Drone Wars - Issue 6 - A New Beginning Read online

Drone Wars - Issue 6: A New Beginning

  William Hrdina

  Copyright 2014 William Hrdina

  Drone Wars - Issue 1 - Secrets and L.I.E.S.

  Drone Wars - Issue 2 - Combat Fitness

  Drone Wars - Issue 3 - The Panopticon Net

  Drone Wars - Issue 4 - Conundrums

  Drone Wars - Issue 5 - Missing Pieces

  Kenny G Must Die!! A Satire about Music- and Zombies

  After watching her friends drive off into the night, Tasha wandered aimlessly for a few hours before returning to her house, her eyes red and puffy with tears.

  “What are you crying about you Sissy-Mary?” her grandmother Bee demanded the moment she walked in the front door.

  Feeling ambushed, Tasha sneered, “I lost my only friends in the world today and you want to know why I’m crying?”

  “You’re just lucky I didn’t call the authorities. I’m sure they would’ve been willing to pay me a good deal of money for information about you and your friends.”

  Tasha felt her stomach tie up in knots. “Why would you even say that?” she asked.

  “What?” Bee asked, playing stupid.

  “You know damn well what grandma—don’t you ever say anything like that to me ever again. Those girls are my friends, they care about me.”

  “I care about you too.”

  “No you don’t. You care about having someone to cook your meals and wash your clothes. You don’t care about me or what makes me happy. You don’t care that I could’ve helped the whole country and instead I’m stuck here while things get worse and worse.”

  “I need you.”

  “You don’t need me—you need a maid or a nurse. I’m sorry you’re sick, I really am, but what you don’t seem to understand is that you’re the selfish one in our little situation—not me.”

  Bee responded, but Tasha had stopped listening. Rather than prolong the fight, she walked out of the room.

  All Tasha wanted was to get some sleep, it had been a long, stressful day. She went into her room, locked the door behind her and laid down without bothering to take off her clothes. Even though she was upset, the stress of the day had drained all of her energy. Tasha was asleep in less than a minute.

  She was still sleeping when Natalie’s message came through on her watch. By habit, the soft chime yanked her awake. Tasha sat up, used her eye to unlock the message and read it with interest. By the time she reached the end, she was in tears.

  Afraid of what she was going to see, Tasha got up and hurried to the TV.

  The first reports had just begun to break on the news channels. Talking Heads were breathlessly reporting that the military claimed to have just perpetrated a strategically surgical strike on the vile terrorist organization known as ENIGMA. Their Headquarters, located in the wilderness of Northern Wisconsin had been utterly destroyed...

  Back among the Smoking Ruins of ENIGMA HQ…

  Jenna, Evelyn and Michelle had no choice but to remain hidden for ten minutes while explosions continued to rock the ENIGMA HQ. Alice, their escort, had been killed instantly when the initial blast caused a chunk of the ceiling to come down on her head. Crying and traumatized, Jenna, Michelle and Evelyn remained huddled against the wall in the total darkness, afraid to move, flinching after every explosion.

  Finally, the booms started to taper off.

  “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” Jenna moaned.

  “This is the war—the one we’ve been fighting—we’ve just never seen it the way it really is. Before now, it was always just an abstraction,” Evelyn replied.

  “Nothing abstract about this,” Jenna said, wiping a smear of blood from her cheek.

  Once the bombardment stopped, the emergency lights kicked on, but they flickered randomly, giving everything a horror-movie-like appearance as people staggered through the smoke and dust of the half-collapsed cafeteria.

  “We gotta get out of here,” Jenna said.

  “Natalie is the only person who knows who we are—we need to find her,” Evelyn added, taking control. “Once we locate her, then we’re going to get the hell out of here and regroup.”

  Jenna nodded at this, happy to be relieved of the burden of thinking. They held onto one another’s shirts so they wouldn’t get separated if the lights went out again and started in the direction they’d last seen Natalie.

  Everything was chaos. At least a third of the facility had collapsed to one degree or another and the rest of the place could obviously collapse at any moment.

  Still, the girls searched. It took nearly twenty minutes, but they found Natalie lying against a wall near the central hub. She was conscious, but clearly in bad shape. It took all three of them to help her up to a sitting position. They tried to get Natalie to talk about her injuries, but the only thing she wanted to discuss was their unfinished business.

  “This is really bad, but we still have a chance to win,” Natalie groaned, “The information we stole, it was much more than we thought—there is a keystone L.I.E. codenamed Guzzler.”

  “Guzzler?”

  “Yeah, every other drone in the sky sends all of its data to Guzzler first. Once Guzzler approves the data, it gets sent to the ground for storage and further analysis.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  “Because, L.I.E.S. don’t exclusively detect the things the ‘rabble’ are doing wrong. The drones catch Clint Fleener’s people doing illegal things too. By running all the data through Guzzler, they can delete the information that might be deemed ‘controversial’ before it ever reaches a ground based server.”

  “So if we take out the keystone L.I.E.—we bring down the whole system at once?”

  “Not we—you. I’m not going to make it. Besides, someone in ENIGMA is rotten. I don’t know who, but someone talked. You’re the only ones I can trust.”

  Before anyone could object, Natalie reached into her pocket and handed Evelyn a memory stick and a tracking device with a green blinking light. “The future of this organization lies with you girls. You are ENIGMA now. The four of you—go find Tasha…” Natalie started to cough—a little at first, but soon her whole body was shaking.

  Evelyn knelt down and held Natalie by the shoulders. Natalie coughed out a thick spurt of blood, causing Jenna and Michelle to let out involuntary yelps of terror.

  “Take down Guzzler,” Natalie managed to say between gasps.

  Then she died.

  “Oh god, what are we going to do?” Michelle cried.

  “We’re going to get that drone,” Evelyn said, her voice cold.

  “How?” Jenna reasonably asked.

  “I have no idea. But that doesn’t matter. We have to get out of here first. Then we can look at what’s on this memory stick and figure out how we can use it to take Clint Fleener down.”

  As it turned out, escaping the facility was easier than they expected. The ENIGMA HQ had been built with the knowledge it would likely be attacked at some point and was therefore chock full of escape tunnels to the surface. Once they were out, they followed Natalie’s tracker (the green light blinked faster as they got closer to the proper location and slower when they went in the wrong direction) down an unmarked, but traceable trail that led to an SUV with keys hidden under the mat. They were further delighted to discover a brand new, just off the assembly line pair of RJX-9 drones with a brand-new Brain and three portable command stations in the trunk. They hopped in, activated the heavily encrypted GPS system and followed the route exactly as prescribed. Specially designed by Natalie’s ENIGMA’s, the GPS tracked the position of the radios used by the police and the military,
changing course to avoid them.

  An hour later, the girls came out onto a highway, effectively disappearing among the thousands of cars barreling down the road.

  “Where are we going?” Jenna asked.

  “To get Tasha,” Evelyn replied.

  “What if she won’t come with us? I mean, after what happened, there’s no way the Secrets can pay to get her grandmother care.”

  “If she won’t come, we’ll beg. If begging doesn’t work, well, maybe we’ll have to kidnap her,” Evelyn said.

  Nobody could tell if she was kidding.

  Seven hours later, they pulled up in front of Tasha’s house, nearly cross-eyed with exhaustion. To their genuine surprise, she was waiting for them. Evelyn had not even turned off the engine before Tasha appeared from where she’d been waiting behind a hedge. She ran up to the truck and jumped into the back seat.

  “I guess we’re not going to have to kidnap her,” Jenna said.

  “I got a message from Natalie a few minutes after the attack. She said she’d been badly hurt. Did she make it?”

  “No,” Michelle whispered.

  “I’m sorry, she