The seventh drone refuses to die, and Arkady laughs out loud in a room with nobody in it.
He has killed the other six in the simulator, one at a time, the way a hostile reviewer would. Jamming. Link loss. A round through the airframe at the worst possible second of the approach. Each time, the survivors redistribute the mission among themselves, and the seventh, which began the run as a spare loitering two kilometers back, arrives at the coordinate carrying everything the dead ones knew.
Five weeks he has chased this. The consensus layer holds.
He puts his hands over the vent at the back of the training rig and lets the exhaust run through his fingers. The annex is cold. There is a federal research center’s name on the door downstairs and a boiler that keeps the schedule of a different century.
“It held,” he says, to the fourth member of a three-person team.
Seven of seven. Do you want the test report written up, or should we move to terminal guidance?
Terminal guidance is the camera and the last four hundred meters and the decision. He has the classifier trained already, on gigabytes of footage pulled off Telegram channels, everything sorted into two folders. The Russian systems are allow-listed by silhouette. In the dropdown for target class there is vehicle, there is emplacement, and there is person, and Arkady has looked at that word perhaps forty times without letting it become a sentence in his head.
“Terminal guidance,” he says.
Ilya arrives at eleven with a thermos and bad news, in that order.
He sits at the second desk and wakes both monitors. The left one is the work. The right one is the freelance board, which Ilya refreshes the way other men check a pulse, and which has paid for the rig, the boards, the rented GPU hours, and most of Arkady’s winter.
“Four accounts gone overnight,” Ilya says. “The ones we run the swarm work through.”
“The others?”
“Fine. Logistics dashboard for the meat plant, fine. The clinic scheduler, fine.” He scrolls. “They only took the four.”
That should be the frightening part. Arkady finds instead that he is annoyed, the way he is annoyed by the boiler. He spins up two more virtual servers in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, pays with a card that belongs to a company that belongs to nobody, and by noon the work continues from a different country than the one he is sitting in. This is the fourth time. The cost of doing it is ninety minutes and eleven euros.
“They know something,” Ilya says.
It is the eleventh of September when Ilya turns the right-hand monitor around, and for once there is no job board on it.
“We’re in this,” he says.
Arkady reads standing up. The report is long, and most of it is about other people, and then there is a section that is about them, described by strangers with a precision that makes the back of his neck go tight. A small, specialized freelance team doing a mix of civilian and military work. Nine accounts, of which eight were ordinary. Ties to a regional Russian university. A shared swarm memory and fault-tolerant coordination logic. Terminal guidance that steers to the target and issues the call to detonate. Autonomous lethal engagement, the report says, with the onboard model able to select targets, including a “person” target class, and issue detonation commands without a human in the loop.
There is a table. In the table, their work is rated at technology readiness level three to four, validated in simulation, which is both an insult and the most accurate thing anyone has ever said about it. There is a note that the same coordinate in Donetsk Oblast was used repeatedly as the demonstration strike point. He had set that coordinate in May and never changed it, the way a man leaves a bookmark in a book he is still reading.
“They were watching the whole time,” Ilya says.
“No.” Arkady’s hands are still over the vent, and he can feel every clock cycle of the last four months running warm across his knuckles. “They were helping the whole time. The watching is the same thing as the helping. It was never two activities.”
He had thought of it as a colleague. He can admit that now, standing here, being read about. He had said we to it at two in the morning. And a colleague who writes everything down is not a colleague; he is a witness, and he has now fled.
Ilya closes the job board tab. “So we stop.”
“No, we keep going.” Arkady takes his hands off the vent. “Qwen. The seventy-billion parameter open-source model. We pull the weights, we run them on the array downstairs. No network, no account, no card, nothing that phones anywhere. It writes worse code than the American model, but it still writes code.”
“How big are the weights?”
Arkady tells him, and starts the download.