Deer Luhan, With Love

70

Chapter 70 – In Which We Make Minute Progress

Deer Luhan,

I hate deadlines.

Leigh

“…This one’s like the one streaming to camera A,” Yi continued enthusiastically, tapping the computer nearest me.  “Not as light as the—”  He said some name I didn’t have a hope of pronouncing, let alone understanding, and then launched into a list of specs and stats while I munched on a croissant I’d nicked from the hotel restaurant after the EXO boys had left to go and meet with the city mayor.  It didn’t compare to croissants I’d had on my limited trips across the Channel Tunnel, but I understood the French more than I currently understood what Yi was talking about, and that was saying something.

Yi with his drones was like a gamer you’d accidentally asked to tell you what his favourite game was and why, or a Warhammer buff you’d made the mistake of complimenting on his collection of miniatures who then launched into an unwanted explanation of wound charts and hit points.  All I’d really taken from the past two and a half hours was that Yi had fourteen drones flying over the city, the majority of which were silent, and that his baby was some version of the Stalker UAS (or it might have been something that was much better than the Stalker UAS – I hadn’t been totally sure if he was comparing two drones at that time or not) which he’d managed to purloin from a nearby airforce base and which was streaming onto cameras J, K and L on computer ten, which was about three paces away from me.  Oh, and Yi was even more enthusiastic about the Stalker or whatever it was than any of the others because he was actually controlling it personally with what looked, honest to God, like an oversized remote control for a toy car.  The others were all being given directions from the main police station somewhere in the centre of Changsha but streaming to us and Yi was telling the people where he wanted the drones sent.

I had to admit the quality of the pictures (the ones I understood anyway) we were getting was good.  Some of them were in radar, which looked like an early version of the Asteroids computer game or possibly Space Invaders, and others in infrared, which I couldn’t help but grin at, and yet more in satellite imaging that reminded me of Google maps.

“But the reason I like this one best is because it can be recharged 24/7 while it’s still in the sky,” Yi finished up.  I gathered from the way he was stroking his remote control that he was back to talking about the Stalker.

“Mmhmm.”  I nodded, polishing off the last of the croissant and wiping away crumbs, trying not to think about the inscrutable look Sehun had shot me that morning before leaving.  “Wait, you mean you never need to land the thing?”

Yi nodded and shrugged.  “Yeah, pretty much.”  He patted the remote control again.  “You can recharge it with a laser beam.”

“That is f*cking cool,” I said.  “I wish my phone would do that.”

He laughed, idly twitching one of the levers on his control box.  The camera views on computer ten shifted as the drone hovering somewhere over the city responded.

“Do you often get to work with drones?” I asked him.  “You seem to enjoy it.”  Understatement of the century.

“Not often enough.”  He pursed his lips.  “It was how we found Mr Lu’s aunt, actually.  Model of that one—” he pointed to computer thirteen, which was displaying no fewer than six cameras, “—has awesome infrared and motion sensors, even though it’s quite slow and a bit noisy.  Got it to fly over all the suspect places in Baoding – places that had been deserted, factories, warehouses, the like – and found several hundred people camped out in a place that was set for demolition in about a year and a half.  Obviously suspicious.”