AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Zoya was within earshot. “How?”
Court had no answer, but before he admitted this, he cocked his head at a new noise. Zoya heard it, too. The loud buzzing of a large drone.
But it wasn’t coming from outside; it was coming from the great room just beyond the door.
Zoya whispered, “There’s a UAV flying through the damn house.”
Another buzzing came from the courtyard now; this drone was higher, over the hacienda, but low enough to be in position to attack any targets if it was a kill bot.
Zoya said, “There must be someone controlling each of these things, plus the one that already crashed. That’s a lot of pilots.”
“Yeah,” Court said, his mind racing with the increasingly complicated equation before him. He turned to Fitzroy. “Get that name out of Tudor.”
Fitzroy nodded, and though obviously in great pain himself, he knelt over his dying friend.
•••
One minute earlier Carlos Contreras had watched the ISR drones’ feeds on the laptops in front of him, and though he said nothing and his face remained expressionless, in his mind a realization was slowly coming to him that he found almost impossible to comprehend.
From the overhead ISR camera feeds he could see the two surviving hunter/killer air bots, and the pair of armed ground vehicles moving through the courtyard. He knew these latter two units must have come from the cases he’d dropped some twenty minutes earlier.
The boxes he had released read “Greyhound V120” on the outside, which he assumed to be a make and model number, and it reminded him of YouTube videos of quadruped unmanned ground vehicles he’d watched in the past.
He’d even seen one with a rifle on its back on the Internet, a prototype, but he’d never even heard of anything that operated in the field with the capabilities these bots clearly possessed.
Soon one of the two ISR drones flew lower, over the roof and then down to the balcony, and then it descended even farther, finally flying right through the raging fire inside the window shattered by the Hornet bot moments earlier. Instantly it began broadcasting the feed inside the house: the great room, canisters spewing black smoke all around, and the two dead bodies lying by the overturned chairs.
The camera turned away, to the right, and now Contreras saw a closer view of one of the ground robots as it moved nimbly out of the stairs.
He thought about the flying camera now, and what technologies must be at play. The machine had the capacity for high-speed, dynamic interior navigation and obstacle detection and avoidance, and it automatically switched from its optical cam to its thermal depending on how much smoke was in the air in front of it.
Contreras was transfixed by the utter symphony being performed by the four remaining machines in the air as well as the two on the ground; they seemed to all be commanded as one, in harmony, and not as individuals.
He was an expert in the hardware being employed at the hacienda, and as he took it all in, one thing soon became abundantly clear.
If these machines were working together as one entity, then there was no way these machines were being controlled by human beings.
They operated in a swarm; the ground bots fired expertly, taking only an instant to choose a target, advancing and discharging smoke grenades while doing so.
And the hunter/killer hexacopter that had crashed through the window and detonated had had less than two seconds to identify and then lock on to its moving target, fire some sort of object out to destroy the window, and then attack in a terminal dive.
This was something no mortal human could possibly accomplish.
This was AI.
Contreras was certain now that all the equipment he’d been ordered to deploy was under the command of some integrated artificial intelligence that, in all his research on drones and robotics, he had only heard the faintest rumors of.
And although he was two miles or more out to sea and over a mile in the air, completely safe from what was going on at the shore, he felt pangs of terror in his stomach, back, and heart.
Contreras realized he was merely a human logistics component, an enabler of a massive artificial intelligence weapon, and the thought of this utterly terrified him.
As soon as this was over, he told himself, he was going to have a talk with this American, Cyrus, to get some understanding about this mission.
But for now he looked on, at once thrilled, fascinated, and scared.
•••
Court and Zoya moved together to the closed door of the library, their weapons out, but they did not open the door. Soon the sound of the drone on the other side faded away; it seemed as if the machine was flying quickly and confidently into another part of the second floor, no doubt on a hunter/killer mission like the machine that had killed Tudor and his guards.
