The Hardy Boys meets Alex Rider in this start to a brand-new series starring everyone’s favorite inventor—Tom Swift! When your dad funds the Swift Academy of Science and Technology, you’re bound to have a bunch of tech at your disposal. So no one bats an eye when Tom and his best friend, Noah, test their new virtual reality drone before class. At the academy, once class starts and the drone is parked, their brainiac friends then launch into farfetched discussions about the curriculum. And when they watch a documentary about the FBI’s most wanted hackers from the eighties, they quickly start speculating that the academy custodian is one of them. At first, Tom dismisses the idea as another one of his friends’ conspiracy theories. But using their new drone, he spies the custodian acting suspiciously around school. As Tom and his friends search for evidence that the custodian is the missing hacker, the signs become impossible to ignore when Tom gets threatening messages that warn him away from investigating. And when someone releases a virus in the school servers, all bets are off as the adjoining servers at tech giant Swift Enterprises come under fire. Can Tom and his friends uncover the true culprit before it’s too late? "A kid-friendly aspirational series relaunch." — Kirkus Reviews "An entertaining fantasy debut that will appeal to sci-fi fans and reluctant readers alike." — School Library Journal Victor Appleton is the author of the classic Tom Swift books. The Drone Pursuit 1 The Evasion Equation THE CAMERA SCANNED THE CROWDED hallway. A steady stream of students flowed below. “You will never believe what Deena did this weekend,” said a girl’s voice. “What?” asked another girl. “Her entire family went to . . . ,” said the first girl’s voice before fading into the clamor of other random voices. “I think that last one was Ashley Robbins,” said Noah. “See if you can get her back.” I adjusted the tiny joysticks on the controller. The view in my visor spun as I rotated our drone to the left. “Easy, Tom,” said Noah. “You’re going to make me puke.” “Again,” I added. “I warned you about copiloting this mission.” Virtual reality can make people nauseated when they’re not controlling the movements. And it always made my best friend, Noah, more than a little queasy. Noah Newton and I sat in our algebra classroom wearing VR headsets and earbuds. Meanwhile, our remote-controlled drone hovered in the crowded hallway outside. Now, this may seem weird if we attended any other school—two kids doing a Daft Punk impression twenty minutes before first bell. It may not be grounds for expulsion, but we’d certainly get our virtual reality gear taken away. Things were slightly different here at the Swift Academy of Science and Technology. It’s no big deal to see drones flying above the halls or small robots moving around the students. Last month, Kevin Ryan was out sick with chicken pox and sent a small robot in his place. He had built it with a camera, microphone, and even a converted tablet that showed his pox-covered face on the screen. Kevin wasn’t breaking his perfect attendance record no matter how contagious he was. Me, I would’ve enjoyed the week or two off. Last week, Mia Trevino created a science experiment that had drifts of snow pouring out of the science lab. I’m talking real snow. It gave a whole new meaning to having a snow day at school. So, as you can imagine, the students at the academy have almost seen it all. “Okay, there,” said Noah. “Right there.” I released one of the joysticks and the view on my screen stopped on two girls standing beside an open locker. “Target acquired,” I reported. “And that was the funniest thing I ever heard,” said Ashley’s voice in our earbuds. “Aw, man,” said Noah. “We missed it.” Noah and I had spent the entire weekend building a cool surveillance drone. We had modified one of Noah’s old drones that came with a small camera on the front. I added an extra camera on the back and three tiny microphones—one on each side and one on the front. And with both of us wearing virtual reality visors, it felt as if we were inside the drone itself. Sure, VR drones are pretty common. But ours was special for a few reasons. One thing was my custom-built, tiny parabolic directional microphones. Each one had a tiny dish behind it that focused the sound waves into the microphone. Theoretically, they could not only pick up quality audio from several meters away, but they could also pinpoint and isolate the source of the sound. For example, someone gossiping in a crowded hallway. Another thing that set our drone apart was the sweet bit of code Noah had written for the onboard audio filters. See, the trouble with having microphones on drones is that they’ll always pick up the whirring sound of the four propellers. Well, Noah came up with a cool program that matches the frequency and pitch of each motor and filters out their sound in real time. Now we can