They bounded up the stairs to the top floor, where an unlocked door awaited them. Pete looked at Finn and drew the small handgun without a word. Nodding, they pushed the door open, Pete holding the weapon in a firing position.
“Pete Hamlin,” said an old man from the center of the hexagonal room. “It’s about time you showed up.” He had a gray beard, and wore the shoulder boards of an admiral.
“Who are you?” Pete shouted over the sights of his pistol.
“That,” said Finn, wonder in his voice, “is Admiral Wesley Stewart.”
Pete allowed himself to take it all in for a moment before he began speaking. The familiarity of the control room washed over him; he knew he’d spent many days in there in the past, watching the drones below. Despite the carnage outside, the control room itself was in relatively good condition, the carpet still clean, just one of the surrounding windows cracked. Electric lights still illuminated the room, and the computers beeped, clicked, and contentedly reported their data. Somewhere far beneath them, he could feel the hum of a generator in his feet. He placed the small pistol slowly in his pocket.
Admiral Stewart broke the silence. “I didn’t expect to ever see both of you in the same room. Certainly not this room.”
He turned to Pete and pointed at McCallister. “How much does he know?”
“You might want to ask me the same thing,” said Pete.
“We’re here for the cure,” said Finn. “The epidemic.”
“The disease that killed my wife.”
The admiral looked at Pete with concern. “You may have come to the right place for the cure,” he said. “But that disease didn’t kill Pamela.”
Pete was confused. It was one of the few things he thought he knew, the memory that had anchored his actions. “But…”
Stewart looked at him with a seriousness that gave way to sympathy. “Pete, the disease didn’t kill Pamela. The drones did.”
And with that, everything came back to Pete.
BOOK
TWO
THREE YEARS EARLIER
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.