Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  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 all: 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.

  Seagull deterrence wasn’t something he had studied before, but he found that there was a large body of work on the subject, the result of a few high-profile disasters of commercial airlines ingesting seagulls in their engines during takeoff. (There was also the oddity that worldwide, many airports were located near garbage dumps, exacerbating the problem.) Following the advice of experts, they first tried scaring the birds away with shotgun blasts and sirens, but the canny gulls soon realized that the noises weren’t lethal and returned to the island, spreading their waste all over the bodies of Hamlin’s highly engineered drones as they ignored the noise. Next, the Alliance imported a family of spirited Brittany spaniels to chase the birds off, but the dogs soon grew lazy in the island heat. Throughout, Pete’s engineering team took careful readings of the solar cells and battery charges that confirmed that the batteries were slow to charge and that the situation was getting worse as gulls continued to manufacture excrement at a rate that seemed nearly supernatural.

  Pete had no doubt that once the drones took to the air, the problem would fix itself. The drones were designed to stay aloft for long periods of time, landing only when they needed to refuel or rearm. Having the whole fleet on the ground at once for the gulls to attack would never happen again, and hopefully the continuous takeoffs and landings would frighten the birds away. More important, the drone force would be largely autonomous. Once the initial launch was complete, most of the island’s human residents would depart, taking with them the bread crumbs and pizza crusts that the gulls found so appetizing. Once the drones deployed, Pete was confident, the bird problem would go away. But in the meantime they had a thousand stationary drones on the tarmac, and their batteries needed to be charged, which meant their solar cells had to be clean. Which was why he was standing in the middle of the tarmac with a fake falcon in his hands.

  “Are we ready?” asked Admiral Stewart.

  Pete jumped, and smiled. “You startled me.”

  “I can tell,” he said. Admiral Wesley Stewart had been Hamlin’s opponent at first, an intense one at times, but he was fiercely intelligent and possessed a brilliant military mind. Hamlin was glad he was here for the launch. He realized that men like Stewart, even if they were beholden to an older style of warfare, would be vital in the coming fight. And to his credit, Stewart, once he had his orders to mobilize a submarine fleet such as the world had never seen, had fulfilled his mission with heroic speed and effectiveness.

  He pointed at the bird in Pete’s hands. “This sounded like something I would want to see in person.” Gulls swooped and soared around them, leaving a small bubble of space around the two men but covering all the other drones that weren’t immediately in reach. Pete held out the fake falcon so the admiral could take a look. Even up close it was a convincing fake, lovingly painted to look like a peregrine falcon, from its painted-on tail feathers to its menacing, sharp eyes and pointy beak.

  “You really think this is going to work?”

  “The brochure said it would,” said Pete. The admiral laughed.

  Pete turned to the tower and waved. The Robobird had arrived just the day before, so, mercifully, they’d had no time to develop a detailed procedure for what they were about to do. This would be an operation of pure trial and error. Pete was certain that, should the Robobird be successful, its success would be followed by many pages of Alliance doctrine and formalized procedures.

  “Power it up?” asked the admiral. Pete nodded. The admiral pushed the green central button on the remote control he held, and its big wings began to flap. Pete was surprised at how much force it now took to hold it in place, the robot straining to take flight. Before he
lost control of it completely, remembering what he’d read in the Robobird’s scant instruction manual, he threw the fake bird up and away, with a motion like he used to throw paper airplanes as a child.

  It immediately flew away, wings pumping, looking for all the world like a real falcon. Pete took the controller from the admiral.

  The Robobird had been invented by an eccentric pair of brothers in the Netherlands. They’d originally designed it for farmers, who hated seagulls for the way they could pick a freshly planted field clean in hours. But the Robobird had quickly found a following in the aviation community, for reasons that Pete immediately understood.

  “My goodness,” said the admiral as the fake bird took flight.

  “Pretty good replica, right?”

  “I’d say so,” said the admiral. “What is that thing made out of?”

  “Glass fiber and nylon composite,” said Pete.

  “Like…”

  “Yes,” Pete said, smiling, “just like our birds.”

  When the bird reached altitude, Pete made it stop flapping. It banked and glided into the wind—just like a real falcon. Pete had spent his life studying machines that fly, but he’d never seen anything like this. He pulled it around into a tight loop, then with a couple of flaps propelled it upward again.

  “Having fun?” said the admiral.

  “Even if it doesn’t scare the gulls, I’m keeping this thing,” said Pete.

  It was high above them now. “Let’s see if can scare a seagull.” Pete turned the bird into a dive and had it fly straight down toward a pack of loitering gulls.

  “Here we go!” said the admiral.

  The Robobird dived sharply with its convincing fake wings tucked behind it. It dropped right over the center of the airfield and then pulled up.

  Fifty seagulls scattered instantly, in a squawking panic.

  They landed a few dozen feet away, on another column of Pete’s grounded drones, but he had the Robobird follow them; this time they flew away with even greater urgency, sensing they were being pursued. They in turn alerted every bird they passed, until the skies were filled with noisy, panicked gulls.

  Some peeled off from the group and tried to return, but Pete turned the Robobird and chased them back into the fleeing group. Pete had, in ten minutes, mastered the operation of the Robobird.

  Within thirty minutes, there wasn’t a single seagull on the tarmac.

  “I think that thing works!” said the admiral.

  “And,” said Pete, chasing off a small pod of birds, “it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”

  “My turn,” said the admiral, reaching for the controller.

  “Take it,” said Pete, hating to give it up but eager to proceed. “I’ll get a crew down here to wash these drones.”

  * * *

  The next morning at dawn he walked the tarmac once again, among the orderly rows of now pristine drones. Some of them were still damp from the efforts of the crew that had spent all night washing their black, composite skin, and they gleamed in the early sun. They seemed to throb with potential energy as they gathered up sunlight and stored it deep in their batteries. He stopped and put his hand on one of them. It was low enough that he had to kneel. Just five feet and six inches long, and almost exactly twice as wide. The long, swept wings made it look like a glider, which, in fact, it was designed to be whenever possible to conserve energy. But a small, rear-mounted propeller provided the real thrust, the killing speed. On a bright day, with no targets to pursue, it would actually gain energy in the sky, storing more power from the solar cells that covered its wings than it burned by turning the propeller. The entire drone weighed just forty pounds, and carried a single bomb that weighed ten. It could soar as high as twenty thousand feet, and fly as fast as 80 knots. In a dive, it could go even faster. Its composite material was at once featherlight and incredibly strong; it felt warm against the palm of his hand, almost alive.

  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.