The entire Hub had squeezed together into a tight bunch, everyone trying to get a glimpse of Rob’s phone. Wint was smooshed against Rob’s shoulder, and he had a front-row view to what was happening on the screen. The glowing rectangle displayed a rudimentary radar — a blue-and-white dot marked their location in the middle of the light-blue nothingness: the sea. Around them, half a dozen red square indicators blipped on and off, disappearing and then re-appearing in the same location, or a few millimetres off.
“There’s something wrong with the radar”, Rob said, shaking the phone to force a reload the display. You could hear the stress in his voice. “But looks like it’s about ten of ‘em.”
“Look!”, Ada pointed at the top right corner of the screen. “There’s two more!”
“There too!”, said Wint, tapping at the bottom edge of the phone.
“Foook”, said Rob.
“What are they?”, Wint asked.
“Drones. Tiny ones, I couldn’t see any with my bare eyes.”
“Drones? Like, military drones?” Wint asked. “Like the ones that will blow us up with a missile strike?”
“Nae, not military. They don’t have this type yet. Could be a private contractor working for Intelligence, but Occam’s razor says they’re probably private drones on private business.”
“To… get me?”, Wint asked, incredulous.
Nobody answered. Dazed, they stared at Rob’s screen, where more red dots dithered around their location.
Carla inhaled audibly. “It’s a swarm.”
“Fooooook!”
“Is that bad?”, Wint asked.
“It’s bad, but it could be worse. The good news is these types of drones are too small to carry weapons. The bad news is, they’re too small to shoot down, and whoever sent them probably isn’t far behind.”
“We should take the tunnel”, Carla said.
“How do you think they found us?”, Rob shot an openly hostile glance at Wint. “The only way they could know were we are is that they know how we got here. My bet is, they’ve sent the swarm to scare us back to land, and they’re waiting for us in the other end.”
“So… we’re trapped?”
“Foook! Carla, I don’t know. Give us a minute and let us think.”
Ten minutes had passed, and the number of drones had steadily grown until it stabilised and hovered around a hundred. The refresh rate of the radar was too slow to track each individual drone accurately, but it appeared that the swarm had surrounded them, and circled them slowly in a counter-clockwise motion.
“It’s too windy for them to stay still”, said Jon. “They need to keep constantly moving against the wind or they’ll be thrown off their swarm.”
“Couldn’t we… EMP them?”, Wint suggested.
“EMP?”
“Yeah…”, Wint wasn’t sure what the acronym stood for. He had heard it in the movies, but now that he was being questioned, he wasn’t sure it was a real thing and not a hollywood fantasy. “Electro… magnetic? Pulse?”
“If you have one, by all means”, Rob sneered. “Otherwise I suggest you shut the fook up and let the adults do the talking.”
“There’s no need for that”, Ada snapped, turning to address Wint. “If we had one, we could try to EMP them. But that wouldn’t solve the problem. They know where we are, and whoever they are running recon for can’t be too far away — their range is a kilometer at most.”
At that moment, Mohammed slid down the stairs from the top of the platform, nearly falling down. He was dripping wet from rain, or being splashed by the ocean. “Can’t see a thing out there!”, he panted.
“What do we do? Who is it? What do they want?”, Wint was panicking.
“If they’re after him, we should just give him to them.”
“Throw him to the lions?”, Ada asked.
“Yeah, I don’t see why not.”
“William…. is there any reason you can think of that might make somebody this… sophisticated to want to get you?”
“I keep telling you! The Bitcoin!”
Ada bit her lip. “I don’t know how to say this to you in a way that will get through to you, William, but it’s not the Bitcoin. These people, whoever they are, aren’t after money. Anyone with access to a self-directing drone swarm must already be swimming in it —”, Ada said and then paused. Her eyes grew so large it looked like her eyeballs could pop out of their sockets. “Tell me again, William, how did you come to find out about the Bitcoin.”
“It — it — “, Wint had to think. “It was an anonymous comment. On the internet.”
“When?”
“Thurs — Friday, Friday morning.”
“You called me on Friday evening.”
“Yes.”
“What happened in between.”
“Nothing — I went home… I looked for the Bitcoin wallet. I called Nicky… I found your number…”
“Do you often get comments on old articles like this one?”, Carla intervened.
“No, almost never. I have an alert for them — nobody reads the old things.”
“Do you think…?”, Rob trailed off, looking at Ada.
“Fuck.”
“Fook.”
“Huh?” Wint wasn’t following, but whatever it was, it didn’t sound good.
Rob had disappeared into the ceiling hatch to prepare the boat. Ada was shoving her laptop and a fistful of thumb drives into her backpack. The plan was clear. It seemed the drones were either after Wint, or they were after Ada for reasons that weren’t quite as clear to Wint, but this did not seem like the time to stall and request a thorough explanation. But in both cases, the solution was the same: Wint and Ada would take the boat and lure the drones out after them, hopefully giving the rest of the Hub enough time to destroy any sensitive information and a chance of an escape.
Rob reappeared from the upper floor, pulling a soaking yellow rubber rain coat off himself, his arms getting stuck in the rigid sleeves of the jacket. “Oh for fook’s sake! — WHERE THE FUCK IS TOM”, Rob bellowed.
“He’s in London on a job”, Carla said.
“Oh, the fookin’ suitcase, for fook’s sake. We need to get an emergency dispatch out. There’s a chopper on the way!”
“What!?”
“There. Is. A. Fookin’. Helicopter. Coming!”
“Jesus”, Carla said and rushed off to her desk and powered on her computer. “I have months of work here I haven’t synced.”
“ADA! Babe! You ready to go?”
Ada appeared from her room, wearing a heavy black rain coat, her eyes shaded by a black baseball cap that read: “Don’t worry about the government”.
“Yeah, I’m ready. But you’re not going.”
“The fook I aren’t”, Rob said.
“I need you to get a message to Starr.”
“You and me both”, Rob said. “And we’ll get there together. I’m not leaving you like this, Ada.”
Ada rolled her eyes. “Fine, let’s go then! William, grab that bag”, she said, pointing at a black plastic rubbish bag on the floor next to Ada’s desk, its mouth tied shut. Wint lifted if off the ground. It felt light for its size. He squeezed the bag. Clothes?
Ada rushed out first, taking the steps two at a time with her long legs. Rob followed close on her tail. Wint, trying to keep up, rushed towards the light at the top of the stairs.
As soon as he hit the doorway, the rain soaked his shirt through the open front of his parka. He zippered the coat shut, pulled up the hood over his skullcap and turned his body left and right to locate Rob and Ada through the field of vision narrowed by the hood. He couldn’t see anyone. The sea was upset, shooting heady splashes of freezing salt water onto his shoes. Wint walked to the edge of the platform and looked down. He saw Rob helping Ada into a small, lightweight fiber glass boat, barely large enough for the three of them.
“Come the fook on!”, Rob yelled and motioned for Wint to descend the ladder. Wint threw the black plastic bag into the boat and took the ladder, squeezing hard on the cold aluminium rungs, trying not to slip and fall into the thrashing sea. He reached the bottom rung and Rob pulled him from the waist, forcing him to let go of the ladder and land onto the center perch of the boat with a thud. Rob pulled on the cord of the motor once, twice, three times until it caught and prattled on. With a wide curve, the boat careened out into the sea and towards the closest wind turbine thirty, forty yards in the distance, splitting air and sheets of rain with a loud FUM, FUM, FUM, FUM.
“Heey! Over here!”, Rob yelled and waved his free arm, steering the boat with the other. “Come and get us!” Wint spun his neck left, right, up and down, but even when shielding his eyes against the whips of rain, he couldn’t see a single flying thing, much less an entire swarm. They were surrounded by an invisible enemy, which was somehow even more frightening that one that you could see. Rob kept waving his arms, screaming, like crazy person howling at the clouds. Wint could have almost convinced himself that Rob — or the radar — had fabricated the existence of the swarm, if it wasn’t for the second part of the prophesy fulfilling itself with a low “wha-wha-wha-wha-wha” sound of a helicopter approaching from the direction of the city. Rob gave the motor more gas and turned towards the coast, the entire boat bouncing precariously as they faced the direction of the waves. And then, the sound of the motor loosened. Wint looked back, finding Rob missing at the helm.
“Rob!’, Wint yelled, jumping towards the back of the boat. In the waves, he could see Rob’s head bounce briefly above the surface of the water, and then going back under again.
“Hold on, I’m coming!”, Wint yelled. He grabbed the handle of the rudder and steered the boat around, approaching the location where he thought Rob had gone under. Ada stood on the front perch of the boat, eyes fixed at the surface of the frothing sea. “Rob!”, Ada screamed. “Rob!”
Rob was underwater. Rob would not be able to hear them. Seconds passed painfully slowly.
Then, Wint saw a hand emerge from underneath a receding head of a wave. There was no rope, no ring, no life vest on the boat. There was only him and Ada. Wint gave the engine gas and moved close to the point where he had last seen Rob. Holding onto the smooth fiberglass edge of the boat with one hand, he stretched himself as far into the frigid sea as he could, waving his arm around, hoping to get lucky. There! He felt something touch his hand. He lost it for a moment and then reached it again and squeezed his fingers around it — an arm! He pulled with what little leverage he had, nearly falling out of the boat himself if it hadn’t been for Ada holding onto his waist. With a single heave, Ada pulled Wint, and Wint pulled Rob’s arm, launching him from the water halfway onto the boat. The vessel veered precariously under the imbalanced weight, but did not capsize. With another pull, Rob was back onto the boat, his entire body shaking from the shock of the cold December sea.
Wint clambered into the back of the boat and revved the engine, bouncing along on the waves towards the city lights. He looked back into the dawning horizon. He couldn’t see drones following him, but then again, would he see them even if they did? He did, however, see the black helicopter hover over the Hub, swerving in the wind, and three dark forms descend down a rope and land onto the platform. The forms disappeared into the belly of the structure, and in the wind.
Wint thought he could hear the sounds of gunshots.
He looked at Ada, who was pulling Rob’s raincoat off of his shoulders, seemingly not noticing the commando team that had just invaded the Hub. Rob’s body was violently shivering. Should they turn back? What for? What could they do to stop the onslaught? Wint took one last look at the Hub which had already began to fade into the distance, and looked towards the Brighton skyline. All he could do now was to get them safely to solid ground.