Drone Wars 1: Day of the Drone Read Free

posed the biggest problem for the defenders, since they were unpredictable in their actions, needing to be engaged in head-to-head aerial combat.
    This was the last weekend before Christmas and the Dolphin Mall had been overflowing with eager and desperate shoppers at the time of the attack. That was why the mall had been targeted in the first place—more death and destruction guaranteed.
     With the unpredictability and spontaneity of drone attacks, the team’s primary objective wasn’t to prevent an attack, but rather to limit the effects. They accomplished this through a combination of the quickest response time possible, followed by the systematic destruction of the attacking auto drones before they could target civilians and detonate their onboard bombs. Time was the variable in the equation. The sooner the enemy robots could be neutralized, the lower the body count.
    With a quick scan of data now present on his heads-up display, Xander Moore began assessing the situation at a location over twenty-three hundred miles from where he sat. By now, he was tied into the mall’s sophisticated security camera system, and with a flick of a toggle on his sixteen-function controller, he switched from scene to scene looking for targets and damage.
    The hostiles had come in shooting, which to his relief was better than coming in and detonating; however, he could already see a number of bodies dotting the marble floor. Too often drone attacks lasted less than thirty seconds, as three or four UAVs would fly into a crowded venue and simply explode—nothing fancy, just spontaneous killing for the sake of killing. Casualty counts for such events could be in the hundreds, and there was nothing the Rapid Response Center could do to mitigate the damage.
    Most autonomous attack drones operated on sophisticated pre-loaded programs, which basically instructed them to fly to a designated GPS location and shoot anything with a specific heat signature—the heat signature of a human being. To combat this, malls and other public venues—where possible—would douse their patrons in cold water in order to disguise their temperature readings. In addition, installed heating columns would activate during an attack, acting as decoys to distract the drone sensors from their primary targets. These towers were protected by thick, bulletproof glass and could withstand an onslaught from the lightweight, nylon-jacketed .5mm rounds most attack drones fired.
    Of course, once these mindless killing machines depleted their supply of ammo, the next order of business was to detonate the small explosive charge each carried on board. Drones were cheap and disposable weapons of destruction. Once the mission was complete, they usually went out with a bang.
    Yet by the time the auto drones reached the end of their usefulness—which could last as long thirty minutes in some cases—most of the civilians in the area would have heeded the broadcast warnings and left the building or taken shelter. At the end of an event—as the RDC termed terrorist attacks—only additional property damage would result from the explosions. At least that was the plan.
    Drone Alerts were becoming more common, with most being triggered by small-time events involving only a single drone or two, flown by lone-wolf terrorists or members of homegrown radical organizations. In one recent event, an attack had been initiated by a man with a hefty bet on a football team that was losing at the time. Out of desperation, he flew an unarmed drone into the sports arena causing the game’s suspension. It was a spur of the moment event and the drone caused no real damage, beyond the frayed nerves and tempers of over fifty thousand terrified spectators. The man was quickly apprehended, and his gambling losses soon became the least of his worries.
    If there was a silver lining to these events, it was that they emphasized the seriousness of the threat and helped quicken the public’s reaction time when