Collateral Savage: Book Twelve in The Mad Mick Series by Franklin Horton

Author:Franklin Horton [Horton, Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2026-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

26

Baotou

The beauty of civilian drones was that they were cheap, maneuverable, and easy to operate. Blackburn could buy thousands of them for the price of one military-grade drone. The drawback was that they couldn’t be operated from a remote facility thousands of miles away like their more expensive cousins. These commercial drones required the operator to be within a certain range of the target, which was why Conor and his team were now sitting on this hillside wearing virtual reality headsets and holding controllers.

When all three drones were powered up and operational, Conor, Ricardo, and Barb each lifted off and headed toward the target. As they were still novice operators, they kept a safe distance between each drone, with Ricardo in front, Barb in the middle, and Conor bringing up the rear. Back at The Crypt, a special research and development team had manufactured custom munitions and deployment systems for these drones using 3D printers. Each drone was outfitted with a custom carousel that could rotate through the munitions payload and deploy them at the touch of a button.

In the distance, battery-operated emergency lighting flickered to life inside the plant. Men with flashlights scurried around, trying to figure out if the blackout was specific to the facility or a regional issue. By the time someone at the plant noticed that the entire city was dark and reported it to a supervisor, the trio of drones was upon them. With their arrival, the hum of rotors filled the air. Workers searched for the source of the buzzing, assuming at first that it had something to do with the power outage. Some began to panic, noticing that the sound was getting louder, a sure sign that something was moving closer. Without the bright exterior lighting knocked out by Havoc’s outage, they couldn’t tell what was happening.

Ricardo’s drone zipped through one of the open bay doors. Those who spotted the drone in the emergency lighting cried out and pointed. They’d located the source of the noise but had no idea if the drone was malicious or part of some attempt to diagnose the power outage. Then Ricardo hit a button on his remote and dropped the first of his drone’s payload. The teargas grenade hit the ground, bounced, and began spewing a high-pressure stream of chemical irritant. Feeling almost like he was playing a video game, Ricardo steered his drone through the vast plant and dropped the remainder of his six grenades.

As crowds of workers poured from the building, Barb was performing a similar maneuver around the exterior of the facility. Her payload consisted of a mix of teargas and smoke grenades loaded into a printed munitions carousel. Barb concentrated on the areas where most of the workers were congregated, taking advantage of the prevailing wind so that the clouds of smoke and gas would blow into the crowd rather than away from it.

Between Barb and Ricardo, they created mass, non-lethal chaos at the processing plant. Despite security personnel shouting over megaphones for everyone to stay calm and exit the building in an orderly fashion, no one listened.

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