She reflected that she and the world in general were lucky that Richard had chosen to ally himself with the Forces of Good.
On her return to the ops center Dagmar encountered Magnus, whose kilt was hiked up to highly unacceptable levels as he cycled to work on his bike. Fortunately, by the time she caught up to him he’d dismounted and was stowing his bike in the rack.
It was a different kilt, she realized, than the one he’d worn the day before. The man had at least two Utilikilts.
That was hard-core Geek.
“Morning,” she said.
“Hi, Briana.”
He waited for her to finish racking her bike. She looked at him curiously, looking for signs that he’d been Hellmouthed the night before. He seemed fine, maybe a little tired.
“Did you have a good night?”
“Limassol is a happenin’ town,” he said cheerfully.
She looked at him. “You got the lecture about the Russian hookers, right?”
Magnus laughed. “One of them came right up to me off the dance floor and wiped her face on my T-shirt,” he said.
Dagmar was curious. “What did you do?”
“I blew her off.” He laughed again. “Jesus Christ, it’s not like I want whore sweat on my clothes.”
They walked toward the door of the building. Two airmen came out, and one politely held the door for them. Dagmar thanked him as she entered, and then she and Magnus walked up the stairs to the ops center.
“Are you settling in?” she said. “Any problems?”
“None to speak of,” he said. “It’s a more interesting job than the government usually gives me.”
She remembered Angry Man Byron’s complaints the previous day and asked if he found the security rules too restrictive. He shrugged.
“They do get in the way. But it’s not too bad here-I mean, if we’re not all in the ops center anyway, we’re not working, right? This isn’t the kind of job you bring home with you.”
“True enough.”
She came to the door of the ops center, waved at the camera, and snicked her card through the reader. The lock buzzed open, and Dagmar pushed the heavy steel door open.
Lola looked up from her desk as they entered. Dagmar waved the ID at her, and Lola nodded expressionlessly.
Dagmar stopped in the door to the break room, where yesterday there had been the breakfast buffet, and saw that today no food had been provided. Yesterday she had eaten breakfast and then found out about the buffet; today she had assumed there would be a buffet and not eaten breakfast.
She sensed that the primary theme for the day had already been set: whatever she did or thought was going to be wrong.
She paused by her office door and let Magnus walk past her into the ops center, T-shirt, kilt, thin hairy legs, and flapping sandals.
Part of the secret of the Scots kilt, she decided, was the long stockings. They limited the amount of unattractive pale flesh visible to the onlooker. They suggested curvy calves even if the calves in question were matchsticks.
Magnus hadn’t quite learned what made a kilt work and what didn’t. But it wasn’t Dagmar’s job to tell him.
Though probably she was going to have to tell him how to ride a bicycle in a skirt, just to keep him out of the hands of the RAF Police.
We are like ourselves, Dagmar thought, and walked into her kingdom.
It turns out that Lloyd, the intern, was in charge of the unit’s air force. He had been a model rocket hobbyist in high school, and apparently that qualified him to wrangle a whole fleet of radio-controlled drones.
Lloyd invited Dagmar and Lincoln to his workstation for a status report. Lloyd’s scarred metal desk was directly beneath one of the ceiling fans; the fan gave a regular mechanical chirp as it drove cold air down on Dagmar’s head.
Dagmar guessed that Lloyd had graduated from college a couple years ago. He was a little shorter than average height and had rimless spectacles. He wore soft gray slacks and a Van Heusen shirt with a faint lilac stripe, long sleeved against the artificial chill.
He was Air Force Brat, Dagmar thought. And Lola was the Guardian Sphinx.
“We’ve got two types of drones,” Lloyd explained. He had loaded videos of the tests in his desktop computer. “One is a model helicopter with an off-the-shelf zoom lens.” The video showed a flying machine so bare and basic that it looked as if it had been assembled out of carbon-fiber fishing rods and leftover circuit boards. There were two rotors, surprisingly silent, with a package slung between them that consisted of three cameras, each equipped with a different lens and capable of independent tracking. On the video the copter bounded into the air like a jumping spider, then zigzagged around the sky with sufficient speed and agility that the video had trouble tracking it. It made a faint whooshing sound, like Superman passing far overhead.
“It’s got GPS,” Lloyd said. “You tell it where to go, and it goes there, and if you’ve got the coordinates of the target, it will point the camera there without a human operator having to manually adjust it. We figure to use these for reconnaissance-keep tabs on nearby police stations or army barracks.”
“How close does the operator have to be?” Dagmar asked.
“Doesn’t even have to be within sight,” Lloyd said. “The operator won’t be anywhere near the action, and the helo can automatically return to the GPS coordinates from which it was launched, or anywhere else within its range.”
There were more videos, these taken by the copters’ onboard cameras, their occasional jerkiness smoothed by computer enhancement. The lenses, generic products of some anonymous Southeast Asian factory, were capable of remarkable performance: Dagmar could make out individual faces as the helos floated unseen, unheard, over Limassol.
The sounds of the operators came over the sound track, all speaking Turkish. Dagmar listened, frowned.
“Is that your voice?” she asked.
Lloyd gave her a guileless look. “Yes.”
“You speak Turkish?”
“I do.”
She waited for a moment in case Lloyd wanted to offer an explanation, but he only offered a tight little smile and then went on with his talk. The rules said they weren’t to tell each other anything of a personal nature, and Lloyd was clearly a rule follower.
“Our second drone,” he said, “is another VTOL-we can fly them both off roofs, or from roads or parks. But the second one also has anti-air capability. It’s a flying wedge, basically.”
“Sorry?” Dagmar asked.
Lloyd looked at her, solemn dark eyes behind spectacles.
“Do you ever watch World War: Robot?”
“No.”
“It’s one of those programs where homebuilt robots fight each other. And the basic rule for robot combat is that wedges rule.”
Dagmar’s mind swam. “Sorry,” she said, “but I’m still four-oh-four.”
Lloyd’s hands swooped descriptively in the air. “A wedge is just a robot with a wedge-shaped cross section,” he said. “They’re used for ramming-they hit the other robot at high speed and just fling it in the air.”
“Okay.”
“So what we did was adapt the wedge to aerial combat. We’ve got a hard plastic wedge kept aloft by arrays of miniturbines. It’s got several cameras, a GPS, and a top speed of about forty knots if we really want to burn through the fuel. Stability is achieved by fly-by-wire computer guidance-you really can’t turn the thing upside down even if you try. The idea is to fly it against police drones and bring them down by ramming. It’s a type of attack the Russians call taran.”
Dagmar looked at him. “The Russians use planes to ram?”
Lloyd nodded. “They train for it. Even now.”
Dagmar blinked.
“That’s hard-core,” she said.
Lloyd nodded. “Glad we never had to fight those guys.”
The video made the tactic clearer. The flying wedge brought down a whole series of target drones. Usually the wedge tumbled for a second or two but righted itself. On a couple occasions the wedge lost control and crashed.