuming at being kept out of the loop. He wondered how she would take it out on him.

Later that night, Ramirez took Pete to the wardroom. “I’ve shown you where to sleep, now I’ll show you where to eat. That should about cover it.”

It was a somewhat formal-looking room: wood panel cabinets, a glass case with actual silver serving platters on display, and eight chairs arranged around a table with the captain’s chair at the head, the only chair with arms.

“That silver is from the USS George Washington,” said Ramirez, pointing at the cabinet. “The first ballistic missile submarine. The first to carry a Polaris missile.”

Pete stared through the glass at the elaborately etched silver tray, a long, flat-decked submarine carved upon it. “Beautiful,” said Pete.

“Hard to imagine an era when they served food on silver like that onboard a submarine.”

Pete looked around and confirmed what Ramirez was saying. Any formality in the wardroom had long since given way to a kind of grubby practicality. Very old magazines were stacked across the table. A well-worn steel coffeepot had the power of place in the room, right next to the door. Giant, unillustrated bags of Navy-issue snack foods were arranged on a side counter — cheese balls and corn chips. Little boxes of cereal were stacked like bricks against one wall. After years at sea, it seemed, the Polaris had given up on the burden of formal meals.

“Breakfast?” said Ramirez, holding up a tiny box of Apple Jacks. “Or lunch?” he said, poking a bag of the bright orange cheese balls.

“How about just coffee?” Pete responded, sitting down across from him.

“We have that,” said Ramirez. He began to make a fresh pot.

“How often do you get resupplied?”

“As often as we can,” said Ramirez. “Which ain’t that often. We meet a tender up north… every year it gets farther north. Every six months if we can pull it off. Each time the food gets worse, the supply parts get harder to come by. Unfortunately, they made this boat so well that it just keeps running.”

“Why so far north?”

Ramirez looked at him as the coffeemaker began its noisy burbling cycle. It was a hard, assessing stare.

“The drones,” he said.

“The drones?”

“If we go far enough north, we’re less likely to get one of our own little bombs dropped on us. Every year we go farther. Two months ago I was on the bridge when we met the tender. We were so far north that with my binoculars I could actually see ice in the water.”

“Jesus.”

He shrugged. “Of course, we’re not supposed to say that. But I can tell you that we haven’t heard a whisper from an enemy ship out here, submarine or otherwise, in over a year. But every time we get near the surface, those drone alarms start screaming.”

The door burst open, Frank Holmes in workout gear carrying a stack of papers. He was followed by a man Pete hadn’t yet met. It had to be Haggerty, the doctor. Ramirez quickly stopped talking.

“What’s going on in here?” said Holmes with a large smile on his face. “A non-qual lounging in the wardroom?” He began feeding classified papers into a shredder that sat at the corner of the room, which groaned as it tried to digest them. Pete fought his engineer’s impulse to tell Frank to slow down, he was feeding too much paper into the machine at once.

Ramirez shot Pete an evil grin that said, watch this. “Hey, Frank… whatcha doing?”

Frank turned around, still feeding his sheaf of paperwork into the shredder. “I’m deleting these old targeting documents,” he said.

Ramirez burst out laughing. “That kills me every time!” he said. He looked at Pete. “He says he’s deleting stuff when he shreds it.”

“Whatever,” said Frank with a shrug. “Same fucking thing.” He clapped his hands as the shredder finished chewing through the last document.

“So,” Frank said to Pete. “Who won the Super Bowl? Was it awesome?”

“Tell us it was,” said Ramirez. “Even if it wasn’t.”

Pete learned in the wardroom that part of his onboarding required a cursory physical examination from Haggerty. He followed the doctor to sick bay after he finished his coffee.

“Any contagious diseases?” Haggerty asked, reading from a clipboard.

“No,” said Pete.

“No coughing, diarrhea, sore throat?”

Pete shook his head.

“Don’t be offended,” said the doctor. “We have to ask everybody.”

“I’m not offended at all,” Pete answered.

The doctor turned and reached in a drawer for a small plastic cylinder. He wrote a tiny serial number on it and handed it to Pete. “Here, wear this on your belt: your personal dosimeter. It will keep track of how much radiation you receive from the reactor. Don’t worry, it won’t be much. I read them once a month, and all of us have negligible doses, even guys like the captain and Ramirez who have been here for years.” He pointed to a row of binders, one for each crewman, past and present. Ramirez’s was thick with paper, one sheet representing every month onboard.

“Thanks,” said Pete, undoing his belt to attach the device.

“It’s a hell of a thing,” said the doctor.

“What’s that?” said Pete.

“Your mission. Our mission. You really think the cure is out there?”

Pete shrugged. “You’re a doctor, don’t you believe in cures?”

He smiled wryly. “Of course I do. I’m just not sure I still believe in patrol orders.”

After his physical, Pete met Ramirez back in the stateroom.

“Home sweet home,” said Ramirez as he walked in.

“How long have you been at sea?” he asked, remembering the folder with Ramirez’s exposure tracking.

He squinted his eyes, as if deep in thought. “Five years and two months. Longer than anybody except the captain.”

“And you’ve been engineer the whole time?”

He nodded. “Yep. And Frank is weapons officer, Moody is XO. That’s it — four watchstanders. The ship was designed to operate with no fewer than six, originally, but here we are.”

“What about the doctor?”

“Not a watchstander. Technically, he’s not required to learn a watchstation as the science officer, but it would be, you know, good manners if he did. I hear most doctors on other boats do it.”

“That’s the plan for me?”

Ramirez nodded. “You should be able to complete the qualification in a couple of weeks with all your simulator time. Everything is pretty much automated. But it’ll still be nice to have another name on the watchbill.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“Just don’t get too good. They’ll never let you leave.”

Pete laughed. “Is that what happened to you?”

Ramirez nodded. “Yeah. For a while I sent messages requesting a transfer — my sea tour was supposed to end two years ago. They stopped even giving me the courtesy of a response. And I stopped asking — don’t want to look disloyal. In the current environment.”

He held Pete’s gaze.

“Meaning?”

He could tell Ramirez was assessing him, not completely sure if he could trust Pete.

“The captain and I — we’re Navy guys. He went to the academy, I was ROTC at Texas A&M. Frank and Hana — they’re Alliance officers. Pure Alliance.”

“True believers?”

“Exactly. They distrust everyone and anyone who isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid. And they don’t mind letting their bosses know about it.”

“And that includes you?”

“Absolutely. And the captain.”

Pete thought about that.

“What about the doctor?”

Ramirez laughed. “Who knows where he comes from. Medical school, I guess.”

“So why did you volunteer for submarines?”

“That’s a question I ask myself a lot these days,” said Ramirez. “My father was a submariner, I guess that had something to do with it: a captain.”

“What boat?”

“The Alaska. An old Trident. Here,” he said, “let me show you something.”

He reached into his desk and cleared some papers and books out of the way, revealing a small safe. He spun the dial and opened it up. Nestled among a dozen bottles of medicine was a small nine-millimeter pistol.

“This was my dad’s,” he said, pulling it out. “At sea, he slept with it.”

“The drugs, too?”

“No,” he said. “I happen to be the controlled medicinals custodian, one of my many collateral duties, that’s why I’ve got a safe.”

“So why did your dad sleep with a gun?”

“He said that the captain of a Trident submarine was the most vulnerable part of the entire strategic weapons triad. So the minute the boat went alert, he put the purple key around his neck, and this pistol under his pillow.”

Pete took it and hefted it. He dropped the clip. “It’s loaded,” he said.

“Well, he couldn’t very well stop a mutiny or a KGB takeover if it was unloaded,” he said.

“Are you allowed to have this?”

He shrugged. “Not technically. No real small arms allowed on the boats anymore — just a few Tasers and billy clubs. The doc is the only other one who has the combination to the safe, we do a monthly inventory of the drugs together. He never says anything.”

“Maybe he thinks it’s a cigarette lighter.”

Ramirez shook his head vigorously. “God no. Cigarettes would really get me in trouble.”

Pete spent the next days learning the ship’s systems, usually with Ramirez but also standing watch with Moody, Frank, and the captain. Ramirez had been right, the ship was easy to learn, the systems supremely well engineered, and with Pete’s technical acumen he soon learned them all. While he didn’t have the competence they’d all gathered after thousands of hours on the conn, the simulator and the attention of Commander Ase had served him well, and he was soon trusted enough that they signed his qualification book and made him an officer of the deck. They honored the occasion in the wardroom with a real meal, a chicken that had been saved deep in the freezer for a special occasion, and a bottle of wine that the captain brought down from his stateroom. Only Moody wasn’t present, as someone had to stand watch in the control room.

“To our new watchstander,” said the captain, raising a glass. “By my calculation, this should give each of us twenty-five percent more time in the rack, and Hamlin seventy-five percent less.”

They clicked their glasses together and drank.

“What now?” said Ramirez.

“Now — we have a mission to complete.”

“Are we getting close?”

The captain nodded. “We’re getting close.”

Suddenly the phone buzzed at his knees, a direct line to the control room. He picked it up.

“Captain.”

He nodded as he listened, his brow furrowing with concern. “OK. I’m on my way up.”

“Something wrong, Captain?”

He nodded. “We’ve got a submerged contact. Moody thinks she’s following us.”

The next two weeks were a blur of evasive maneuvers, countermeasures, and stifling tension. But they couldn’t shake the shadow boat. Pete watched a change come over the captain as he tried to evade the enemy boat, but couldn’t. One night prior to taking the midnight watch, he spent some time with the captain to discuss the situation in the wardroom.

“You’re certain it’s the enemy?”

He nodded. “No Alliance boats would get this close to Eris — trust me. It’s crazy to get this close, and if I didn’t have your assurances that you knew some backdoor in, I wouldn’t be trying it either.”

“Why don’t they shoot us?”

“I’ve thought about that,” said the captain. “Maybe they want to see what we’re doing. Maybe they want to shoot us after we pick up our cargo.”

“So why don’t we shoot them?” Pete asked.

At this, the captain’s demeanor darkened. “Have you been talking to them?”

“Who?”

“Hana and Frank,” he said. “They think I should just fire two torpedoes at her, make all our problems go away.”

“They haven’t said a word to me about it,” said Pete. “But why don’t you?”

“At this range — they’ll shoot back immediately. And they’ll hit us, sure as shit. Firing a torpedo at them is a murder — suicide. As long as we’ve got a chance to evade, and complete our mission, I’m going to keep trying.”

“Unless they shoot us.”

“If they shoot at us first,” said the captain, “I’ve got a torpedo in tube one with their name on it. We can say goodbye to each other as our torpedoes cross paths.”

The next morning, the captain called them all to control. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night. Ramirez and the captain stood on one side of the plotting table, Frank and Hana on the other. Pete stood to the side, equidistant between the adversaries.

“OK,” he said. “We’re going to try something new. We’re going to launch the MOSS.”

Hana rolled her eyes. Frank looked to her for approval, then snickered.

“The MOSS, Captain?” Moody was incredulous. “That thing is archaic. It’s a waste of time.”

“What’s the MOSS?” Pete asked.

“It’s a submarine simulator,” said Ramirez. “Basically a fake submarine we launch from a torpedo tube. It broadcasts our same acoustic signature. The bad guy follows it.” But even Ramirez didn’t sound optimistic.

Moody continued. “Captain, respectfully, we’ll never fool a modern boat with that thing.”

“We’ll rig for ultraquiet,” he said. “Then we’ll launch countermeasures and push out the MOSS. While Typhon is trying to figure it out, we’ll peel away to the north. If we’re quiet enough, and the MOSS works like it’s supposed to, we’ll slip away.”

“Waste of time,” said Hana again, frustration in her voice.

“You have any better ideas, XO?” said the captain. They were glaring at each other.

“I do, sir,” she said, emphasizing the word. “Instead of firing that dusty MOSS, launch a real torpedo down their throats. If you want to evade, a torpedo in the water will make that a lot easier. Let’s get the first shot off in this fight.”

“She’s two thousand yards away, Hana. At this range, she’ll fire right back on a dead bearing.”

“So we evade!” she said. “That’s what you’re planning on doing anyway! Let’s take a shot and then evade!”

“I’ve made my decision,” said the captain. “Frank, load the MOSS in tube three, and prepare for battle stations.”

“We’re not going to discuss this anymore?” said Moody.

“Discussion is over,” said the captain. “Now, follow your goddamn orders.”

For a second, they all stared at each other. Then Frank stormed out of control without a word, while Hana continued to glare at the chart.

Frank pushed his way past the doctor on the ladder on the way out. He’d been standing there the whole time, listening.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Commander Carlson kept waiting for the shot, but it became clear to her that the Alliance boat was trying to evade her, not willing to engage in any suicidal actions: smart. In the meantime, she would follow. She was proud of shooting that little plane down, and she would stick to that philosophy. Better to shoot the enemy ship on her return trip from Eris Island.

Polaris was a good, quiet ship, with a skilled captain, she could tell. Acoustically, they had two things she could hold on to. At very close ranges, inside of one thousand meters, they could hear a 60 Hz tonal. It could be anything electrical that was sonically sorted to the hull, broadcasting that slight electric whine into the sea. It traveled a very short distance, its high, narrow frequency attenuating quickly in the ocean. But it was distinctively man-made and therefore invaluable, a sound they could pluck from the cloud of natural noises that surrounded them: the roar of the ocean, the tides, the shifting of the ocean floor, and the mournful cries of whales a hundred miles away. Moreover, it was distinctively Alliance, as the Typhon boat operated on a 50 Hz electrical system, so they could quickly distinguish any of their own noise from the enemy’s.

Secondly, they had discovered a sound made from the ship’s reduction gear, a slight chirp. It could have been a chipped tooth along one of the many gears, and it clicked reliably with every full rotation of the screw. This sound had the added advantage of being directly related to the speed of the reduction gear, and therefore, the speed of the ship. Over many days of tracking Polaris, they had even constructed a formula to convert the frequency of the chirping to the speed of the ship.

Both noises disappeared entirely outside of about two thousand meters, so they worked hard to stay inside that range. It was difficult because the Polaris tried all the standard evasion techniques, changing speed and course often. Polaris was hampered here by the fact that Carlson knew their destination: Eris Island. Still, sometimes they drifted out of range. When they did, Carlson had a third sound she could count on to reel the Polaris back in: the voice of their spy. It almost felt unsporting to rely on it, but there you go. War is hell.

Carlson was in control with Banach and two of her officers whom she trusted only slightly less. They were staring at the small-scale plot in the corner, looking at their estimate of the Polaris’s course and speed. Suddenly a starburst of noise lit up their sonar display. Banach quickly put headphones to one ear.

“They’re launching countermeasures,” he said, quickly putting down a red X on the chart at the position of the launch. “And another,” he said, making another red X.

“They’re up to something,” said Carlson. The Alliance had basically two categories of countermeasures, things that spun in the water, and things that fizzed; they looked to be using both. The goal for both was to create a large acoustic cloud that the Polaris could escape behind, the same way infantry used smoke grenades on the battlefield. Carlson wasn’t too worried; she had too many good cards in her hand. But she was curious.

“Target zig,” said Reese, her youngest officer, on the phones with sonar. “Target has turned to the south,” he said, taking the information from the display in front of him.

Carlson looked at the plot. Over days, the ship, despite all its maneuvering and attempts to evade them, had steadily made its way toward Eris. Maneuvers like this weren’t unusual as they tried to shake her. But the countermeasures were a new twist; the large amount of ambient noise they were creating was weakening the acoustic grip they held on their prey.

She walked over to the sonar display, the narrow band readout stacking dots on top of each other. The dots represented the actual data from sonar. If they stacked in a perfectly straight line, it indicated that they had a good-quality solution: they knew the Polaris’s course and speed. But the newest dots were starting to stray, bending toward the right.

“Target is speeding up, too, no?” she asked.

“Yes, Captain,” said Reese. “Turned to starboard and sped up.”

She clicked on the screen and looked at the data. The 60 Hz tonal was loud and clear. But the clicking of the reduction gear had disappeared entirely.

“Ship is rigged for silent running,” said Moody. She was looking at an electronic status console in front of her. All unnecessary machinery had been stopped to make the ship even quieter. This included fans and air conditioners, so the temperature was steadily climbing in control. They were all at their battle stations. The doctor was in sick bay, “counting Band-Aids,” as he said. Frank was in the torpedo room, while Ramirez was in the engine room. The captain, Pete, and Moody were in the control room. Pete was in the dive chair, directing the rudder and the stern planes. “Countermeasures are in the water and activated.”

“Very well,” said McCallister. “Launch the MOSS.”

They felt nothing in their feet, no rush of water or change in pressure — it wasn’t like when a torpedo was ejected from the ship. They had pumped open the outer doors of the torpedo tube, and the MOSS simply swam out.

“The MOSS is launched,” reported Moody.

“Very well,” said the captain. “All stop.”

Pete rang it up, and the engine room answered immediately.

“Left five degrees rudder,” said the captain. Pete turned the yoke in front of him. “Sir, the engine room has answered all stop. My rudder is left five degrees.”

“Very well,” said McCallister. “We’re turning away. How long until the MOSS broadcasts?”

“Five minutes,” said Moody.

Everyone in the control room looked at their watches.

The MOSS swam from its torpedo tube powered by a small electric engine. Unlike the ship it was born to imitate, its propulsion machinery was almost silent, the energy flowing from a chemical battery rather than the spinning of turbines and the pumping of water through a nuclear reactor. Five minutes into its journey, it began broadcasting a recording from a transponder in its nose. The sound was carefully designed to sound like a Polaris submarine, with a 60 Hz tonal and a broadband signature in the back of that like the whooshing of steam through pipes. While the MOSS was tiny, it was noisy, purposefully so, creating an acoustic profile that was slightly louder than the ship it was leaving behind. It was a decoy, and like a hunter’s wooden duck floating on a lake, it had to attract attention without being obvious.

After five minutes of broadcasting, the MOSS turned on its programmed course. It turned right and sped up slightly, to 8 knots. Its acoustic twin, the real submarine, turned left at this same time, and the distance between the two grew.

After forty-five minutes, its battery exhausted, the MOSS died. A small valve slid open, filling a center chamber with seawater. Its mission complete, the MOSS sank to the ocean floor.

“The MOSS is broadcasting,” said Moody. The Polaris was now just drifting, its screw not turning, as silent as the big ship could be.

“I see it,” said the captain, tapping the screen in front of him. He looked at the narrowband profile that had suddenly appeared on his console, the 60 Hz tonal a bright line that was peeling away from them. He switched displays to see broadband sound, and watched the line tracing away from them that marked the “steam ring,” the signature of a very nearby submarine, the actual sound of high-pressure steam moving through pipes. It was a faithful duplication of their own noise being broadcast by the MOSS. “So that’s what we look like,” he said, almost to himself.

Moody came to his side. Despite her lack of faith in the plan to evade, she was excited, and determined, as always, to succeed. “Look!” she said excitedly, pointing at the display of the enemy boat. “They’re turning! They’re following the MOSS!”

“Make turns for three knots,” said the captain. “Let’s drive slowly away before they figure it out.”

Carlson allowed them to swing right to follow the sound, but the hair was standing up on the back of her neck. Something wasn’t right.

“Captain?”

Banach was standing beside her. Just as she had finely tuned instincts about enemy submarines, like any good XO, he had developed good instincts about his commander.

“I don’t know about this…” she said.

“Why? We can hear them clearly. If anything, it’s louder.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And faster. So why no noise from the reduction gear?”

He furrowed his brow at that.

“We’re following that sixty hertz because it’s all we’ve got.”

“Correct,” said Banach. “It’s all we’ve got. We haven’t always held both signals.”

“It’s going completely straight now, at a higher speed.”

“Maybe they’ve given up,” said Banach. “Perhaps they are abandoning their mission. Because of us.”

She snorted at that. “No,” she said. “You poor thing. It’s been so long since we’ve been in port, you’ve forgotten what it feels like to be seduced.” She swept through the sonar display, looking on all bearings for another sound, anything. But there was only silence, except for the 60 Hz beacon in front of them, the clearest they’d heard their target since they first acquired it.

Then, after forty-five minutes, it disappeared entirely.

“Shit!” said Carlson.

“I don’t understand,” said Banach, sweeping the cursor on the display through the ocean. “It just disappeared!”

“A drone of some kind,” said Carlson, already heading for the main plot. “We’ve been duped.”

She tapped her finger on a spot on the chart precisely between their current position and the spot where the fake Polaris had first turned and sped up. “Here!” she said. “Drive us here!”

“Left full rudder!” said Banach. The big ship turned to port.

“We’ve been driving away from them for almost forty minutes,” she said. “Assuming they are going very slow…”

“Maybe a mile or two?”

“If they were driving directly away from us,” she said.

“Have we lost them?” said Banach.

“We lost them,” she said. “They outsmarted us, fair and square.”

“We’re almost in position,” said Banach.

“All stop!” she ordered. “Rudder amidships!”

As her big ship coasted silently through the ocean, she closed her eyes and pictured the drone submarine to her north, and her prey somewhere to the south, an entire ocean to hide in.

Banach started to talk, but she stopped him with a finger to her lips, her eyes still shut.

Suddenly, a bright blip appeared on the sonar screen.

“Transient!” said Banach. “Bearing two-zero-zero.”

“Drive to it,” said Carlson, relief flooding through her even as she felt a slight sense of shame. Just as she told Banach, the Polaris had outsmarted them fair and square. The only reason they were able to find them again was because at this critical juncture they had a friend onboard. A friend who helpfully dropped a heavy wrench into a dry bilge, sending a pulse of sound into the sea that traveled for miles and miles.

“I think we did it!” said Moody.

The captain nodded grimly. “Ahead one-third,” he said. They were three miles away from the enemy boat, the farthest they’d been since they first spotted her. At this distance, they would be invisible, even at the slightly higher speed.

“Engine room answers ahead one-third,” said Pete.

Frank appeared in control. “Did it work?” he said.

“Maybe,” said the captain. He fought the urge to speed up even more, the desire to open distance faster balanced by the greater noise the ship would create.

“No sonar contacts!” said Moody as the enemy disappeared entirely from their screen. The captain checked his watch.

“The MOSS will die soon. Then they’ll know.”

They drove a few minutes more at five knots, seemingly alone according to the blank display in front of them. Then the enemy reappeared.

“She’s there!” said Moody. “And faster, by the look of it.”

“She figured it out,” said the captain, “when the MOSS died. Doesn’t surprise me. Sped up and backtracked. I would have done the same thing. She still doesn’t see us.”

“Speed up?”

“No,” said the captain. “Let’s just try to slip away.”

They watched the Typhon sub move on sonar, created a solution that showed her moving, just as the captain had predicted, right down her old track. Not pointing directly at them as she had for days. The bright dots stacked up neatly.

And then suddenly the enemy veered.

Moody sat down and quickly worked out a new solution.

“Target zig.” She looked up. “She’s turned toward us.”

“Dammit,” said the captain.

“Speed zig,” said Moody. “Speeding up.”

“Ahead two-thirds,” said the captain. “Make turns for eight knots.”

“Too late,” said Moody, fine-tuning her solution on the display. In minutes, the Typhon boat was again following them so closely and so tightly that on sonar it looked almost like they were towing her. “They’ve got us.”

“Goddammit!” shouted Frank. Pete winced. He realized they’d all been whispering everything since they went to battle stations.

“How?” said Moody. “How did that happen?”

Pete turned around to look. For the first time, he saw real resignation in the captain’s eyes. Moody stared at the captain, but Frank stared at Pete; everyone seemed to be accusing everyone else of giving the ship away.

Soon enough, Ramirez had made his way to control, and the conversation grew heated.

“Every time we start to get away,” said Moody, “they know right where to find us.”

“Exactly!” said Frank. The captain ignored him.

“Something is giving us away,” he mumbled, looking at the chart.

“Or someone,” said Moody. Her eyes were locked on the captain’s, bright and wary.

“What exactly are you saying, Commander Moody?”

“I’m saying that the Typhon boat seems to know our every move. We were completely silent back there, and she turned right toward us.”

The captain shook his head. “It has to be something…”

“Maybe a transient?” said Ramirez.

“Did you hear something?” snapped Moody.

“No,” said Ramirez. “But obviously they did.”

“Let’s look at the sonar recordings,” said Moody, already moving toward the screen and deftly changing the display. “Every individual hydrophone. We know when it happened — about thirty minutes ago.”

She moved the cursor backward in time, and they all stared over her shoulder at the picture the computer had rendered, turning noise into green waves of light and dark.

“There!” she said.

At first, Pete didn’t see it, but she changed the resolution and it came into view. A bright spike at precisely the time the Typhon boat had turned toward them.

“What the hell?” said the captain. “Something that loud would have traveled for miles!”

“We didn’t stand a chance,” said Frank.

Moody was still feverishly turning knobs on the central console. She threw a small switch and began playing the actual audio through the control room speakers.

It sounded like a whirring, the universal sound of the ocean, an ear to a seashell. Then suddenly, there was a bright spike of noise. It actually made Pete wince. It sounded like a hammer on a steel pipe.

She moved the cursor, turned up the volume, and played it again, this time staring at the captain.

And then she played it again.

“All right,” said McCallister. “Enough.”

She played it again.

“Knock it off, Moody!” he said.

“Why stop now?” she said. “I think we’re finally getting somewhere here. Let’s narrow it down by hydrophone.”

She clicked through a few more menus, and suddenly there was a small line graph for every one of the twenty-six hull-mounted hydrophones that lined the exterior of the ship. She pointed to the one where the spike was the biggest, twice as big as the adjacent sensor.

“There!” she said. She tapped the number beneath the graph. “Hydrophone twenty-three.”

“In the engine room,” said the captain. They all looked at Ramirez.

“What?” he said.

“Did you hear anything?” said the captain.

Moody let out an exasperated sigh.

“No… I was in maneuvering the entire time with the doors shut—”

“Captain, I demand you arrest this man,” said Moody.

“Fuck you!” said Ramirez. “I was back there keeping the ship running while you were developing your paranoid fantasies.”

She slapped the screen so hard, Pete thought she might break it. “Fantasy!” she screamed. “What is this?! Somebody is banging on the damn hull, giving us away, and you’re the only guy back there!”

She turned again to the captain, gathered herself, and stood up, almost at attention. When she spoke, her words had a formal steadiness to them. “Captain, I’ll ask you again: arrest this man for treason. For mutiny.”

Ramirez locked eyes with Pete. His defiance had faded now; he looked genuinely worried that the tide was turning against him. The word “mutiny” hung in the air almost as jarringly as the sound spike on the twenty-third hydrophone.

The captain stared Moody down. “I’m not arresting anyone.”

“Then I’m taking command of this ship and arresting you both,” she said.

Frank slowly pulled something from his pocket. Hamlin realized that they had planned this.

Ramirez suddenly bolted from the control room. McCallister started to follow, but Frank pointed his Taser at the captain’s chest.

Seconds later, alarms began wailing.

Moody and Pete jumped forward to the control panels and began cutting them out, announcing them out of habit.

“Radio is disabled!” he said.

“Fire in the four-hundred-megahertz generators,” said Moody, cutting out the alarm. They were almost right next to each other on the panel. “He’s sabotaging us,” she said, directly to him.

“Ahead two-thirds!” said McCallister. “Rig for general—”

Before he could finish the order, Frank Tased him. The captain fell to the ground, writhing in pain.

Hana stood up and announced to Frank and to Pete, and to the recording of the deck log, “I am Hana Moody, and I am now in command of the Polaris. I have the deck and the conn.”

“Aye,” said Frank. He was resetting the Taser and smiling as McCallister groaned at his feet.

It had all unraveled so fast. Pete realized that Moody and Frank were now waiting to see how he would react.

“I’ll find Ramirez,” Pete said. And before they could say anything else, he flew down the ladder and out of control.

Radio was trashed, he saw as he sprinted by. The screens of the computers were caved in. A small fire extinguisher had done much of the damage, Pete could see, as it still jutted out of one of the shattered monitors. The small generator room for the 400 MHz machines was a soggy ruin. The fire-suppression system had put out the fire with a thick coating of foam, but the machines were destroyed. Lights shut off as he ran, the electrical system trying to protect itself from the carnage.

Just before reaching the door to his stateroom, he heard a gunshot. The sound was deafening in the confined space.

He burst through the door to see Ramirez slumped against the bulkhead, shot in the head. Leaning over him, the doctor was placing the old nine millimeter in his hand, trying to make it look like a suicide. He turned to see Pete standing in the doorway.

Pete rushed toward him, but the doctor stood up and trained the gun on him.

“What?”

“Don’t move, Hamlin, or I’ll do the same to you. Which would be a shame because we need you.”

“I guess you’re not really a doctor.”

Incredibly, Haggerty looked a little insulted by this. “Of course I’m a doctor.”

“Why did you kill him?”

“He was going to try to stop their stupid little mutiny. And that wouldn’t do. This mutiny might be helpful to us. He and the captain were the only guys smart enough for me to worry about, and now they’ve both been neutralized. As for you, I still need you. I need your mission. I need your orders.”

Pete suddenly lunged toward him, but the doctor was surprisingly fast. He brought the butt of the gun down on the top of Pete’s head, bringing him to his knees. He was now staring right into the face of his dead friend.

He expected to hear a shot, ending it all just like it had for Ramirez. But instead, the doctor fished something out of the small, open safe. A minute later, he felt a needle sinking deep into his neck.

“There,” said Haggerty. “This will make you forget just about everything.”

Haggerty moved fast, knowing he had only minutes before he was discovered.

Almost everything in the stateroom belonged to Ramirez, of course, and while there were stacks of engineering documents that he was certain were classified, he had no way of telling which of the indecipherable tables and charts would be valuable to his masters at Typhon. They all looked the same to him. Deeper into the pile on his desk, he found a trove of pictures of Ramirez’s girlfriend, and he threw these to the floor.

Hamlin’s desk was almost bare, he was furious to discover. But above it, something caught his eye.

He pulled down a smooth Lucite block. Entombed inside it were insects. Honeybees, actually — each stage of life of a honeybee. It had to be Hamlin’s, he knew; he’d been in the stateroom hundreds of times and had never noticed it before. But what did it mean? Did the honeybees contain some kind of secret code? Perhaps inside them there was some kind of microchip, or memory card? He pocketed the block, the only thing he took with him.

On the way out, he checked Hamlin’s pulse to make sure he was still alive, and placed the warm gun in his hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

A loud crash below their feet snapped Pete back into the present. He was back in the control tower on Eris Island, with McCallister and Admiral Stewart.

“What was that?” said Stewart. Finn stepped to the glass and looked down.

“Carlson and her crew,” he said. “They’re trying to shoot their way into the tower.”

Pete joined them at the glass.

“We don’t have much time,” said Stewart.

“Can they get in?”

“Eventually,” said Stewart. “It’s blast-proof and bulletproof, but they’ll shoot through it sooner or later.”

“And we’ll never fend off that entire crew of marines once they get in,” said Finn.

Pete’s head was spinning, trying to figure out a plan, even as all his memories came flooding back.

Suddenly, the noise from below stopped. Stewart and Finn ran to the other side of the tower. Pete hesitated, then followed them to the glass.

Carlson and her men had given up on the door. They’d climbed to the low rise of exposed rock toward the sea, the bluff that faced them. They began shooting at the windows. Each crack was deafening, and each strike made the windows crack and splinter. They dived to the floor and covered their heads.

“That glass is bulletproof!” yelled the admiral. “But like the door — it won’t last forever against a sustained attack.”

Sure enough, the window that directly faced Carlson was almost completely eradicated, the floor of the control tower covered with powdery glass. Bullets were now flying through the tower and hitting the opposite window from the inside, until it, too, was gone. Suddenly there was a pause in the shooting.

The three men crept slowly to the window. Pete wondered if Carlson was pausing to accept their surrender. He also wondered if they should give it.

On the bluff, another marine was aiming a different weapon at them — a much larger weapon.

“Is that…?”

“It’s a grenade launcher,” said Admiral Stewart. The man holding it had two bandoliers of grenades across his chest.

Carlson was pointing at them, at the damaged window. The man with the grenade launcher took careful aim and fired. The grenade hit just below them, bounced off the tower, and exploded in the air.

“They’re going to lob one in here eventually!” said Finn.

“We can go below,” said Stewart. “Into the bunker. It’s more heavily armored down there, made to survive a missile strike. There’s food, water — we could live down there for months.”

“No!” said Pete.

“What choice do we have?” asked Stewart. “We’re sitting ducks up here.”

“No more hiding beneath the surface!” said Pete.

“Just until help arrives—”

“We are the help!” shouted Pete.

“Then what do we do?” shouted Finn. “Do we have any weapons? Any guns at all?”

“Actually,” said Pete, “we do have a weapon. We’ve got the most sophisticated weapon system in the world.”

They heard the curious noise of the grenade launcher again, and as if in slow motion, watched as a grenade passed all the way through the tower, in one shattered window and out another, exploding in the air outside.

“Jesus Christ!” said Finn. “Let’s get below! We don’t have any choice!”

Pete ran to the center console and entered codes that were rolling back into his memory. Soon, he had the display up that he wanted; an outline of the island, with a dotted line exactly five miles from the tower. He took the red key from around his neck, inserted it, and turned it. The display changed, the five-mile ring blinking. As an alarm rang in the tower, Pete turned a knob and shrank the circle to ten feet. Stewart saw what he was doing.

“You’ll destroy everything!” he said.

“I know,” said Pete.

As he worked, he swore he heard laughing outside the tower.

“We’ve almost got them!” said Carlson. She was breathless with excitement. They were against the very door to the tower. She’d seen it in pictures a dozen times, grainy satellite photographs of it, and a few times through the magnified optics of her scope, when she dared get that close. But here she was. She slammed her fist on the door to the tower, more from excitement than from frustration.

As she backed up, her marines kept shooting at it, but the bullets were having little effect, barely denting the door. The thing had been built to withstand a sustained attack.

“We’ll get through it eventually,” said the sergeant as he reloaded.

“Maybe,” said Carlson. “But how much time do we have?”

Banach had stepped away and was looking at the rocky bluff that faced them. “Let’s go up there,” he said, pointing. “We can easily shoot at the tower from there.”

“We’ll be exposed…” said the sergeant.

Carlson thought it over. From the bluff, they could shoot out the windows — there was no way they were as solid as that door. Then, maybe lob a grenade into the tower. From their current position, while they might shoot their way through eventually, it could take hours. In the meantime, they could be summoning help, arming themselves, destroying everything of value, who knows?

“Let’s do it,” she said. “I want to kill them quickly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the sergeant, already leading his men up the rock face of the bluff.

She and Banach looked at each other. “Having fun?” she said.

He nodded. “Nice to see these guys earning their pay for a change.”

They scrambled up the bluff behind the marines. As she neared the top, she saw what was left of her submarine out at sea, a few floating scraps still being bombed by the relentless drones. Just in front of it was the wounded Polaris, badly damaged but untouched by the swarm. She felt a pang thinking about her lost boat. But it was balanced by the relief she felt at escaping with her life, and the thrill of the hunt.

“Almost all the windows are out!” said Banach after a few minutes of shooting from atop the rise. The men inside had stopped showing their faces; they were hunkered down, panicked, no doubt, perhaps contemplating surrender. Banach had a small pistol out, but the commandos around them had the bigger guns, automatic rifles and a grenade launcher that Carlson had been only vaguely aware was onboard. She admired the efficiency of the marines as they worked, the sergeant barely said a thing as they took their positions, covered one another, and shot accurately at the windows. There was something medieval about it, she thought, besieging a tower on an island. And as in any siege, time was on their side. Soon, several windows of the tower had been completely shot out.

The marines stopped shooting momentarily, and the sergeant addressed the man with the grenade launcher. She couldn’t hear his words, so deafened was she by the firing that had gone on all around her, but she knew what he was saying. The same thing she might say to a brash OOD who had a torpedo in the tube, the outer doors opened, and the bearing of the enemy. Take your time, he must be saying. Make it count.

The soldier got down on one knee, squinted through the sight, exhaled, and fired. The grenade launcher made a satisfying BLOOP. The grenade flew directly toward the tower but hit low, bouncing off the side and exploding as it fell toward the ground. The sergeant leaned in and calmly spoke to the soldier again, who nodded and adjusted his stance. His second shot flew directly through one of the windows they had blown open with their bullets.

And then it passed directly through a shattered window on the other side. It exploded harmlessly in the air.

There was a moment of silence, and then they all burst out laughing.

“What a horrible shot!” said Carlson, laughing with the rest.

The sergeant put his hand on the shoulder of the soldier with the grenade launcher, moved him slightly to his left, so that his next shot wouldn’t pass all the way through.

Before he could shoot, there was a sudden change that Carlson became aware of on a subconscious level. The drones that had been hovering all around them, watching their fun but not participating, suddenly jerked in their flight paths, as if jolted by a sudden and important set of new instructions. A large contingent of them formed into a V and flew directly toward the Polaris. The drones that had been directly over their heads dipped ominously, their buzzing engines deepening by an octave as they changed course.

Almost immediately, the bombs began falling.

The first one landed in the middle of the commandos, shattering their bodies, sending three of them rolling down the hill. The man with the grenade launcher was cut almost in half, leaving his weapon behind as he rolled into the sea. The gray rock of the bluff was suddenly red with the blood of her men.

Carlson was shocked to realize she wasn’t hit, even as the bombs continued to fall. She followed the dead bodies of the marines, rolling down the bluff, thinking that the drones might take her for one of the dead.

Banach followed her down. They were in that slight crevice in the rock now, between the bluff and the rest of the island, but the drones weren’t fooled at all. An explosion went off right in front of them. She was turned away, but Banach lost an eye in the explosion; his face was covered in blood.

Banach pulled himself upright, still alive, and dragged himself on top of her. At first she wasn’t sure what he was doing and started to get angry with him, could barely breathe from the suffocating weight of his body on top of hers. Then she realized that he was trying to protect her.

It won’t work, she thought. The drones saw the concentration of bodies, alive and dead, as an attractive target and wouldn’t stop until they were obliterated. He might absorb the first blast, maybe the second, but the drones were relentless, and her death was inevitable. Banach was so close, the whole length of his body atop her, that she could feel his weakening, dying pulse through her uniform. Each explosion forced him down harder on top of her, as if he were a lover trying to tighten his embrace. A bomb exploded directly on top of them, and his heartbeat stopped. His blood poured over her face, and her arms were pinned by the rock walls, her hands unable to clear her eyes. His dead body absorbed another blast, and then another. How gallant of him, she thought. But she would have preferred to die atop the bluff in the first blast, she realized, looking out at the sea.

CHAPTER THIRTY

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.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

They waited a full day in the tower, watching the drones trickle in and kill themselves on the island. They ate a little from the well-stocked bunker in the basement beneath the tower, slept a little in the two cots, taking turns on watch upstairs. They dressed the wounds of the admiral, picking out the pieces of broken glass that had lodged in his chest and scalp. Finn’s wound was more serious, but the bullet had exited his shoulder cleanly, and they dressed and bandaged him as best they could.

They dragged Moody’s body onto a landing in the stairwell, for lack of a better place, and covered it with a green tarp that barely covered her.

At sunrise, Pete wandered upstairs to find the admiral staring out at sea.

“Anything?” he said.

“No.”

“Think we should venture out?” said Pete.

The admiral nodded. “It’s probably safe now. Haven’t seen a drone in hours.”

He turned and leaned against the console that still glowed green with the shortened radius that kept them safe from any drones that might still be alive. “But now that we’ve got a second,” said the admiral, “let me ask you a question. Why are you here?”

Pete had to think for just a minute. While his memory had come back, it was still hazy, as if operating in a lower gear. And so much had happened.…

“They sent me here,” he said, “because of the flu.”

“Is it that bad?”

“They say it is,” said Pete. “So here I am.”

“They evacuated all the doctors a few weeks ago… it was entirely classified, of course. I managed to stay behind while they left. I figured they were taking the vaccine with them.”

“They didn’t survive the trip. So they sent me.”

“Sent you to stop one epidemic…”

Pete raised his hands to indicate the airfield, scattered with the wreckage of a thousand drones. “And I stopped another.”

“Maybe you’ll stop both,” said the admiral. He reached under his coat and pulled out a thick manila envelope that he’d been hiding. “I went down there and looked around after the medical team left. Found this on a desk — pretty sure somebody wanted me to find it.”

“What…” said Pete, as he took the envelope.

Across the front of it, in large red letters, it read: THE CURE.

The three men made their way out onto the island, explored on foot. The drones had performed well until the very end. No structure was still standing except the control tower, protected by that green electronic circle that Pete had inscribed around it. He’d left it there, just in case, and the three men kept a wary eye on the sky. But Pete had a feeling that all the drones were gone, the word spread by dancing drones and self-destruct sequences under way all over the Pacific.

They came upon the bluff where Carlson had made her last stand and scrambled to the top.

A number of weapons were scattered across the bluff. Finn picked one up.

“Grenade launcher,” he said. “They almost got us with this.”

Pete bent down and picked up two bandoliers. “Are these the grenades?” They looked like very large shotgun shells, each with a bulbous nose.

“They are,” said Finn. He took the two belts and counted up the remaining shells. “Twenty-two left,” he said. He put the belts across his chest. “Let’s see what else they left behind.”

“Over here!” said the admiral. He was at the edge of the bluff, pointing down into the crevice.

When the waves ran out of the space between the bluff and the island, they revealed a grisly sight: almost the entire Typhon force, their bodies broken and twisted. Pete saw movement and thought for a moment that someone had somehow survived. Then he realized that the bodies were covered in thousands of tiny crabs, busily consuming their dead flesh.

“Let’s drag Moody’s body out here with them,” he said, remembering how she had treated his friend Ramirez.

On the other side of the island, they came over a rise to the remains of a low-slung building that still smoldered.

“What’s this?” said Finn.

“The medical research facility,” said Stewart. “What’s left of it.”

They climbed a hill, from which they could see water in all directions. Waves crashed on the south side of the island, and seagulls dived around them. Each time a gull’s shadow crossed the ground, Pete caught himself flinching.

“Now what do we do?” said Finn.

“Everybody will realize soon that the drones are gone,” said Pete. “There are people that have been waiting for this moment. To seize the island.”

“Will this end the war?” said Stewart.

“It’s been over,” said Pete. “I’m convinced. Both militaries have all been driven underground and underwater for so long; they’re decimated. Nobody wants to fight anymore. Nobody has for a while now. I’m sure there will be negotiations, bad intentions and good, but the war is over. We just destroyed the only weapon system that was still functioning.”

“Will they call us traitors?” said Finn. “Saboteurs? For destroying it all?”

“No one needs to know,” said Pete. “Both sides were here; now both sides are gone. We’ll say they destroyed the drones while fighting each other. I’m the expert on drones, I’ll explain how it’s possible.”

“Will that work?”

Pete sighed. “It’s close enough to the truth. I can live with it.”

The men thought that over for a minute and continued to look at the sea.

“So what now? We stay here and wait for somebody to come get us? What if the enemy gets here first? What if it’s another one like Carlson? Or Moody, for that matter?”

Pete shrugged. “I’m not sure we have any choice. We’re stranded.”

“Maybe not,” said Stewart.

He led them down a path to a small inlet on the rocky side of the island. A heavily reinforced concrete shelf hung over it. “Come on,” he said.

The admiral was surprisingly spry given his age and his injuries. Pete had to help the wounded Finn down the path.

At the rocky edge of the water, they could look into the dim pen to which Stewart had led them. Inside was a perfectly white Navy cutter.

It was pristine. The water lapped gently against the hull. Black X’s had been painted against the side.

“We kept one here for additional trials with the drones,” said the admiral. “We never needed to use it because the drones worked so well right out of the gate. But it’s a perfectly seaworthy boat, with two full tanks of diesel fuel and room for all of us.” Pete noticed a large tank against the back of the bunker, and pointed.

“Extra fuel,” said the admiral.

Finn walked over to the boat and pulled himself with his good arm up the small ladder that led to its deck. He had a huge smile on his face.

“Admiral, I’ll be your XO.”

“No, you be the commanding officer,” said Stewart. “I’ve been thinking about retiring.”

They spent two days carrying all the food they could from the tower to the boat: powdered milk, powdered eggs, canned vegetables, canned beans, and hundreds of tiny boxes of cereal. Whatever the impact of the war, thought Pete, the Alliance’s Frosted Flakes production had remained strong throughout. On the way back, they each carried a five-gallon plastic container of diesel fuel and positioned it in the control room.

They also practiced with the grenade launcher that had been salvaged from Carlson’s team. The thing was supremely well designed for war: tough and easy to use. With no instructions of any kind, all three men were soon shooting it accurately, until they were down to the last six grenades. They judged Hamlin to be the best shot.

That night, they decided to rest, and leave at dawn.

The sun was coming up as Finn started the twin diesels. They had tested them out the day before, and they required some minor work. Pete could see pure pleasure in Finn’s eyes as he worked on some last-second adjustments, his shirt off.

“You just going to stand there while I work?” said Finn.

“I’m an aeronautical engineer,” said Pete. “Can’t help you.”

Finn rolled his eyes. “Well, you’re second-in-command now.”

He gave a hand to Stewart to help him on deck, and then Pete untied the two lines that held the boat to the small cleats inside the pen.

“What will we name her?” asked Finn. “A ship needs a name.”

“How about Polaris?” said the admiral.

“No,” said Pete. “That boat was unlucky.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Pamela,” said Pete, without hesitating, and they all nodded in agreement.

“Are we sure there are no drones out there?” asked McCallister.

Pete nodded. “As sure as we can be. They must be self-destructing all over the place by now. And all of the ones within range of the island have probably made it back by now and self-destructed.”

“Who do you think will get here first when they realize the drones aren’t a threat anymore?”

Pete shrugged. “Not sure it matters. We’ll make sure there’s nothing left of value here. For either side.”

Finn turned a switch, and the little boat’s diesels roared to life. Pete could feel the power in the rumbling in his feet. Two plumes of black exhaust shot from the stacks as Finn gunned the engines slightly, and ably pulled the boat out to sea.

As they exited the pen, the bright sun almost blinded them.

“At this point in my career, I never thought I’d command a surface ship!” yelled Finn. Pete was hauling in the lines.

“Think about this,” said Pete as he worked. “You’re probably commanding the largest surface ship in this ocean.”

“I might make admiral after all,” said Finn.

He revved the engines slowly and pulled away to the leeward side of the island, the side that went hard against the control tower, right by the bluff where Carlson and her men had died. Finn cut the engines, and Pete made his way to the aft deck. The grenade launcher was waiting for him.

“Close enough?” shouted Finn from the bridge.

“Should be,” said Pete.

The deck undulated slightly in the calm water, something Pete hadn’t practiced for. He lifted the launcher to his shoulder, aimed it at the tower, and waited too long to shoot. The grenade went wide. It exploded impotently on the ground with a spray of gravel.

“Nice shot,” said Finn.

“That doesn’t help,” said Pete. He raised the grenade launcher again, and exhaled deeply.

He pulled the trigger again, and the grenade arced gracefully into the air. It went right through the middle of one of the broken windows; they could actually hear it land with a thump on the carpeted floor. There was a pause — then an explosion. Glass and smoke shot out of all four sides of the tower, followed by orange flames and black smoke as the diesel fuel ignited.

“Well done!” said the captain.

“Let’s do one more,” said Pete, breaking down the launcher and reloading it. “Make sure there’s nothing left in there.”

When they were done destroying the tower and all traces of what had happened inside, Finn gunned the engines and swung the bow toward open ocean. They surged forward and starting cutting through the waves instead of riding on top of them. Pete leaned against the aft railing as the boat accelerated. Behind them, Eris Island shrank into the distance. A dolphin jumped exuberantly in their wake. For the first time since he’d awoken on the Polaris with his memory erased, Pete smiled.