Polaris

by Todd Tucker

  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.

  Hamlin took three steps forward, to the front of the tower, to get a better look at the drones. The sight still took his breath away.

  Below them, as far as they could see, were rows of the military drones that he had designed. The glint of the solar panels on their wings made them look vaguely like dragonflies, their wings shimmering in the sun as they absorbed power.

  Hamlin was pleased to hear the admiral also react, despite himself, to the breathtaking sight.

  After he’d had a chance to gather himself, the admiral started asking questions.

  “How many?” asked the admiral.

  “One thousand,” said Pete. “Many more on the way—we’ll have more room after the first wave launches. We think no more than twenty percent will ever need to be on the ground here at one time; that means we could easily launch twelve thousand, just from Eris.”

  “Each just has a single missile?”

  “Not a missile,” said Hamlin. “A bomb—a rather simple bomb, in fact. But across the island are autoloading magazines. Each drone can come back, arm itself, and return to the fight, as often as necessary. Completely without human intervention.”

  “What if they can’t rearm?”

  “If the drone senses that it can’t fly far enough to rearm, it will turn itself into a kamikaze … it just crashes itself into the target. The planners call that a ‘kinetic weapon,’ but it’s basically just a forty-pound piece of metal falling from the sky. Enough to destroy a lightly armored vehicle or structure.”

  “And they’re solar powered?”

  “One hundred percent. If they start to lose power, they just need to find a place to touch down and charge their batteries for a while … like all these are doing.” He waved his hand over the armada of lazily buzzing drones.

  “How long can they operate?”

  Hamlin shrugged. “We’re not sure. We’ve had one in the air, circling Detroit, for eighteen months now, and it shows no sign of wearing out. And they can land and recharge—rest, so to speak. The design life is five years but we’re pretty sure they can last longer than that.”

  “And they use infrared?”

  “Multispectral targeting. Infrared and visible imager. That’s in the nose. Along the underside of the wings are the MAD units.”

  “And they’ll target anything that moves?”

  Hamlin heard the hint of accusation in his voice. “Yes—for all the engineering in them, they’re a ‘dumb’ weapon, designed to destroy anything that moves. Think of them like land mines. We avoid them until their work is done.”

  “And the minefield?”

  Pete held out his arms. “The entire ocean. From here to one hundred miles from the American shore. Anything that shows itself will be a target.”

  “And that’s where I come in,” said the admiral.

  “Correct,” said Hamlin. “Submarines will be safe from the drones, as long as they stay submerged. That may be the only place. Even at periscope depth, the drones can find them.”

  “Using MAD?”

  “That’s right,” said Pete. “At shallow depths, the drones will ‘see’ their magnetic signature.”

  “What about here? What’s to stop them from bombing us?”

  “A safe zone. Part of the reason the area is so heavily guarded by your fleet. This is where the drones come to rearm, and recharge if necessary. For this tiny island, and a five-mile radius around it, the drones won’t attack. It’s the one safety that’s hardwired into them. Although we can adjust that distance, as you’ll see.”

  “What’s to stop the bad guys from just moving underwater as well?”

  Hamlin shrugged. “We’re hoping we’re ahead of them on that; we know our submarines are more capable. Part of the gambit here was to get underwater faster and more completely. And the island itself is ringed by shoals; it would be nearly impossible to approach closely submerged. If they try to get close, they’ll have to surface, and the drones will destroy them. Protection of the hive is the highest priority in their programming.”

  “The hive?”

  An engineer in a lab coat approached them and spoke to Pete. “Sir, we’re ready for the first wave.”

  Hamlin smiled and breathed deeply, excited and apprehensive at the same time. “Green lights across the board?”

  “Yes, sir. All green for launch.”

  “No Alliance ships within twenty miles?”

  “No, sir, no ships.”

  “No surface ships,” corrected the admiral.

  “OK,” said Hamlin. “Arming the central computer.”

  Hamlin inserted his red key into a lock in the central computer and turned it. A row of lights above it came to life. He entered a passcode, and the lights turned green.

  He exhaled deeply. “Launch the first wave.”

  The order was relayed, and everybody in the tower who wasn’t monitoring a radar screen or a computer approached a window.

  It started slowly. A few drones began buzzing and then slowly rose from the runway. They took off, not quite vertically but in tight spirals. Once in the sky, they began making lazy circles around the field. The tower was soon filled with the sound of their buzzing engines.

  Once a few drones had taken to the air, the others followed. They orbited around each other in swooping circles, diving and swerving with an agility that a manned aircraft could never match. Gradually a cloud of them hovered above the island, with more on the ground. Their actions in the air reminded the admiral of the flocks of swallows he’d seen migrating as a child.

  Suddenly an alarm buzzed, and a jolt of concern ran through the control room. Hamlin looked behind him to a row of consoles where operators busily studied their displays, then back out onto the airfield. “Individual malfunction,” reported one of the operators.

  “I can see it,” said Hamlin, pointing out the window, something odd in the movement of one drone catching his eye.

  “One of the drones is off program,” said the operator behind him. “CPU is red.”

  “Still ascending,” said Hamlin grimly.

  Stewart didn’t see it until it veered away from the lazy circling of its kin and headed right toward the tower.

  Everyone in the tower involuntarily ducked as it buzzed overhead. It was close enough that the admiral could actually see the bomb that clung to its underbelly, like a mother bird with an egg. It was behind them suddenly, everyone turning like spectators at a tennis match to see what the rogue drone would do next.

  “Bad processor,” said the operator behind them.

  “No shit,” said Hamlin. “Is it following its self-destruct protocol?”

  The operator looked at his console again. “Can’t tell, sir.”

  “Goddammit,” said Hamlin.

  “Can you recall it?” said the admiral.

  “We don’t communicate with them like that. If we could disable them with a radio signal, so could the enemy. They’re completely autonomous—they react to only two things: targets and other drones. It’s supposed to self-destruct if it meets certain criteria.…”

  The errant drone reached the shoreline, and then suddenly shot straight into the air. At about five hundred feet, it gracefully turned, and seemed to shut off power as it fell straight toward the ocean. It crashed with a surprisingly small splash.

  “One drone down,
sir,” said the operator.

  “Pull the telemetry,” said Hamlin.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pete walked behind the operator and looked over his shoulder at the screen. He tapped a key and pulled up the data package for that specific drone, scanned the programming. He was disturbed at how much the programming had changed since he’d delegated that to others; there’d been a time when he could have spotted an anomaly instantly, he’d known the programming so well. Now, the fingerprints of a dozen others were all over it, making it opaque.

  “Send me the entire package,” Pete said, not knowing when he would have a chance to analyze it in the depth required.

  He looked at the admiral and shrugged. “That’s why they call this a test,” he said. “And that’s why we’re building so many. We have a built-in failure rate of about one percent.”

  Some of the still-airborne drones flew over to the splash zone of the errant drone and swooped low, as if to investigate their fallen comrade.

  “Are they … curious?” said the admiral.

  Hamlin laughed. “No—when it crashed, the other drones registered the object with their own sensors; now they’re seeking it out.”

  “To kill it?”

  “They might, if it wasn’t inside the five-mile safe zone of the island. Now they’re just checking it out.”

  One of the drones that swooped closest to the water took off, flew back toward them and the island. It soared straight away from them in an odd zigzagging pattern, then returned to its original position in a figure eight maneuver. Above the others, it tipped its wings and dipped dramatically.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Telling the other drones what it saw—that’s why none of them are following. It’s telling them there’s no target to pursue.”

  “With those movements?”

  “Yes. There’s no radio communication between the drones, which means there’s nothing for the enemy to intercept, nothing to jam. We emulated the ways honeybees communicate, the ‘waggle dance’ they do to communicate locations of nectar to each other with really remarkable precision. Bees use the bearing of the sun as a reference angle. We use true north. The drones ‘waggle’ on an angle from straight vertical; the magnitude of that angle indicates how far from true north the target is.”

  “And the length of the waggle indicates the distance?”

  “Almost,” said Pete. “It actually indicates the amount of energy needed to get to the target, so it takes into account headwinds, the strength of the sunlight, all those factors. So each drone can calculate whether or not it can make it, given the state of its energy reserves.”

  “Fascinating,” said the admiral.

  A petty officer entered the control tower. “Sir, two hundred drones are now in the air, ready to commence the test.”

  “Very well,” said Hamlin. “Reducing the safety radius to one mile,” he said.

  Warning lights came alive inside the control room. Pete once again used his key to complete the procedure.

  “We’re temporarily reducing the safety radius for this test,” said Hamlin.

  “I thought you said there was no communicating with the drones?”

  “This is the one exception: the safety radius signal. But the drones can tell, by distance and bearing, that the signal has to emanate from this island. From a transponder at the very top of this tower, actually. It would be impossible for the enemy to jam, or duplicate, without actually sitting in this tower.” He turned a small knob, and a bright green circle on his display shrunk inward.

  “Release the target,” said Hamlin, excitement in his voice.

  “Aye, sir,” said a petty officer at the corner of the room, who spoke into a microphone.

  Outside, a small cutter suddenly sped directly away from the island. It startled the admiral; it looked for all the world like someone was trying desperately to escape Eris Island. But no one reacted inside the tower, and he quickly discerned that it was part of the test. It was a beautiful white cutter, seemingly brand new. He guessed it was thirty-six feet long, a rigid-hull inflatable powered by water jets. Broad black crosses had been painted on its sides and deck, and the admiral knew these were markings to aid telemetry and observation; he’d seen similar markings on missiles during ICBM test shots years before. Huge rooster tails flew out behind the cutter; he estimated it was going at least 30 knots. While he knew suddenly it was a target, as a lifelong mariner, he found himself pulling for the boat.

  Hamlin had binoculars to his eyes but was smiling broadly. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s unmanned.”

  “Drones hunting drones,” said the admiral. No one reacted.

  “Target is one hundred yards from shore,” said a petty officer at a radar screen.

  “Very well,” said Hamlin.

  Already the drones in the sky were reacting. They veered off, the whining of their engines increasing in pitch and volume. It wasn’t the roar of a military jet but the buzzing of a stinging insect. In seconds, six of them were zooming down the wake of the cutter, accelerating urgently. Soon they were directly over it, about twenty feet above its deck, in a V formation.

  “Two hundred yards,” said the petty officer, counting down the distance as the ship raced away. “Fourteen hundred yards … sixteen … eighteen…”

  With perfect timing, at the exact moment the petty officer would have said “two thousand yards,” the lead drone dropped its bomb. It exploded with a flash, and the crack of high explosive reached the tower a millisecond later. The front drone immediately veered upward, and the two behind it dropped their payloads on the ship even as it was exploding into pieces and sinking. The final drones dropped their bombs on what tiny pieces of floating wreckage still remained. It was over in seconds.

  The drones, even faster and more nimble now without the weight of their bombs, immediately flew back toward the tower, to the cloud of drones that whined above them. The lead drone went through an elaborate dance: swoops, twitches, and rolls. The swarm of drones beneath it reacted to whatever news it was communicating, the urgency of the engines and their movements increasing in what, to the admiral, looked for all the world like a celebration. Their shadows crisscrossed the carpeted floor of the control tower as they flew overhead.

  A few of the drones peeled off from the cloud and went back to the site of the explosion, but nothing remained, not a single shard of wreckage. The attacking drones, their message communicated, flew to an unseen part of the island. To reload, the admiral realized.

  Hamlin put the binoculars down, and looked at the admiral with an ecstatic smile on his face.

  “You’ve just seen the future of warfare,” said Hamlin, pointing straight up to the swarm of drones above them.

  “Maybe so,” said the admiral, pointing out to sea. “But in the meantime, you’ve driven us all underwater.”

  * * *

  Eight miles away, an enemy submarine watched. Commander Jennifer Carlson was on the periscope.

  “Something happening?” asked Banach, her second-in-command. He didn’t yet have her patience—a hunter’s patience.

  “Yes,” she said. “Something.”

  “Shall we get closer?” asked Banach.

  She wanted to, badly. She could barely see the island from this distance, even with the scope in high power and raised as high as she dared. The electronic sensors in her boat were so crude as to be almost useless. But she needed to see what was going on. The island was ringed by jagged shoals, but she’d studied the charts, thought there were breaks she might slip through at periscope depth, get her right up to the beach. From there, she could snap some pictures, take some video, chart the locations of underground cables. It was sorely tempting. All submariners were born snoops. Next to shooting at things, it was the most fun you could have on a submarine, looking through the keyhole and seeing things you weren’t supposed to see.

  And there was definitely something forbidden there, no matter how many times her clueless commanders dism
issed her concerns. According to the few charts they had of it, the island was a medical research station, and had been for decades. They even had a few ancient satellite photos of it, showing two small buildings at the south end with animal pens and a small dock flying the yellow flag for quarantine. Old italicized warnings on the chart told vessels to stay away because of the presence of contagious diseases. While it seemed like dated information, this, more than the shoals, worried Carlson. Like Banach, she’d grown up in an area that was regularly ravaged by disease, and had an almost superstitious fear of infections and viruses. Her crew, who once a week cleaned everything to a sanitized gleam, would attest to it. She preferred targets she could shoot torpedoes at. Was the Alliance creating something smaller and more sinister?

  They were definitely up to something. Farther out, past the horizon, were dozens of enemy surface ships, standing guard in a twenty-mile ring. But none of them dared come as close as she had. She wasn’t remotely worried about being found out here. No one, not even her own command, expected her to operate this far out to sea, sailing the deep blue water. To them, submarines were not strategic assets; they were designed to patrol coastal waters and pluck off an occasional container ship, or deploy a landing party of saboteurs to blow up railroad bridges and other quaint targets. The Alliance submarines carried ballistic missiles; she carried a platoon of marines with rifles and hand grenades.

  “Here,” she said, handing off the scope to Banach. “Tell me what you see.”