“Shut up,” Lisa told Sophie, “and hurry up.”
“I’m hurrying already.”
“Hurry faster.”
LoTek reported, his voice low and hard, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have good news, bad news, and worse news.” His voice echoed in my earpiece; that conference call had still not ended. “Good, the American cell network awaits our command. Bad, there’s a roadblock up ahead. Worse, it’s not just the cops we have to worry about. I’m tracking a swarm of six drones coming straight at us from dead ahead. ETA maybe three minutes.”
I went cold.
“Shit,” Lisa said, “shit shit shit, Dmitri and Anya saw the ambulance get away. This is my fault. I should have pulled the fucking trigger.”
LoTek said to Sophie, “The longer we wait, the greater the chance of the cell companies noticing something is wrong and seizing control back.”
“Give me five minutes,” Sophie said, without ceasing to type.
“We don’t have five minutes,” Danielle objected.
“Then we lose.”
I winced.
“All right,” Danielle decided, “let’s try to buy a little time. Everyone hang on. Lisa, James, you know what to do.”
I didn’t, actually, but I didn’t have time to protest, because just then Danielle stomped on the brakes and screeched into a U-turn. Lisa and I had neglected to buckle ourselves in, and we both went tumbling to the floor. I barked my shin painfully against something metal. A dozen car horns howled at us as we bounced over Sheikh Zayed’s raised meridian. Then we were accelerating the other way, pedal to the metal, the engine throbbing beneath us.
I looked up at the thing which had bruised my shin, the electromagnetic pulse cannon, and realized what Danielle had meant.
The faint hornets-nest buzz of an incoming swarm of drones was audible above the engine, and growing louder.
“Lisa,” I said hoarsely, “get the doors.”
Chapter 86
Sheikh Zayed was a gauntlet of cyberpunk towers. In the distance, about three hundred feet up but angled gently down, directly towards us, I saw a line of six shimmering blurs of motion, moving inexorably closer as if drawn to us by gravity. A swarm of drones in perfect and deadly formation.
I had to rock the pulse generator back on its edge to aim its megaphone-like barrel at them. It was incredibly heavy, and I could barely move it. I squatted and balanced it against my torso, gave a brief praise of thanks to the emir of Dubai for ensuring that this road was paved as smooth as a baby’s skin, and realized I needed a third arm to push both buttons while I held the generator angled back.
“Shit,” LoTek said behind me. “I just checked Twitter. The use of the word ‘explosion’ has skyrocketed across the USA in the last two minutes. It’s begun.”
“Lisa!” I called. “Give me a hand.”
From behind me her arms threaded through mine, and her hands hovered over the buttons on either side. It was like a drone launcher, you had to trigger both buttons simultaneously to fire the cannon.
“I can’t see,” Lisa muttered into my ear, “you’ll have to tell me when.”
I nodded. The drones fell towards us, closer and closer. Our police pursuit, who had been distanced somewhat by our unexpected U-turn, grew nearer at almost the same speed. I hoped they didn’t think the giant metal box I was holding propped up was some kind of bomb. Though it was mostly battery, so dense and heavy that if they shot at me their bullets would probably bounce right off.
“I’m almost there,” Sophie shouted, “I’m almost there, don’t do it yet!”
At that Danielle seemed to slow down a little, or else the drones accelerated, or it was just a trick of perception; whatever it was, suddenly they no longer seemed there, they seemed here, and every instinct screamed at me to fire the cannon.
I forced myself to wait. They grew larger as they grew closer. I could see the lead drone’s wings and its whirring propellor.
“Got it!” Sophie called. “Shoot!”
Lisa didn’t move.
“Shoot,” I echoed quietly, and for some reason thought of Jesse.
Lisa’s hands slapped both buttons. The cannon shuddered, and emitted a low ominous buzz, like from a power substation or a giant insect, as the ambulance’s lights and electrical systems went out as if Lisa had flicked their off switch. I saw the rotors of the lead drone slow and stop. It began to drift further behind us, and fall further downwards.
“Get us out of here!” I shouted.
Danielle stood on the accelerator. For an ambulance it had a remarkable kick. We rocketed away while the first three drones in the swarm exploded in quick succession, sending the pursuing police cars tumbling side-over-side, leaving smoking potholes the size of washing machines in Boulevard Sheikh Zayed. The fourth and fifth drones had followed closely enough that they were disabled by the explosions of their peers, veered off course, and tumbled to explode relatively harmlessly against skyscrapers.
The sixth and final drone kept coming.
I looked down at the analog dial. It had swung all the way back down to EMPTY, and was slowly creeping back up through red towards green as the generator recharged. Much too slowly.
As if in slow motion the final drone fell gradually towards us, like an airplane on autopilot, descending the flight path to our fiery death with perfect grace. It was so close that I could see the blur of its propeller in the night. The cannon’s range varied nonlinearly with its power; at half charge it had one-eighth the range of a full charge. The needle reached the one-quarter mark. One-sixty-fourth the range.
A hundred feet away. Seventy. Fifty. Forty. I could see the glint of its nose-spike camera. Thirty feet from us, ten above the road. The LED on its belly flashed red.
“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” I muttered.
If anyone else said anything, I didn’t hear it. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten. I could feel its rotor wind -
“Now,” I said, and Lisa slapped the buttons, and the generator expelled its weak charge.
The drone didn’t actually shut down, but it faltered, and began to glide downwards. That gave me time to shove the EMP cannon out of the ambulance, and Lisa time to slam shut its doors.
A second later we actually lifted off the ground with the force of the explosion. Our tires spun frantically with no purchase for a long breath. Then we landed, and they grabbed traction, and somehow, heroically, Danielle kept the ambulance from rolling as we squealed and rattled to a halt.
I looked to LoTek and Sophie and saw that their laptops had snow-crashed.
“Oh, shit,” I said, “the pulse -“
“Flash memory is fine unless you aim the cannon right at it,” LoTek said, “we just need to cold boot.”
He matched action to word by ejecting and quickly replacing his laptop’s fuel cell, then doing the same with the phone that served as its Internet tether. Sophie didn’t bother with her computer; she just held out a thumb drive to LoTek.
“The adjusted signal?” he asked.
She nodded.
“You’re sure?”
“Dead certain.”
Danielle tried to start the ambulance. It wouldn’t.
“I think we’re stuck here,” she said apologetically.
I shook my head in dismay. “The cops will be here any moment. We’re not getting away.”
“Did you ever think we would?” Lisa sounded almost amused.
“Doesn’t matter if we get away as long as we get it done.” LoTek’s laptop and phone had booted. He grabbed the thumb drive from Sophie, plugged it in, started typing. “Let’s hope the attacks have some kind of Gaussian time distribution, and Twitter was just reporting a handful of early arrivals.”
He hit ENTER, stopped, nodded briefly, and sat back. It was so anticlimactic that I wanted to shout at him not to stop.