Polaris (21 page)

Next question: a young woman with a peace sign on her shirt. “Wasn't that a civilian ship?”

“There are no civilians in that part of the Pacific,” he said. “Anyone at sea in that area is a combatant and will be treated accordingly.”

An unhappy murmur went through the crowd, as Pete expected. A shaggy young man in a denim jacket stood up and shouted without waiting for the microphone.

“What about the drones attacking us, on American soil?” he yelled.

“Impossible,” said Pete, his tone dismissive. “Numerous safety features are built into the drones to prevent just that.”

“Bullshit!” said the man, causing a stir in the crowd. Pete didn't mind; he'd been protested before. Tie-dyed pacifists, of course, but also the standard anti-government crowd, who were convinced that the government drones would spy on their mountain cabins and take away their guns. The shouting protestor continued. “Drones are attacking mainland, civilian targets, and the reports are being suppressed by the Alliance!”

Pete shook his head with a wry smile. “Simply not true,” he said. “If drones were hitting anybody on the mainland, I would be the first to know about it. And I haven't heard a thing.”

“All of you!” said the man, turning to the crowd. “Look for the video now, before it gets taken down!” he said. He was holding his phone in the air as if the audience could see the images on it. Uniformed military guards suddenly began moving toward him.
Where did they come from?
Pete wondered.

“Look for it!” he yelled as he was led away. “In the last three days, drones have dropped bombs five times on the West Coast! We have video of a drone patrolling in Sequim, Washington. We have reports that people were killed just this morning in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico!”

Pete froze at the mention of the resort town where Pamela waited. The crowd erupted; shouts of approval countered by jeers. Most people in the room reached for their phones, some to film the guards dragging the man out of the auditorium, others to look for the video he had referenced.

Chaos reigned in the audience. Pete walked numbly backstage, where he was strangely alone, the crowd noise dissipating behind thick curtains. He pulled out his phone and searched for “Sequim drone” on the Internet. It was listed in a dozen places, but it had been taken down in every place he looked. Six thousand people had watched it on YouTube before it disappeared:
This video no longer available.

He texted Pamela, and called her: no answer.

He called the resort's front desk: no answer.

Finally, he called his masters at the Alliance. He got through to an officer in the situation room, who after several terrifying minutes on hold, put him through to the tactical duty officer in the Alliance war room.

“Are you on a secure line?” asked the major.

“No,” said Pete.

“Get somewhere where we can talk,” he responded. Pete could hear the stress in his voice.

“I'm the OIC for the entire drone project,” said Pete. “You have to tell me what's going on.”

There was a long pause as the major thought it over.

“There appear to have been some catastrophic failures, among a small number of the birds.”

“Fatalities?” said Pete, his voice catching.

“No,” said the general, a slight note of hope in his voice. Pete felt relief flood his body until the duty officer finished his thought. “None on US soil.”

Pete hung up the phone and walked out a side door, around to the front steps of the auditorium. A few of the protestors eyed him, but none confronted him directly, perhaps because of the dazed look on his face. He sat on the steps until his watchers from the Alliance found him and hustled him into a waiting car.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They flew Pete to a drab Alliance office building near Atlanta, and for two days they debriefed him. Quickly, Pete could tell, they deemed him unreliable. The funny thing was, in the entire time, no one told him directly his wife was dead; no one said a word about it. They showed him photographs of the destroyed resort. They showed him a breakdown of all the people killed, listed by nationality. Pamela was on the list, just one name among many. They explained, in abstract, how the human remains would be disposed of and the cover story that they'd come up with: natural gas explosion. It was in their eyes, he could see it; they knew that his wife was among the dead. But it was as if everyone assumed that someone else had said the words to him, a legion of psychiatrists, engineers, and generals. No one offered a word of apology. Or asked him for contrition.

Another sure sign of his fall was the reduction in his access. He wanted to look at the drone programming, to see where it could have gone so wrong. There was no way a drone should have traveled that far, and that far inland. There had to be a glaring error somewhere in the program, and he was certain he could find it if they would just let him. But the Alliance suddenly isolated him from the drones, from the team, from any of the technology that he once knew so intimately. It was a new level of autonomy, Pete thought wryly. Now the drones operated without even the participation of their creator.

Suddenly idle, with more spare time than he'd had in years, Pete began looking for reports of other rogue drones. He had a solid Internet connection in the temporary office where they'd stashed him, and he could see the videos as they popped up. He watched them until they were suppressed, usually within minutes. A bomb dropped on a ferry near Seattle. The video showed screaming commuters in suits scrambling to climb the sides of the boat as it turned over. Another bomb fell on a cargo terminal in Los Angeles, setting it on fire. That clip was of unusually good quality, showing the lone drone swooping in gracefully, dropping its bomb, then peeling away. Most were on the West Coast, although Pete saw a reliable clip from as far inland as Reno, Nevada, where a drone dropped a bomb on a truck stop, igniting a spectacular fire as the fuel tanks exploded. The drone then recognized how far it was from Eris, and the impossibility of rearming, and went into self-destruct mode, flying directly into a semitruck that was trying desperately to drive away on Interstate 80.

*   *   *

Pete was shuffled in and out of a number of remote offices, always well away from the drone program. At first he thought he would be assigned to a place where he would be closely watched. But instead, the Alliance, in its bureaucratic wisdom, just gave him a series of meaningless assignments where he could do little harm while still remaining under their control. All were within the Alliance's vast research apparatus. He worked on a team studying the effects of paint colors on a submarine crew's mental health: dark orange was best, red the worst. He worked briefly on a program that was evaluating the use of airships as surveillance platforms: their slow speeds and steady movements allowed for a kind of high resolution that wasn't possible from planes or satellites. After that, he was given orders to a research detachment in Frederick, Maryland. He scanned his orders at a hotel bar as he drank his third overpriced martini. Something to do with the flu.

The next morning, he walked the two blocks to his new office, hoping the cool air would mitigate his hangover. He checked the address twice when he arrived. The military leaders of a past era had sought to intimidate and impress with their structures, the Pentagon being the ultimate example: a city unto itself in a mythic, magical shape. The Alliance, Pete had learned, sought the opposite; they wanted to disguise and obscure the true scope of their power by distributing their vast resources across anonymous leased offices and buildings across the land. Like the drones, the Alliance sought security in redundancy, and vast, wide distribution. Such networks, Pete well knew, were almost impossible to kill. The building where Pete reported had just six stories, of which the Alliance occupied only the top floor. The ground floor contained a Subway sandwich shop and a dentist's office. One of the other tenants in the building was a financial advisor, whose darkened windows and security door looked far more secretive than the Alliance office where Pete found himself that morning, with its unlocked front door, unmanned reception desk, and new carpet smell.

Inside the suite, he found his way to office 16-E, where the door was locked. There was a keypad, but he had no code. He rang a buzzer, and could hear movement inside. He could tell the door was solid; he'd been behind enough serious security doors to recognize one when he saw it: the heavy weight, the precise balancing, the hidden hinges. He heard a click within the door, and he pushed it open.

Inside were two men, looking up at him somewhat suspiciously from their drab metal desks. They were at opposite ends of the small office, as far apart as they could arrange: Pete sensed instantly that the two men didn't like each other. A large, tattered world map had been hung from the center wall, a series of colored pins pressed into it. Above one man's desk was a small flat-screen television, tuned to one of the news channels that was favorable to the Alliance, with the sound muted. The screen periodically seized and pixelated, as if the cable connection was poor.

“You the new officer in charge?”

“I am,” he said. “Pete Hamlin. Pleased to meet you. Is this the whole team?”

The younger man stood and raised his hands dramatically. “This is it. I'm Reggie Strack,” he said, walking over with a hand extended.

“You're the doctor?”

“I am—your resident physician. Epidemiologist. Serving the Alliance by combatting the flu.”

“How long?”

“Fighting the flu? My whole career. But I've only been working for the Alliance six months.” He had an earnest look, and a friendly, open manner.

The other man had made his way over. “Steve Harkness,” he said. “I'm an Alliance communications specialist.” Harkness was the kind of young man who exuded ambition. His clothes were casual, but neatly pressed and well tailored, the kind of garments worn by a man who occasionally expected, or hoped, to be photographed. “I'm here to get the word out, raise awareness both about the flu and the Alliance's efforts to help the sick and find a cure.”

He stopped. Pete was aware that both men were sizing him up, deciding whether or not they could trust him.

“So,” said Pete. His mouth was still dry from his hangover, his voice scratchy. “Is this a real disease, or a propaganda operation?”

Harkness winced at the word, but Strack laughed. “It is a real, frightening disease,” he said. “
And
this is a massive propaganda operation.”

*   *   *

Pete did the minimum amount of work he could do to get by, and spent the rest of his time alone to mourn Pamela. While he still wanted to figure out what had gone wrong, he was glad in a way that the Alliance hadn't assigned him to anything to do with the drones. He loathed himself for his part in Pamela's death, and had vivid nightmares in which he would follow a drone, in his mind, from Eris Island, where he had probably cheered its departure, to Mexico, where it dropped the single, ugly bomb that ended her life. He tried to fight it off, but he couldn't help but imagine her final moments. Was she beside the pool, in one of the prized lounge chairs near the bar? Or was she in the water, lazily paddling back and forth as the men poolside watched her through their sunglasses? Maybe she was wading in the ocean, up to her knees in the sea, and saw the drone fly in. Perhaps she thought it was Pete's plane in the distance, returning him to their honeymoon. He imagined her squinting at it curiously when she realized that this plane had no windows.

*   *   *

Pete's team had weekly meetings in Silver Spring with other research groups, where they presented their findings to an indifferent panel of officers led by General Cushing, who always sat in the middle of the group and nodded his head, his strong hands folded in front of him. He rarely spoke, but when he did, the room always fell respectfully silent. He had a chest full of ribbons on an Army uniform, ribbons that Pete could tell, even from across the room, were regular Army commendations, not Alliance. He had a combat infantry badge and jump wings, and the ribbons themselves were the kind that you saw only on regular military officers. Alliance ribbons had a smooth appearance, colors that looked like they had been chosen carefully by focus groups and laid out by designers. Real military ribbons had a knotty, disorganized look, like combat itself, a random assortment of colors and patterns, here and there adorned with dark stars or a bronze
V
that Pete learned stood for Valor. Just as Alliance officers were being given military commands to demonstrate that they were all, in fact, one team, combat officers like Cushing were being given Alliance commands. He scowled continuously at their weekly meetings, like it was a duty he had accepted grudgingly, and he couldn't wait to get back into a position where people were shooting at him.

Their weekly meetings took place every Tuesday, along with three other detachments. Each group was given fifteen minutes to talk, five minutes for each man on the team. Pete had no idea how many of these meetings the generals had to sit through in a week, how many well-polished five-minute speeches they had to endure. It was amazing, sometimes, how much information a man could cram into five minutes, and at times it was amazing how little. But the schedule never varied.

Strack, in his five minutes, would detail the latest outbreak numbers, emphasizing that the problem was uncontained. Harkness would describe, and occasionally show, the media campaigns that his group had created to promote hand washing and the idea that only the Alliance could find a cure. After they were done, Pete was offered a chance to elaborate, a chance he always declined, opening up five minutes on the agenda to someone more eager than he to kiss the ass of a table full of generals.

*   *   *

It was a forty-mile drive from Silver Spring back to Frederick. In bad traffic, it could take well over an hour, and Pete usually welcomed the time alone in his car. “Alone with his thoughts,” would be inaccurate. He preferred to be without thought entirely, his guilt-ridden mind wiped clean at least for a moment. Inching along in traffic was one of the few places he could actually achieve this thoughtless state. Most times he didn't even turn his radio on.