The Swede looked grim. “And what if everything goes wrong?”
“You mean we start to sink? We rally up in the ship’s galley. That’ll be our Alamo. They won’t be taking prisoners.” Smokey gave him a thumbs-up. “Stay in touch by radio, Captain.” Smokey pounded the roof, and the BMW took off down the ramp, screeching through the garage levels.
Mooch, Ripper, and Smokey then stood side by side at the ship’s railing watching the dark, writhing cloud coming toward them from the south, like bad weather.
Ripper checked the action on her pistol. “I don’t know about you guys, but I am really starting to hate these fucking drones.”
Smokey headed back toward the Bentley. “Best we can do is keep them too busy chasing us to cut up the ship. Deck three is the least crowded, so use that for speed. And for godsakes, Ripper, don’t run that shovel into the hull walls below the waterline.”
They ran for their vehicles even as the black cloud grew.
Smokey revved the Bentley. With tires screeching, he fishtailed down the loading ramp into the depths of the ship as the howling of a thousand small jet- and two-stroke engines became a deafening clamor—and the bodies of the drones blotted out the sun.
* * *
Evans sat unsteadily on a desk chair in front of several computer monitors in the spotless engine control room. He’d expected a dark and noisy place, but there were several sections to the ship’s engine room—the engine itself was the size of a semitruck and occupied a cavernous three-story-tall space crisscrossed by piping, but there were also several smaller auxiliary engines that were idle, banks of large generators, cooling water and fuel pumps, fuel filtration systems, oil and fuel ports. The place was massive.
The captain and Ritter came back into the control room. “You shouldn’t have drank so much. You’re going to be useless.”
Suddenly there was an explosion somewhere, and the deck vibrated.
Evans sat up straight as alarms went off on the control board. “What the hell was that?”
A klaxon sounded and red fire strobes started flashing.
The captain shoved the wheeled chair aside and starting clicking through screens. In a moment he brought up a surveillance camera on one of the monitors. It showed a downward view of the starboard hull near the bow of the ship. As they watched, several small aircraft raced into the frame and “landed” on the hull near the waterline in a shower of sparks, leaving long scars in the orange paint. Even as the first ones came to a stop, a dozen more were already screeching to land next to them—like leeches.
The captain watched, utterly confused.
Evans searched fruitlessly for cigarettes. “They’ve got electromagnetic landing gear, Captain. They’ll stick to your hull like fucking barnacles. And that’s when the fun really begins.”
“Madness. Absolute madness!”
Ritter watched, shaking his head.
On-screen the first arrivals were already sending a shower of sparks into the passing waves as their steel-cutting torches kicked in. Their wing acted as a cowling to cover them as they worked, and they began cutting downward below the waves.
“My God! They’ll gut us like a fish.”
“That’s the general idea.” Evans was still patting his empty pockets for cigarettes.
Suddenly all three men looked up to trace a scraping sound as it passed fast along the hull wall opposite them. It was quickly followed by several more beyond the steel.
The captain clicked through still more control screens. “We have a double hull. It will take them some time to cut through.” He grabbed the radio. “There are numerous drones cutting into the hull below the waterline, and there’s a fire on deck one. Port side, compartment three.”
The sound of gunfire and screeching rubber came in over the radio, along with Smokey’s voice. “We’ve got our hands full at the moment, Captain!”
* * *
McKinney stepped carefully around scurrying wire-cutter drones, and then leapt the eight feet over a ten-story chasm to the last container block separating them from the control tower, which now loomed right above them. She landed next to Odin and Foxy, who caught hold of her to prevent her from tripping on still more winged drones and the hovering, lawn mower–sized quadracopter drones roving about.
They could barely hear each other above the mind-numbing noise of thousands of small engines. She watched as several of the quadracopter drones rubbed past each other, their sensilla antennas brushing together—an exchange of information.
Odin sprayed her and Foxy with more pheromone and leaned in to her ear, shouting, “These quadracopter drones seem to be more aggressive. Unless we keep spraying, they start following us.”