It seemed, too, that the terrorists had done their homework, selecting the only large public facility in the area that didn’t employee a private drone security force. The pilots of the RDC had the authority to assume control over any and all defensive drones operating within a crisis area, whether private or government UAVs.
The three main drones in Xander’s sortie were RDC units — the most-advanced to be found in any defensive fleet — and now they shot through the same hole through which the enemy units had just entered only seconds ahead of them. And Xander’s defenders weren’t alone. Trailing behind the three RPAs — remotely-piloted aircraft — came a force of twenty autonomous defense drones. These auto-controlled units quickly dispersed, some turning left, others right, while four proceeded straight down the central concourse of the mall. Equipped with the most advanced sense-and-avoid software and scanners, the RDC auto drones were designed to navigate tight quarters and hone in on other UAVs in the vicinity through a combination of radio signals and audio pick-ups. Any aircraft not carrying the proper transponder code would be blown out of the air.
It was the responsibility of the live operators of Team Red-One to assess the event and coordinate the proper defensive response, while also being on the lookout for any RPAs operated by enemy pilots. Actively-piloted drones 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 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.