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.