Chapter 13: The Tax Drone

The high-pitched whine of the motor didn't just vibrate in the air; it set the fillings in Elena’s teeth to screaming. High above the cypress canopy, a speck of matte-white plastic hovered like a bloated mosquito, its gimballed eye twitching as it cataloged the illegal expansion of Miller’s barn and the unpermitted solar array she’d helped him wire last Tuesday.

Elena didn't look up, not yet. She kept her hands steady on the rusted fender of her 1994 Bronco, her fingers stained with grease and the faint, metallic scent of lithium batteries. If she looked up, the drone’s facial recognition software—even a localized county-tier unit—would ping her identity against the state database within three seconds. Instead, she reached into the footwell and pulled out a modified surveyor’s transit. It looked harmless enough to a casual observer, but the internals had been gutted and replaced with a focused microwave emitter she’d scavenged from a discarded medical imaging unit.

"Damn thing’s been circling for twenty minutes," Miller hissed from the shadows of the barn. He was gripping a pitchfork like he intended to throw it at a target three hundred feet in the sky. His knuckles were white, the skin stretched thin over bone. "If it sees the hydroponics shed, they’ll have the Sheriff out here by morning. They’ll take the land, Elena. My grandfather’s land."

"It won’t see anything," Elena said, her voice a flat rasp. She adjusted the cooling fan on her jammed-together rig. "And put that fork down. You look like a caricature. If it captures a silhouette of a man posing like a revolutionary, the algorithm flags this as a ‘hostile encounter’ and calls for backup. Just keep fixing that tractor."

She moved with a slow, deliberate economy of motion. Every gesture was designed to be interpreted by an AI as "mundane agricultural maintenance." She knelt by the front tire, using the body of the truck as a shield, and aligned the transit’s lens with the whining intruder. 

The drone was a DJI-Taxmaster 900, property of the Mariposa County Assessor’s Office. In this part of the country, the government didn't send men in suits anymore; they sent silicon and sensors to sniff out property value increases that hadn't been reported. Every new roof tile, every cleared acre, every sign of prosperity was a line item in a ledger that the people of Cypress Bend couldn't afford to pay. 

Elena peered through the modified scope. The drone was oscillating slightly, fighting the humid crosswinds coming off the swamp. It was a beautiful piece of engineering, really. It possessed a cold, unblinking efficiency that she almost respected. Almost.

"Now," she whispered.

She depressed the trigger on the transit's handle. There was no sound, no flash of light. But on the small LCD screen taped to the side of her device, a spectrum analyzer spiked into the red. 

The drone’s behavior changed instantly. The smooth, predatory drift became a frantic, stuttering jerk. Its gimbal spun wildly, the camera lens looking at the tops of trees, then the dirt, then spinning back toward the sun. To the operators five miles away in a climate-controlled office, their feed would be a kaleidoscope of static and digital artifacts. 

"What's it doing?" Miller asked, stepping out an inch further. "Did you fry it?"

"I’m blinding it," Elena corrected. "If I fry it, the black box logs a hardware failure and they send a technician to investigate the coordinates. If I jam the signal with a ghost-loop of its own sensor data, it thinks it’s experiencing atmospheric interference. It’ll default to its 'Return to Home' protocol in about... sixty seconds."

She watched the drone struggle. It felt like holding a wild animal by the throat. The microwave burst was narrow-cast, a needle of invisible force stabbing upward. She had to lead the drone, tracking its erratic movements to keep the beam centered on its receiver. Her shoulders ached. The heat from the battery pack in her lap began to bleed through her jeans, a stinging reminder of the power moving through her hands.

The drone dipped, losing altitude dangerously. It skimled the top of a weeping willow, scattering a spray of silver-green leaves. 

"Come on, you piece of junk," she muttered. "Go home to your cradle."

Finally, the Taxmaster leveled out. Its navigation lights shifted from a steady green to a pulsing amber—the universal code for a lost link. With a mechanical hum that sounded like a frustrated sigh, it tilted its nose toward the county seat and accelerated, fleeing the "dead zone" Elena had created.

She held the trigger for another ten seconds, watching the white speck shrink into the haze of the afternoon sun, before she let go. The silence that rushed back into the clearing was heavy, filled only with the rhythmic thrum of cicadas and Miller’s ragged breathing.

Elena collapsed against the truck tire, the adrenaline leaving her limbs like water draining from a tub. She wiped a smudge of oil across her forehead, leaving a dark streak.

"Is it gone?" Miller asked, his voice shaking.

"For today," Elena said. She began breaking down the transit, tucking the components into a foam-lined Pelican case hidden in the Bronco's false floor. "But they’ll be back. The system doesn't like gaps in its map. It sees a blind spot and it gets curious."

Miller walked over, his heavy boots crunching on the dry earth. He looked at her with a mix of awe and terror. To him, Elena was a wizard of the new world, a woman who spoke the language of the machines that were slowly squeezing the life out of his town. To Elena, she was just someone who knew how to find the loose threads in a digital tapestry and pull.

"How much do I owe you?" Miller asked, reaching for his wallet.

Elena closed the Bronco’s tailgate with a definitive *thunk*. "Keep your money, Miller. Just make sure that hydroponics shed is camouflaged by sunset. Use the IR-reflective tarps I gave you. Not the cheap plastic ones—the ones with the metallic weave. If they fly a thermal sweep tonight and see a hot spot in the middle of your woods, I can’t jam that from my bedroom."

"I will. I promise," he said. He hesitated, looking toward the horizon where the drone had disappeared. "Why do you do it, Elena? You could be working for them. You could be the one designing those things, living in a house with central air and a lawn that isn't half-dead."

Elena climbed into the driver’s seat. She gripped the steering wheel, its cracked leather hot against her palms. She thought about the sterile hallways of the tech firms she’d walked away from, the way every "innovation" was just another way to turn a human being into a data point. She looked at Miller, a man whose family had farmed this dirt since before the first telegraph line was strung across the marsh.

"Someone has to remind them that there are still places they can't see," she said. 

She turned the key. The Bronco roared to life, a glorious, inefficient, analog beast that didn't care about satellites or server farms. She backed out of the clearing, kicking up a cloud of dust that hung in the stagnant air.

As she drove down the winding gravel road that led back to the main artery of Cypress Bend, Elena glanced at the tablet mounted to her dashboard. It was running a localized sniffer program, scanning for any other unauthorized broadcasts in the area. The screen stayed dark, save for the green pulsing of the local cell tower. 

She lived in the gaps. That was the only way to survive now. The world was shrinking, the net was tightening, and every day the mesh got a little smaller. 

Her phone buzzed in the cup holder. It was an encrypted message from Sarah. *The shipment is behind schedule. The sensors at the bridge are upgraded. We need a new route.*

Elena squeezed the wheel until her knuckles matched Miller’s. The tax drone was just a skirmish. The real war was at the bridge, where the state was installing a "smart" checkpoint that would log every vehicle, every face, and every heartbeat that crossed into the bend. If that bridge went live, Cypress Bend would become a cage.

She tapped a quick reply: *I’m on it. Meet me at the graveyard at midnight. Bring the schematics for the bridge's power grid.*

She looked into the rearview mirror. The dust from her tires was settling, and for a moment, the road behind her looked empty and peaceful. But then she saw it—another white speck, tiny as a grain of salt, emerging from the clouds far to the north. 

They weren't just curious. They were hunting. 

Elena pushed the accelerator to the floor, the old engine screaming as she sped toward the shade of the deep woods. She had twelve hours to figure out how to take down a bridge, and the sky was already full of eyes.