Dropzone

Two: DRONES

Eastern Cordillera, Columbia

0100 hrs Local Time (UTC -5 hrs)

March 2, 2263

Sixteen Years Earlier

“There.” Gunnery Sergeant Josephine “Jo” Navarro whispered as she squirted the blurry night-sky image through the commo’s relay to her squad leader Lieutenant Hicks. “I think that’s one of them.”

Jo felt rather than saw Hicks’ face contort into a frown in the near-pitch black shadow of their freezing perch just inside a shallow cave on the side of yet another nameless hill. “That?” Hicks asked as he mentally perused the image. “It looks like just random noise, Jo.”

She fiddled with her small pack of surveillance gear and shifted some filters. Jo shook her head and realized that Hicks probably couldn't see her very well either. “I don’t think so sir. That little pixelated streak keeps moving around in a pattern, looks like it shapes a rough figure eight if you run it back and forward about thirty minutes. Here’s the track.” She sent him a second image. “Random noise is more . . . well, random.”

“Maybe,” Hicks said with a note of doubt in his voice.

The Republic of Texas special forces squad’s communications officer, who was actually an enlisted man, Corporal Sanchez, grumbled softly, “This is some scary shit. They could be looking at us right now. Blow our balls off before we even had a chance to fart. I vote we risk just one—”

“Absolutely not,” said Hicks. “And it’s not a democracy, Sanchez.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not,” Jo echoed. “The cartel’s drones are the best money can buy. Better than ours, even. Stealthy. Restricted AIs. Bristling with active and passive sensor suites. Loadouts with at least one missile and probably two. Better than even the U.S. and Chinese military has, if our intel guys are right. Got sensors across the whole EM spectrum. Really, really fucking good sensors.” She started to shake her head, and stopped herself. “We sneak passive looks only. We send so much as a stray electron their way and the only warning we’ll get is a pretty pink rocket-launch dawn a second or two before we litter the mountainside with shower of charred flesh and bone fragments.”

Hicks chuckled softly. “Nice imagery, Jo.”

“Thanks. I majored in Lit at UT, sir. You know I earn a shitload of creds on the side as a romance writer, right? Don’t tell a soul, or I’ll have to frag you.”

“You’re joking, right?”

Jo smiled in the darkness. “Maybe. Wait—you talking about the writer part or the fragging part, sir?”

They shared a low laugh before settling back into sober contemplation. Jo monitored inputs from the senor suite. Their tiny team—just the three of them—huddled under a transparent tent in the cave mouth, a tent designed not to protect them from the elements but to muffle sound and shield their already-low heat signatures from the sophisticated stealth drones Jo was trying to peg with her gear. Drones they suspected were standing watch over the cartel’s latest drug manufacturing facility—ROT’s intelligence agencies had come up with the location by data-mining heat emission patterns hijacked from an Indian satellite’s flyovers in the past year, and the mining algorithms had come up with a sixty percent chance of a positive non-random pattern alteration in the area. That meant signature patterns that could not be attributed to just animal movements or the daily activities of the sparse local population. Patterns that might—might—mean a carefully-run, closely guarded and heavily-armed manufacturing operation.