Page 144 of King’s Ransom

They were tiny, nimble and super-fast: the rabbits.

Then came the Spiderhawks.

There were six of them.

Bigger and bulkier than the rabbits—and each armed with twin cannons—they oozed power and menace.

They swooped across the grassy plain, firing at the rabbits.

As they did, their powerful guns issued blazing tongues of muzzle-flash.

The shots were devastatingly accurate, blasting apart the rabbit drones.

The smaller drones fled gamely, but the Spiderhawks were far too good for them.

In fact, as I watched the ‘battle’ play out, it seemed to me that the Spiderhawks were acting with coordination, as a pack, with one or two of them separating a smaller drone from its brethren and then driving it toward another waiting Spiderhawk which shot it down.

It was brutal, devastating and quite shocking.

‘Are they herding them . . .?’ I said.

King smiled knowingly. ‘Well spotted. We actually trained their A.I. chips—which I also manufacture—on pack-hunting analytics gathered from wolf and orca packs. This is animal behaviour in a thinking robot. Trust me, you don’t want one of these things hunting you.’

(He must have forgotten what I’d experienced with one of these drones on the 21st. But, then, I got the impression that Aristo King didn’t think about other people much at all.)

And all of a sudden there was only one rabbit drone left.

This little drone was feisty and it attempted to hide in a concrete bunker embedded in one of the low grassy hills.

It was no use.

The Spiderhawks descended on the bunker, flushed it out and shot it to bits.

It exploded and the exercise was over.

‘All rabbits destroyed,’ the second tech said.

King turned to me, grinning like a kid. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’

‘Yeah. Very cool,’ I said.

Sometimes, as a detective, you need to test people. Often it’s beneficial to do this when they’re feeling comfortable and confident.

‘I noticed downstairs that one of your drones is missing,’ I said. ‘Was it the one from December 21st? The one that was found on your bed and which later came alive and did all that damage?’

(It had also never been recovered. After it had shot Audrey on the bridge at the cemetery in Sleepy Hollow—and then been shot by me and Xiao—it had flown away.)

‘What? Oh, yes,’ King said, a little irritated. ‘It was stolen from here a couple of weeks ago.’

‘How could someone steal it? This place must be locked up tighter than Fort Knox,’ I said.

‘It happened during a flight exercise not unlike this one. Someone hacked that drone’s navigation and control systems and flew it away, simple as that,’ King said. ‘We’ve patched up the software flaw that allowed it to happen.’

‘Still, that’d require some serious hacking skills,’ I said. ‘These things are military grade.’

I was thinking about what I knew about Modern Alchemical Solutions.

The people there definitely had those hacking skills.