Chapter 46 - THE ROGUE TRANSMISSION
"Drone inbound, altitude two thousand feet, bearing zero-four-zero!" the lookout in the rear cruiser radioed, panic edging his voice. "It’s not military—it's a heavy-lift civilian drone retrofitted with an anti-tank payload!"
The syndicate was growing desperate. Having lost Mount Weather and their automated systems, they were deploying their illicit private contractor hardware in broad daylight.
Through the heavy ballistic glass of the BearCat, I looked up through the rear viewport. A dark, predatory silhouette dropped through the low cloud deck, descending rapidly toward the center of our convoy.
"Sarah," I said sharply. "Can you hijack its telemetry with the drive’s encryption keys?"
"The drive has the master override codes, but Vance’s firewall has a seven-second authentication handshake!" she answered, her hands flying across the keyboard. "I need six seconds of direct signal line-of-sight without interference!"
"Miller, open the roof hatch!" I commanded, unholstering my service sidearm and grabbing a tactical rifle from the wall rack.
"Grant, that thing has thermal tracking!" Miller warned.
"If it drops its warhead on this vehicle, armor won't save us!" I shouted.
Miller didn't argue. He struck the mechanical release on the ceiling. The heavy steel hatch swung open with a pneumatic hiss, admitting the roaring rush of freezing highway air.
I hauled myself up through the opening, bracing my thighs against the turret ring. The wind battered my face at sixty miles per hour. Half a mile back, hovering directly above the tree line along the median, the drone was locking onto our rear escort cruiser. A faint red tracking diode glowed beneath its camera gimbal.
"Sarah! I’m painting the target! Sync your transmitter to my laser sight!" I yelled downward.
I brought the rifle to my shoulder, flicked the selector to semi-automatic, and activated the high-intensity infrared target designator mounted beneath the barrel. I centered the green crosshairs directly onto the drone's primary sensor cluster.
Inside the cabin, Sarah shouted over the wind: "Target acquired! Injecting the handshake payload... three seconds... two seconds..."
The drone’s underbelly hatch began to hinge downward, exposing the dark tube of an unguided rocket.
"One second!" Sarah screamed. "Override accepted!"
The drone jerked violently in midair. Its four electric rotors screamed as Sarah’s code bypassed its remote human pilot, forcing its flight computer into an uncontrolled emergency landing sequence. The rocket pod swung uselessly upward.
"Now, Sarah! Invert the controls!" I yelled.
"Done!"
The drone banked sharply at a ninety-degree angle, diving directly into the empty concrete median. It exploded in a blinding fireball of aviation fuel and magnesium, sending a concussive shockwave across the lanes behind us, completely scorching the asphalt and severing the pursuit line of two black SUVs that had been tailing our convoy from the shadows.
I ducked back inside the hatch and slammed the lock shut, panting hard as the smell of burning rubber and kerosene seeped into the vents.
"Nice shot," Miller exhaled, lowering his sidearm.
"That wasn't shooting," I said, wiping soot from my forehead. "That was Sarah locking their own door against them."
Sarah didn't look up from her monitor. Her face was illuminated by the blue glare of a massive upload bar reaching ninety-nine percent.
"I didn't just override the drone," Sarah said, a cold, triumphant smile touching her lips. "I used its unsecured satellite link to mirror the entire contents of the Sovereign Directive drive directly to ninety-two independent civilian media outlets, the Associated Press, and every verified state attorney general across the country."
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She hit the enter key with definitive force.
"The shadow is gone," she whispered. "The whole world is reading the truth right now."
