Page 4 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
Storm exited the house, carrying a metal briefcase. She was our pilot, and when she wasn’t schlepping our asses around the world, she tested shiny new gadgets that didn’t officially exist, taught air combat classes, and flew the occasional drone mission. One time, I’d heard a fellow instructor introduce her to the class as “the best female pilot we’ve ever known.” She’d shot him down in their next joint training exercise as a reminder not to use the “female” qualifier.
Anyhow, the briefcase contained one of her new toys.
“I figured I could use Butterball to test the target acquisition system on the bees,” she said, and Sin gasped.
“Tell me those aren’t the ones with the explosives?”
“That’s the hornets.”
“The ones with the venom injectors?”
“Those are the mosquitoes. The bees used to be dragonflies, but there was a breakthrough in battery technology, so now they can make the MAVs smaller.”
A MAV was a Micro Air Vehicle, or in plain English, a really tiny drone.
“Wait, we don’t have the dragonflies anymore?”
“We do, but they don’t swarm, and we use them for longer-range projects. I can fly the bees in a net formation that won’t get stuck in a cactus, and then all we have to do is herd Butterball toward the pen.”
“And avoid letting Drumstick out in the process,” Jez added, making the logistical nightmare sound easy.
We all looked at each other. Thirty minutes later, we’d added an airlock arrangement to the makeshift cage, and Butterball had pecked the lawn half to death looking for grubs. Yes, we had a lawn in Vegas, but we also had a grey-water harvesting and purification system set up to nourish it, so we weren’t contributing to the falling water levels in Lake Mead. We’d never do that. Sin wouldn’t allow it. Not due to any militant environmental streak—although she was a big fan of recycling—but because she’d slung a dead pimp in there several years ago and she didn’t much want him to resurface.
Storm set up her swarm targeting parameters on a tiny tablet, Butterball blissfully oblivious to her upcoming role as test subject. The government had pumped billions of dollars into miniaturised weapons technology in the past few years, and MAVs had been a big recipient of the funding. These ones were designed to mimic bird and insect flight, so the enemy would have no idea spies or even nano-assassins were lurking overhead. And they were hard to shoot down—highly manoeuvrable, and even if the enemy took out one, ten more would take its place.
On Storm’s command, the swarm rose and flew toward Butterball. The MAVs were quiet, quieter than regular bees, which was perhaps why the turkey looked up, confused. Then she clucked excitedly and ate one of the drones.
I couldn’t say whether it was the shock on Storm’s face or the disgusted expression on Butterball’s as she crunched defiantly on a hundred grand’s worth of top-secret experimental technology, but I struggled to breathe from laughing. Barbie was crying as she fell off the sun lounger, and even Jez spit wine across the terrace and snort-laughed until she began coughing.
“I just peed myself a little,” she choked out.
“TMI.” But I needed Depends myself. “Shitting fuck… It ate the fucking drone.”
“She,” Sin said. “She ate the drone.”
Marcel threw his hands in the air. “We’re never going to catch the darn turkey.”
Sin glared at him. “Good. I hear Kitty Roebuck has an excellent pumpkin lasagne recipe.”
“That freaking bird will still be running around at Christmas, digging up the grass and terrorising the dogs.”
Barbie’s phone rang, and she put it on speaker.
“Did the…” Echo dissolved into giggles. “Did the turkey just eat a drone?”
“Oh my gosh, yes. I guess the good news is that they’re realistic.”
Great, Echo was still watching. “Don’t you ever take a break from spying?”
“Hey, this is the best entertainment I’ve had all year. Chase is making popcorn.”
Chase was her assistant, a purely platonic arrangement because although Chase was smokin’ hot, he was also very gay.
“Gee, I sure hope it doesn’t get stuck in your teeth,” I said.
“Well, at least none of my stuff got stuck in a turkey.”
“Neither did any of my stuff.”
