Page 57 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
“Sure you can. Just block out the world around you and focus. Huck tells me you’re still reasonably proficient at hitting a target.”
“A target. A piece of paper. Not a living, breathing human being.”
“If you prefer, you can become a dead, rotting corpse.”
He turned away, running his hands through his messy brown hair. “Damn, Phae. What happened to you?”
“While you were busy playing an operator on the big screen, I was becoming one. Any more questions? Or do you want me to focus on neutralising the enemy?”
“I—” he started, then shut his mouth. Good move.
“I’m real glad I wrote my will before I came here,” KD said.
I kicked her in the shin, and she yelped. “Stop being so negative.”
“You should’ve planned your funeral too,” Marc muttered.
“Asshole.”
I might have failed at being a daughter, failed at being a sister, and failed at being a girlfriend, but I didn’t fail at doing my job. With Storm acting as my eyes, I slid the crow out of my backpack. She was bigger than the hummingbird, but she had to be thanks to her cargo. I powered her up and settled in with the controller—which looked like the love child of a cell phone and a gamepad—while Marc examined the chamber on my gun. Of course there was a round loaded in it. Did he think I was stupid?
“Do I have an exit?” Jez asked.
“Yup—they’re focused on Dusk right now,” Storm told her. “Marc’s the jackpot. What about your casualties?”
“One’s unsalvageable, the other is non-critical.”
“Can you get out on the east side?”
“There’s a window. Anyone in the mangroves?”
“One significant heat source, but I don’t think it’s human.”
“A crocodile?”
“More like a large monkey. I could take a closer look, but I’d lose visibility over Dusk.”
“Stay with the main target; I have it covered.”
Secretly, I was damn relieved Jez said that because she had Emmy as her sidekick and I had Marc. And Marc looked as if he was about to puke. Oh, gosh, so that heartfelt letter he’d written me saying he’d do anything—anything—if I’d just rethink our relationship came with a caveat? Who knew?
Storm was in my ear, giving me a blow-by-blow account of enemy movements as I settled against the tree trunk. Five at your ten o’clock, moving east. Two skirting the clearing, five o’clock. Either Emmy or Jez tagged another man by the house, carefully, because neither of them could afford to waste ammo. I held the crow aloft and launched her on a wing and a prayer, fully aware this wasn’t the ideal situation for her first live test. There were too many hazards. Not just the trees, but bullets flying all around. She didn’t have to get in close—that was the job of her precious cargo—but I couldn’t deny I was nervous.
The crow was still a prototype. Eventually, we hoped to fully automate the targeting system, but for the moment, it still had manual checks and balances because nobody wanted to accidentally eliminate a civilian, did they? I glanced down at KD. Almost nobody.
Crows were fascinating creatures. Did you know they liked to pick up insect hitchhikers? Mostly ants, because the ants shit formic acid onto their feathers to help keep them clean, but we’d decided to go with something slightly bigger. I tapped the button to release the passengers. This swarm wasn’t quite as benign as the one Storm had tried using to herd a turkey. Eighty percent of the MAVs were hornets, loaded with plastic explosive; the remainder were the smaller mosquitoes, complete with snake venom. Dice had extracted that herself—the menagerie she kept out back did serve some purpose, other than to freak the shit out of Tulsa.
And did you know the collective noun for a group of crows was “a murder”? The crow was our murder mothership.
Following Storm’s directions, I located the closest pair of hostiles on the crow’s camera and tagged them. Selected a weapon. The crow tracked its target and allocated a hornet. The hornet buzzed in, and I hit “yes” to clear the final safeguard.
There was no boom, more of a wet thwack, and sixteen became fifteen.
When an injury had temporarily forced Storm out of her beloved jets and into the drone program at Creech AFB, her biggest complaint was the lack of humanity. Death by drone felt too much like a video game.
Now I got it.
Oh man, I’d seen what a hornet could do to a watermelon, but this… The wannabe terrorist had lost his head and a good portion of his shoulder as well. And it barely felt real.
