Read Online Crashland by Sean Williams - Free Book Online

Clair picked one unsupervised drone at random and accessed its feed. Drone 484117B was cruising at a steady speed over one of Crystal City’s many aboveground buildings, a boxy structure containing offices and data storage, according to the map her visual overlay provided. Visible were several other PK buildings, the old airport site, now a nature reserve, greater Washington and the Potomac River, and to the south a long, gray wall that was the Great Alexandria Barrage, one of the more awesome attempts to keep the ocean in place after the Water Wars. Fifty yards high and more than two miles long, it looked like storm clouds stuck on the horizon, never coming closer and never going away.
    The drone was intuitively easy to direct. Clair experimented with various commands, pitching, yawing, and diving until she was sure she had it all worked out. Then she put the drone back under its own control and concentrated on the feed. There were dupes out there somewhere, trying to get to her. Her job was to stop them, and if she learned more about them into the bargain, all the better.
    â€œWhere are they?” she asked, studying her windows in vain.
    â€œStick to the assigned flight path,” said Sargent. “If you notice anything out of order, let us know.”
    â€œDon’t get your hopes up,” bumped Devin. “They won’t be giving us any real work.”
    â€œStop it,” she said. “I’m trying to concentrate.”
    But there was a chance he was right. The task was simple and soon became routine. Her mood soured. Every five minutes she was automatically assigned a new drone, to stop her from getting complacent about the view, she assumed. The drones flew over empty rooftops, empty lawns, and empty physical training grounds.
    When not absorbed with this menial task, Clair explored the network of Crystal City and the small insight she had to the wider world of the peacekeepers. It reminded her of the vast complexity of Wallace’s secret network, into which Q had briefly plugged her in the station. That had been epic in scale, spanning the entire world, and this was much the same. There were literally millions of PKs and their new deputies active at that moment, all over the world. She couldn’t tell what they were doing, but she could see their names and where they were. Some came online while she watched and others dropped off. She hoped the latter weren’t dying. Maybe they were using the shadow road to move around.
    Reports about dupes were coming in from all over. That was good, if slightly unnerving, to know.
    A flicker on her drone’s feed brought her out of her observations. The view was alternating between bright white and blackness as though the camera lens was blinking at the sun. She was puzzled for a second until the drone identified it as a laser attack. The drone wasn’t damaged, but its vision was being deliberately obscured.
    Finally , Clair thought, although not without a twinge of nervousness.
    â€œI think I’ve got something,” she said to PK Beck.
    He slipped smoothly into the drone’s control systems.
    â€œGreat. Let’s give her a touch of rotation . . . like this.”
    The drone—Clair refused to refer to it as a “she”—turned on its gyroscopes and fans, blinking all the way. At a certain point the vision in one camera cleared.
    â€œThe source of the laser is now blocked by the body of the drone, see?” PK Beck explained. “That gives us a set of possible angles. All we need is another and we can triangulate, get some countermeasures in place. Let’s take her over here and see what happens.”
    The drone jetted off along a new trajectory, tilting and swaying to define the laser’s path. Clair watched the view through the cameras closely, trying to tease out useful information from the interference. Image-processing algorithms did the same. She saw notifications appear in the corner