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 alclass="underline" 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.