Dragons vs. Drones Read Online Free PDF Page B

smell of dinner on the stove, siblings fighting, parents laughing. He always thought it was what a house was supposed to be like.
    Unlike the rest of the apartment, Marcus’s room was a mess. He plopped down in front of his laptop, which was perched on the edge of a small desk completely littered with newspaper clippings, scribbled notes, and printouts.
    Everything was untidy. Clothes were strewn on the floor, half-eaten sandwiches sat on the dresser, and empty soda cans rested on the nightstand. A massive board was stuck to the far wall, covered with so many tacked-up clippings that you couldn’t even tell there was a board under them anymore. They were all the same sort of odd news stories: UFO sightings in Kansas, an ever-increasing number of violent storms across the country, and Americansturning up in odd parts of the world with no recollection of how they got there.
    But more than anything else, they were stories about the mysterious disappearance of George Brimley during a calamitous hurricane eight years earlier. A highly regarded CIA analyst and one of its most brilliant researchers, just gone.
    Marcus felt a familiar pit form in his stomach as he stared at his father’s grainy picture on one of the clippings. George had Marcus’s jet-black hair, though his was streaked with gray at the temples. His eyes were an icy blue, and yet they were as warm as the deep belly laugh that Marcus remembered from when he was a little kid. The articles about George Brimley all had the same theory: He stole government secrets and ran away to Russia, where he was still living in exile. That was the widely accepted story, anyway.
    Marcus knew the stories weren’t true, but that didn’t stop all the men in black suits from combing over every inch of their house and interviewing him at length when he was just four years old.
    â€œDid your father ever speak any strange languages on the phone?”
    â€œDid your father ever have any visitors?”
    â€œDid he say where he was going that night?”
    Marcus would just sit there, his hands in his lap. He had only one question.
    â€œWhere is my dad?”
    Marcus knew the CIA was hiding something. He always had.
    He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and withdrew his prized creation: Lightning Bug, or Bug for short. It was a drone, small and circular like the ones people attached to GoPros and sent flying over outdoor concerts. But Marcus had built this one from scratch with supplies and advice from Jack, who knew a lot about robotics. It had taken Marcus years to perfect it, but when it was finished, even Jack was impressed.
    â€œJust like your father,” he had said proudly. Then he turned somber, but when Marcus asked what was wrong, he just said he missed his friend. Marcus suspected that wasn’t the entire story.
    Still, Marcus was proud of his creation. Bug was extremely sophisticated with a complex sensor array and artificial intelligence. It was also designed for a very specific reason. Bug was built to scan and record weather patterns—specifically thunderstorms.
    â€œReady to get to work?” he asked tenderly, carrying Bug to the window.
    Marcus spent more time with Bug than pretty much anyone other than Brian. It had a small video camera and electrostatic sensors mounted on the front, and its circular hull was a bit of a hack job of screws and uneven, bumpy welding attaching all the scrap metal he’d used from the local dump. Bug wasn’t pretty, but it had been doing its job for over three years now.
    And if Marcus was right about the dates, then this was its last run.
    He opened his bedroom window, the wind and rainstreaming in, and put Bug on the ledge. Hurrying back to his laptop, he opened his remote program, powered Bug on, and sent it flying up into the clouds. Shutting his window, Marcus got to work.
    The image was a bit grainy and obstructed by the torrential rain, so Marcus switched the view to a thermal one and