Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

They found themselves making excellent time down the Bosque. It was not a raging torrent but it was in full spate and they would have moved at a good clip even if Rufus hadn’t been running the outboard at high power. The river was narrow enough that the woods on either bank nearly arched together above to form a tunnel. Looking straight up they could see the sky, combed by branches, and lowering their gaze they could glimpse bits of houses constructed up on the banks. Those banks got higher, steeper, and rockier as they went, until they were sluicing down the bottom of a gorge: a surprise to Saskia who had assessed the landscape as flat shortly before crashing the jet into it. Then suddenly the stream cornered right and emptied into a much larger and calmer river. Saskia exchanged a look with Rufus, who nodded, confirming that they were now in the Arms of God.

Saskia and her staff used a secure messaging app for all communications. Sometimes they viewed it on old-school smartphones. Other times they piped the output to glasses. Saskia had lost her sunglasses and her phone during the crash but Alastair was still online—she could tell as much by watching the movements of his eyes, which were focused on nonexistent minutiae at arm’s length.

“Any news of the others?” Saskia asked him.

He nodded. “Willem has been sending updates. The woman in the alligator truck—”

“Mary,” Rufus told him.

“Mary drove Lennert and Johan to an emergency department. Baylor Medical Center. Not far from the airport apparently. They took Lennert back to surgery straightaway. Giving him blood transfusions. Johan is in a waiting room. Willem is handling details.”

Alastair was a Scotsman of the ultra-dry and understated style and so it could be guessed that “details” encompassed much relating not just to the medical aftermath but how to pay in 500 euro notes for medical services rendered on patients who had just mysteriously entered the country, if not quite illegally, then certainly without passing through the customary formalities. But the whole point of having Willem was to make it so that Saskia did not have to concern herself with that sort of thing.

Fenna’s role similarly was to make it so that Saskia didn’t have to think about how she looked. The stylist had been terribly imbalanced by the plane crash, but the wild ride through the woods had appealed to her, and being on a boat had then calmed her down and got her mind back on her business. She had been appraising Saskia. She unzipped one of the earthsuit bags. Without opening it all the way—there was no room for that—she thrust in her hand and pulled out the first thing she found, which was the under-layer. This was a white, long-sleeved spandex top with a built-in hood. It was meant to be worn under the bulkier suit that contained the plumbing. It reduced chafing and it could be separately laundered. Worn by itself it protected from sunburn and, if you had some way to keep it wet, cooled the body without the need for the full earthsuit apparatus. “Put this on,” Fenna said, “quick, before we get out of this park.” This was how she talked to Saskia when she was doing her job. It was more efficient than “If you please, Your Majesty, I recommend the white spandex.”

The detail about the park didn’t make sense to Saskia until she looked about and understood that, at least for the next few moments, they had close to absolute privacy because they were in some kind of nature preserve surrounding the confluence of the two rivers. Saskia unbuttoned the cotton shirt she had donned this morning in Huis ten Bosch and peeled it off, momentarily exposing a brassiere and a lot of skin until she was able to pull the spandex sun-shirt down over her body. While she was tugging the silky fabric up her arms, Fenna grabbed the hood from behind and pulled it forward over Saskia’s head. It came down to just above her eyebrows. Some loose fabric was tickling her chin. This was a sort of mask that could be pulled up over the chin, mouth, and even the nose, leaving only an eye slit. “Does anyone have sunglasses?” Fenna asked. Because of Rufus and Alastair they would be speaking English.

Amelia was able to produce from her bag a pair of ordinary (not electronically enhanced) sunglasses with an old-school military look to them. Fenna unfolded them and slipped them onto Saskia’s face, carefully guiding the ends of the bows into the tight gap between her temples and the spandex hood. The look on Fenna’s face was one Saskia had seen often: she wasn’t crazy about what she was seeing, but she had tried her best, and it would have to do.

“You don’t want to be recognized by some random camera,” Rufus guessed.

“Best not to be,” Saskia said. “Until we have things sorted.”

“The rest of your squad?”

“Fenna travels with me all the time,” Saskia pointed out, and so now it was Fenna’s turn to go through a similar transformation using the garment from the other earthsuit. Fenna was braless, wiry, and heavily tattooed, so any lurkers watching from the scrub along the banks would have seen more, but not for long.

Twenty years ago these garments would have done more harm than good, if the point was not to be conspicuous. But now the opposite was true. Anyone out in the open in this heat needed to have some plan for how not to die of it. Rufus looked like he’d done this before; he’d put on a broad-brimmed hat. Amelia and Alastair, however, were dressed altogether wrongly for these conditions.

They came in view of what was apparently downtown Waco: a vintage suspension bridge, the Hilton where, a couple of hours ago, Willem had reserved rooms for them, and some commercial buildings that didn’t rise more than a few stories. Bigger structures loomed a little farther away. Of these, a huge stadium was the most prominent.

“Baylor University,” Alastair said, following a map he could see in his glasses.

“Where Lennert and Johan went?”

“Different complex, different part of town.” Alastair removed his glasses, folded them, tucked them into a case, pocketed that, excused himself, and threw up over the side of the boat. “The heat doesn’t agree with me,” he explained, his chin quivering.

Rufus throttled the motor down. “Jump in the river and cool you off,” he said, somewhere between a suggestion and a command. “I’m a keep an eye on you. You’re the canary.”

Saskia looked at Rufus curiously, and he noticed it. “In the army,” he said, “you leading a platoon somewhere that’s cold, you pick a skinny Southern boy, a brother maybe, and when he’s cold, you stop for a spell and warm up. Some place hot, you pick someone like him —what kinda accent is that, sir?”

“Scottish,” Alastair said and spat bile into the river.

“It ain’t hot where you from.”

Alastair shook his head.

“You are the canary. You start throwing up, we look for ways to chill.” Rufus nodded at Saskia and Fenna. “You two splash a little river water on those garments. Be good for a while.” He nodded at Alastair. “Take a swim, sir.” He appraised Amelia. “Where you from, ma’am?”

“Suriname. It’s hot there.”

Rufus had been surveying Amelia’s face, maybe trying to piece together a racial profile, perhaps taking note of the broken nose and the slightly thickened ear on one side. His eyes strayed downward. Saskia clenched her teeth, thinking he was going to check out Amelia’s boobs. But he was looking at her deltoids.

“Grappler?”

Amelia gave a slight nod. “Judoka.”

“Brazilian?”

“Olympic.”

“Military?”

Amelia nodded. That seemed good enough for Rufus. “Take care of yourself, ma’am. We’ll talk later.”

Conveniently, Alastair wore boxers. Rufus ended up towing him languidly past the immense football stadium on a rope attached to the RHIB’s stern.