“All right!” was all he said out loud, though. “Analyze everything we’ve got on these things, and make sure that our labs are doing the same. And, Waters?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell the eggheads that they’re on a deadline here,” Weston said. “I don’t want answers two years from now; I want them now.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Fire Plan Romeo, Mark,” Brinks said as he watched the overview of the fight through his suit’s HUD.

“Romeo confirmed,” the signal came back an instant later.

“Engage,” Brinks responded, his eyes watching the crowd of drones that had gathered at the top of the tubular pyramid that Bermont and his team had just pulled out of.

“Engaging,” the calm answer came back.

From his position, it was anticlimactic—at least at first. The single word was spoken in confirmation and a series of lights lit up as the sniper teams opened fire according to the Plan Romeo schedule.

Their computer network controlled the exact timing, of course, and the fighting was far enough away that the launches were less than nothing to Brinks, even with suit enhancement, had he been inclined to watch for them.

He hadn’t been.

Brinks watched the target zone instead, knowing that when the thermobaric rounds detonated, it would be climactic enough.

Thermobaric weapons, sometimes also known as fuel air explosives, were a known quantity in military technology for a long time before they entered into truly widespread service in the early twenty-first century, moving from weapons that had to be deployed by large aircraft to forty-millimeter grenade versions placed solidly in the hands of individual soldiers.

Five separate shells were fired at Brinks’s command; fins and computer controls guided the little kamikazes along a carefully selected course. As they topped their arc and started to fall toward the Drasin drones, the shells spread out in a geometric pentagon that kept the enemy mass at its center.

When they reached within forty meters of the targets, the first-stage explosion detonated.

The shells ruptured, blowing out their payloads with a sudden massive force and sprayed aerosol chemicals over the entire region. As the area became laden with the harsh, poisonous chemicals, the second-stage ignition detonated.

The resulting rumble was like a clap of thunder directly overhead and shook the air for over a kilometer.

A firestorm raced through the air, jumping from molecule to molecule of the harsh chemicals, erupting in an orgy of destructive power that forced the air aside with effects best compared to a nuclear weapon.

The overpressure wave erupted on all sides, casting out farther and farther as the chemicals ignited, until it met the Drasin and, by extension, the overpressure waves erupting from each of the other shells.

“Identify yourself,” Rael Tanner growled at the screen, looking straight at a face he didn’t recognize but which matched the computer files they had for one Ithan Milla Chans.