Part 87
The construction of the stealth drone took us four intense days of non-stop work,
utilizing parts from our spare agricultural inventory and the salvaged military core.
We stripped away all unnecessary weight,
leaving only a high-capacity battery,
a carbon-fiber frame,
and an advanced optical camera array.
Its outer shell was coated in a specialized matte material that absorbed radar waves,
rendering it practically invisible to any automated system scan.
On a bitter Tuesday morning,
with the wind blowing fiercely from the south,
we carried the small craft up to the highest point of the ridge.
Our son stood between us,
holding onto his mother’s coat,
his eyes wide with excitement as he watched the machine prep for launch.
The drone looked like a sleek,
predatory bird,
devoid of any lights or markings that could betray its presence.
I synchronized my handheld control unit with its navigation computer,
setting its flight path to follow the deep ravines,
avoiding the open sky where system satellites might detect its shadow.
"Launch initialization complete,"
Khloe reported,
her eyes fixed on her monitoring tablet,
which displayed the drone's vital statistics.
With a gentle hum that was instantly swallowed by the wind,
the drone lifted off my palms,
hovering for a brief second before darting forward.
It stayed low,
skimming just a few feet above the snowdrifts,
before disappearing completely into the gray mist of the northern chasms.
We stood on the ridge for several minutes,
staring at the empty sky where it had been,
feeling a collective weight settle on our chests.
We walked back down to the house,
gathering around the main console in the workshop to watch the live telemetry feed.
The video stream was black and white,
showing a blurred landscape of snow-covered rocks and frozen waterfalls rushing past at high speed.
The drone was performing flawlessly,
using its terrain-following radar to navigate the treacherous mountain passes with autonomous precision.
For two hours,
the flight was uneventful,
revealing nothing but the desolate,
beautiful emptiness of the northern wilderness.
As the drone neared the coordinates of the old mining complex,
the topography grew increasingly extreme,
with massive rock walls rising like skyscrapers on either side of the feed.
"Look there,"
Khloe said suddenly,
pointing to the upper left quadrant of the monitor screen.
Nestled into the side of a sheer cliff face was a massive concrete structure,
its entrance partially collapsed and choked with ancient ice.
It looked completely dead,
a relic of an industrial era long since forgotten by the modern world.
But as the drone drew closer,
adjusting its optical sensors to peer into the darkness of the main tunnel,
the video feed flickered violently.
A strange,
high-frequency distortion pattern rippled across the screen,
tearing the image into jagged lines of static.
It wasn't environmental interference;
May you like
it was an active jamming signal,
highly sophisticated and incredibly powerful.
