I went to the computer and checked on Minerva’s progress. She had a week to practice running simulations over and over of varying combat and civilian dispute systems. I logged into the computer and opened her program. She started the week failing almost every scenario, but after a week, she had progressed to have a 99.5% success rate with zero civilian casualties in over ten thousand scenarios ran. Obviously, there will always be unpredictable variables, but that holds true with human operators as well. I trusted her programming to handle this operation, and as she had more practice, it would only improve.

I moved the computer out of the Library World first and connected everything within the main house. If she was going to run the operation and connect with the drones, she would need a fairly strong transmitter outside. Once I had everything set up inside, I moved out to the roof and started creating a basic antenna assembly for her to use for broadcasting. This setup should give her roughly a hundred miles of control area from the house, more than enough to reach the town and beyond it.

I ran the wiring down and connected it to her, then launched the program to connect the transmitter. She wasn’t capable of conversation yet, but she could give me basic signals of yes/no or diagnose problems and display them for me. I left the house and entered the Library World. Tom and I carried the drones outside and laid them down in the grass outside in a net pattern. Once we finished laying them all out, I entered the house and started the initialization for her to connect with the drones. One by one the drones started to fire their blades up slowly. Once they were all on, the drones launched into the air as a unit and stopped one hundred feet in the air above us.

I signaled to Minerva to run some tests to ensure their functions were all working properly. The drones started forming patterns in the air, twisting and whizzing around above the house. I checked the readout and all of the functions of each drone seemed to be operating properly. I connected to one and viewed the camera on top and bottom to ensure clear visibility. Once I confirmed they were working I had her test the weapons functions of one drone. Tom unknowingly was my subject for the sonic weapons tests as I had her fire the LRAD at him.

Judging from the way he started squirming, they were working properly as well.

“Hey man! Not cool! That felt terrible!” He yelled at me from the yard.

I had her target me with the drone and she wouldn’t fire off the weapon. It seemed the safety function I had built in her programming was working properly.

I went out into the yard and created a wall of cinderblocks with a human dummy behind it, then retreated back to the safety of the house. I had her target the dummy behind the concrete wall with the 9mm rifle. The rounds fired off one after another, blasting the wall making chunks fly all over the yard. I ordered her to cease fire and went out to check the target. It seemed she was able to maintain a spread of less than an inch on target, even while maneuvering the drone in flight. The bullets had penetrated the wall and entered the dummy with minor deviations from the interference of the wall in trajectory.

I was satisfied with her weapons tests and could definitely trust her to run this operation. I would still be watching of course, in case I needed to interfere for any reason, but she should be able to handle this. I created a large display in the living room and connected it to the computer to supervise everything then went outside and got Tom to come inside with me.

“Alright Tom, time to start this and free everyone.”

I signaled to Minerva to start the operation and the drones sped off towards the town. We sat down on the couch and waited for her to arrive at the town and get a visual of the situation. With their speed, the drones were at the town in less than fifteen minutes and they formed a circle over the city.

You could clearly see where the force had formed barricades around the center of town. They had formed a base of operations there, and groups of people were stripping down different pieces of loot and separating them into parts. Other groups were doing what looked like tests of different pieces of machinery and electronics. Small clusters of others were being led in and out of the barricades with objects that had been looted from the surrounding buildings in the city.

It seems they’re still trying to find any objects that still work after the reset. A good plan on their part honestly, as some portions of electronics that relied solely on mechanical operation could be scavenged and repurposed for use without their electronics.

It looked like the main building for their makeshift fort was the store that I had raided before. There was a heavy presence of militants on the roof of the store and patrolling the area around it. The boss of all this is most likely holed up in there, sending out orders to his new “kingdom”.

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“Alright Minerva, it’s time to break this operation up. Remember, don’t harm any civilians as long as they don’t attack us or any other civilians. If they’re carrying weapons, disable them and move on, but retain a video compilation of the entire assault. We’ll use facial recognition to ensure we have the people who assisted in this take responsibility for their actions after we’re finished here. Begin mission.”

The drones widened their circle to encompass the entire town and started to work their way inwards. They searched building by building, clearing each one and disabling anyone with a weapon. I had her play a sound on the drones warning everyone of the attack and letting people know that they wouldn’t be harmed if they didn’t fight back.

As she made her way inwards, the rest of the force must have heard the drones and started to form defense lines to fire back on the drones. Minerva didn’t hold back and fired upon them while moving the drones agilely to avoid the incoming shots. So far, none of the drones had been harmed, but I was sure we would start to lose some as people got lucky shots off.

A soldier ran into the main office of the store gasping for breath. “Boss, there are drones attacking the city and disabling our guards! What should we do?”

“Looks like there are still working electronics somewhere, must be the military finally. I figured they would be here some time. If they’re sending drones, they must not have the manpower to spare on this town. If we can take them out it will give us more time to fortify this town so we can retain control of it. Have the squads pull back to the perimeter and fire upon the drones till we take them all out. Grab the nets from the hardware stores and have people hide on the roofs of the buildings around the perimeter. If the drones come low enough, toss the nets over them and they should drop right out of the sky.”

“Yes sir!” The soldier ran back out of the room and started directing people according to his orders.

We were watching over the whole operation from the couch and it seemed to be going quite well. We had only lost a couple of drones so far and they were approaching the fortifications in the center of town quickly, but suddenly we lost a group of five drones, then another group. I had Minerva pull back and bring up a view of the area we lost them. It looked like there were several people on top of buildings that had thrown fishing nets over groups of drones causing them to drop to the ground. To prevent recovery of them by the enemies, Minerva had initiated self-destruct on the ones that were captured. In total we had lost forty-nine drones, leaving us with 251 still operational.

“Well, that was unexpected. Quick thinking on their part, but that tactic won’t work anymore now that we’re aware of it. Minerva, keep the drones at maximum effective range and continue the operation.”

I took control of one of the drones and had it approach the center by itself. It looks like that little success renewed their will to fight and they had regrouped around the walls. It won’t matter though; we have far superior weapons and I think their morale will break when we breach the walls.

The drones continued their assault for another hour until all the forces outside of the walls had been disabled. I had directed the civilians we rescued so far to retreat to a safe position just inside town. The civilians still inside the fortifications had been rounded up and brought inside the store as the remaining troops pulled back to surround the store.

“Hmm, seems like they’re going to try and use the civilians as collateral to prevent us from taking the rest of them out. That was a poor decision. Minerva, take out everyone outside the store and ensure we don’t have any more surprises from the rooftop. Once you’ve got everything outside secured, surround the store and blast the LRADs into the building at full power. During the confusion fly a contingency of drones inside of each entrance and start clearing the store.”

This would cause the civilians to be heavily affected by the sonic weapons as well, but it wouldn’t cause any lasting damage to them and would prevent collateral damage as much as possible.

I let Minerva take over control of the operation again and watched as she cleared the remainder of the exterior forces. She enacted my plan and in no time the building was cleared of all hostile forces. A set of drones were hovering outside of the office in the store as I communicated for the leader to come out.

I didn’t want to have him killed, I believed he should be held responsible for this just like everyone else that participated. While we were going through the city, Minerva had taken note of several people in the population with heavy injuries still being forced to work. She even came across a building that had people chained up inside of it, who would probably never recover from what it looked like had been done to them. It’s disgusting to see what people will do when they break down to their basest desires and get a little more power over others than they had before.

The drones waited for over five minutes without seeing any sign of the boss coming out of the office. I had the drones shoot the door handle and push the door open. Inside sat the leader of this farce with his brains decorating the walls behind him. Apparently, the coward must have taken the easy way out when he realized that he had lost and he would be punished for his actions here. Shame. He deserved much worse than what he got based on what I had witnessed from the town so far.

I had the drones broadcast that the area had been cleared and asked them to secure the people who had been part of this occupation. I let them know I would be in town shortly to explain everything and provide assistance. I left the drones in town and had Minerva initiate a patrolling schedule to maintain order and ensure there weren’t any remaining hostiles. Luckily, we had only lost seventy-three drones in total. So, there were still plenty to keep order in town.

“Well Tom, looks like that was successful. Want to head into town with me to explain everything and recruit some people for our operations here?”

“Yea, I’ll definitely go with you. Hopefully, with me being a business owner I can connect with some of the other influential people in town and smooth things over. Just one question though, how are we getting there?”