a Drone Alert was announced. For civil defense planners, the problem then became what to do with thousands of panicking people set in motion by the alert?
The solution—at least temporarily—was to be found in the long, no-frills hallways that branched out from the main public concourses and used by vendors, employees, and maintenance personnel. Now they took on a dual purpose—as fortified bomb shelters. Once an alert sounded, civilians would have thirty seconds to enter the nearest, clearly-designated service corridor, after which heavy blast doors would be shuttered. In some cases, a thousand or more people could be packed into these dimly-lit and stuffy chambers.
Most often, patrons were not allowed to leave these shelters until all the exits were cleared of potential hostiles, including those that might be waiting outside for the mass of evacuees to reveal themselves. This made for a very uncomfortable half-an-hour or more, producing its own set of often tragic consequences in the process.
In addition to the service corridors, all inline stores at the major malls were retrofitted with heavy, automatic-closing security doors or grills, which allowed employees and customers to remain safely inside until the crisis passed. That was unless a drone chose to blow open a store’s security barricade to get at the soft targets inside. This didn’t happen often, yet when it did the body count was significant.
After spending five years as the senior pilot at the Rapid Defense Center, Xander Moore had seen his share of carnage created by even the most basic drone attack, so he expected nothing less from this event; however, upon entering the mall, he was relieved to see that the main connecting concourse was clear of civilians, at least those who remained visible.
Xander knew that the few who hadn’t made it to the shelters would be hiding from his drones—just as they were hiding from the enemy UAVs. This was understandable. Even though the RDC drones were painted with a distinctive red, white, and blue motif, the bad guys had begun to paint their units in a similar manner, so to the victims within the Dolphin Mall, all drones were the enemy. Fortunately, Xander and his team would experience no such confusion. The highly-classified transponder signals employed by the RDC units would separate the good guys from the bad.
As Xander’s huge Viper UAV cruised down the central concourse of the Dolphin Mall, he spotted another of the effective defensive tools being used to protect the public during drone attacks. These were the ubiquitous, twelve foot-long, four-foot wide seating partitions now found throughout most malls in America. Although fitted atop with an inviting four-inch-thick pad for seating comfort, these thirty-inch-high, t-shaped structures could be used to hide under and behind when enemy drones were in the area. Their high-grade steel construction could withstand a modest-size explosion.
So as Xander’s Viper led the three-drone phalanx toward the Bloomingdale Outlet at the north side of the mall, he knew that behind many of the seating partitions dozens of terrified—and wet—civilians huddled, all of whom just had their joyous holiday season shattered by an experience that would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
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“Autos are engaging,” Lane reported. “Only three explosions recorded so far.”
“Casualties?”
“I’m detecting seventeen people down, at least in the western side of the mall. No telling at this point the dead from the injured.”
Just then the team heard the distinctive pop-pop of small arms fire coming through the microphones on their drones. Xander’s targeting display instantly locked tiny red-lined boxes on the heads of three men. They were poking out from behind a cellphone accessories kiosk in the center of the concourse, with weapons out and firing—at Xander and his drones.
The RDC pilot wasn’t worried. Their drones were specifically designed