Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

But it wouldn’t stop a rogue wave. One of those could come hurtling silently out of the mist and claw the queen off the dike at any time, as her security team well knew. Looking to her right she was pleased in a way to see that, if this were to happen, Amelia would share the same fate. Willem was on her left, performatively checking his watch. But when the royal photographer finally caught up and began snapping, he melted away. She hadn’t actually come up here to have her picture taken, but she knew it was inevitable. And it would make for a fine picture.

If the Netherlands was a castle and the enemy was the sea, then this artificial island they were standing on was part of the bailey: the lightly fortified outer fringe, never meant to be held against a serious assault. It was now time for Queen Frederika to retreat inside the motte: the higher, more easily defended ground within. And along the way she was going to slam the gate behind her. Or rather she was going to stand in a suitably photogenic location and do absolutely nothing while half a million lines of C++ code slammed it for her. The drive to the Maeslantkering complex—or, to be precise, the half of it that was attached to the waterway’s south bank—lasted only a few minutes. Still, when they got out of their cars there, Saskia had the feeling that the wind had picked up. A reminder that storms built slowly and predictably, except when they didn’t.

The complex was surrounded by the same sorts of security barriers and surveillance tech that in other countries might have been used to seal the perimeter of a nuclear submarine base. Not that it was a military target per se, but if some mad saboteur had gotten in there and vandalized a key part of the system, it would have been expensive to repair. If it had happened just before a big storm, and somehow prevented a gate from closing, the resulting damage would have been comparable to a nuclear strike.

Of course, they couldn’t control the waterway itself, so their worst nightmare right now was a ship sinking in the channel right between the gates. Vessels large and small had been moving through in both directions during the hours since the notice had gone out. It was hard to miss the military and police deployment on land, sea, and air, keeping many eyes on every vessel that moved between the gates and making sure they kept moving. Tugboats were standing by to push or pull anything that got in the way.

Once they were through security they found themselves in a very un-Dutch world of things that were so preposterously enormous that even Texans might nudge their cowboy hats back on their heads and say, holy shit, that’s big . There was a vast open triangular area whose sole purpose was to have nothing whatsoever on it: this was the zone across which the wing would sweep once it began moving. The trusses themselves were the size of seventy-story buildings that had toppled over onto the ground. The nerve center was a horseshoe-shaped building that rose above the level of any conceivable storm surge, commanding the waterway from a sweep of windows. Above that rose a reinforced-concrete tower topped by radars and antennas. A red box, small in comparison to everything else, housed the motor that would actually drive the barrier out into the channel. This, understandably, had come in for a lot of loving attention from maintenance crews during the last few days. As Saskia was whisked from her car toward the south bank’s control center, she exchanged hand waves with a couple of crew members who glanced her way.

Looking up at the huge white vertical expanse of the barrier she had a moment of vertigo and put a hand on a railing just to steady herself. Then she realized that she was rock solid. It was the barrier itself that was moving. They’d already flooded its dry dock and set it afloat. The whole thing was bobbing ever so slightly, restrained by the 240-meter-long arms, but, thanks to those ball-and-socket joints, free to move up and down.

The control room proper was as small and spare as a ship’s bridge. Everyone there was, of course, busy. But there was plenty of room along the panoramic sweep of windows where Saskia could see everything and yet not be in the way. Willem remained with her, and so did the photographer. The rest of her entourage stayed outside to watch from a green embankment, lashed by rain. But around here you were always lashed by rain. The photographer had already got pictures of the queen in her bedraggled and windswept incarnation up on the dike. Check. This was going to have a more formal vibe. Like christening a ship. Fenna had patched her up in the car. She hadn’t gotten too ruined while quick-stepping from there to the building’s entrance. Nothing she couldn’t fix up in the women’s toilet without professional assistance.

The actual closing of the gates was so smooth and quiet that she’d have missed it if she’d looked the other way. The only real clue it was happening was a mild rise in the chthonic thrumming of the motor in the red box. Stepping up to the window, she saw the barrier arc extruding into the channel. Looking across to the opposite bank, half a kilometer away, she saw its opposite number doing likewise. There was still that slow heaving as it responded to waves and currents in the channel, but its swing was as steady and relentless as the hand of a giant clock. The photographer danced around, trying to get the right angle, and finally clambered up on a table so that he could get both the queen and the front gate of her kingdom together in the frame. Slowly the gates severed the waterway. Off to the left, on the opposite shore, was the terminal at the Hook of Holland where the ferries went to and from England. That stretch, which was on the sea’s doorstep, was still torn by whitecaps and shrouded by spray sliced off the waves by a scything wind. But to the right, upstream of the gates, the wild waves were subsiding. Big breakers seeking entrance to her country were slamming into the barrier arcs and sending up explosive gouts, but all those tons of steel soaked up the impacts as if they were gnats ticking into the windshield of Rufus’s truck. She supposed that if you could go and rest a hand on the seven-hundred-ton steel balls in the shoulder joints you might feel a slight tickling in the tips of your fingers.

It would have been satisfying to hear a great boom and snap as the two gates touched in the middle, but that probably would have meant sloppy engineering. The low purr of the motor cycled down. The engineers whose job it was to make sure that those things worked could go home tonight and enjoy a beer. Other machinery was now engaged to open valves and flood the barrier arcs. The only way you could tell that was happening was that less and less of them showed above the churning surface. The long trusses, formerly parallel to the ground, tilted downward slightly. One had to use one’s imagination a little to visualize the flat bottom of those arcs settling down along the full width, making contact with a channel bottom painstakingly sculpted and inspected to be as flat as a hockey rink. The seal wasn’t perfectly watertight—nothing ever was—but it would hold for a day until the surge had passed.

The only way she knew it was done was by a sort of lightening in the atmosphere of the room, a change in the tone of the low conversation, a few laughs. She looked at Willem, hoping to share the moment with him, but he was fixated on his tablet.

A senior engineer approached, peeling off a headset and then self-consciously tucking his gray hair into place. The Netherlands really was just a constitutional monarchy. She had no real business here. She probably shouldn’t have come here at all. If she’d been swept off the dike by a rogue wave, the same things would have happened at the same time. This man had no actual duty where she was concerned. But. He had to do it. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I am pleased to report that the Maeslantkering is closed.”