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.