Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“And who is ‘we’ in this case?”

“Whoever controls the knobs and levers, obviously.”

“How long do you expect you’ll be allowed to control them? What if someone else decides they want the knobs and levers for their own?”

T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?”

While Willem pondered this not uninteresting philosophical conundrum, T.R.’s phone buzzed a couple more times. The man was making a Herculean effort not to look at it, but the effort was taking a toll on his patience. “Look, this is a whole very interesting question unto itself, which I would love to discuss at the bar at the Sam Houston Hotel down in Tuaba or just about anywhere that has more oxygen. But maybe you overrate the value of discussing things. There is a reason why I don’t hire a lot of Ph.D.s. I have a Ph.D., Dr. Castelein. I seen how the sausage is made. And the problem with Ph.D.-havers is overthinking. Y’all live in this alternate universe where everything has to be made perfect sense of before y’all can do anything. Is that why you came here? To help me make perfect sense of everything?”

“Are you sure you’re getting enough oxygen?”

“Your bluntness does lead me to ask a blunt question of my own, if you would not take it amiss: What the fuck are you doing here, Willem? Don’t get me wrong, visitors are always welcome. We will show you nothing but hospitality. But out of all the places in the world you could be, why here?” His phone buzzed again.

“I’ve been sent to talk some sense into you.”

“Many are those who have tried,” T.R. said absentmindedly while finally succumbing to the siren song of his phone.

“Also, I thought I could make myself useful.”

“In what capacity?”

“Politics,” Willem said, “which you suck at.” He glanced over at Amelia, then did a double take. A gun had appeared in her hands. She dropped the cheap plastic venetian blind over the window, then tweaked the angle so she could see out without presenting an obvious silhouette.

Another boom rattled the trailer. As its echoes rolled back and forth among the surrounding mountains, individual gunshots, then fully automatic fire, started up.

“Coincidence, Willem?” T.R. said, getting to his feet.

“Of course not,” Willem said. “Saskia suggested I come here for a reason.”

“Know how to shoot a gun?” T.R. asked, in a fairly light conversational tone, as he brushed past Willem and trudged down a narrow passage to the office closest to the trailer’s front door. There, he hauled open a vertical gun safe and pulled out a long weapon with a fat barrel. Willem guessed it to be a semi-automatic shotgun.

“I could maybe be trusted with that Glock,” he said.

“Be my guest,” T.R. said, pulling it from a felt-lined slot and holding it out, pointed at the floor. Willem accepted it. He was no gunslinger but he’d had enough basic security training that he knew what and what not to do with this style of weapon.

T.R. remarked, “The odds you’ll have to use it are minimal. My security detail is right outside. They will get us to the chopper. Please do us all the courtesy of pointing it at the ground or the sky when not trying to murder someone.”

“Happy to,” Willem said.

“Very much obliged,” T.R. returned, stepping past him to the door. He turned his back to the wall, dropped to one knee, reached across the door, unlocked it, and hauled it open. Several holes appeared in the opposite wall of the passageway; apparently someone out there had fired a burst when they saw the door move. This touched off an answering fusillade from right in front of the trailer: T.R.’s security detail, apparently filling the air with lead to discourage any more such unpleasantness. A man in a plate carrier pounded up the steps carrying what looked like the heaviest blanket in the world and wrapped it around T.R., then essentially picked him up and threw him down the stairs. You could get bulletproof blankets? It was a new concept to Willem but he saw the good sense in it, in a world full of bullets.

Amelia followed those guys out, perched on the top of the stairs to look around just for the amount of time it would take someone to pull a trigger and send a bullet her way, then nodded back at Willem and dove down the steps. Willem ran out the door, tripped down the last couple of steps and sprawled facedown on cold wet ground. A moment later he felt Amelia’s weight on top of him. Everything was insanely loud. He was more worried about his hearing than his life. His breathing and pulse had shot up to what seemed like inevitably fatal levels. But all that heart/lung action didn’t seem to help, made no change in the world. He finally just allowed himself to go limp and be manhandled by much bigger, stronger people. The next time he was fully cognizant of his surroundings he was in the back of an SUV under a pile of plate carriers that sprang into the air and crashed down on him whenever the thing went over a chuckhole. Someone was operating a jackhammer. Here!? Now!? No, it was a fifty-caliber machine gun. “Choppers are all in the air,” said an Australian, “S.O.P. or else they’d be sitting ducks.”

“I understand,” T.R. said.

“We’ll have to time it.”

Apparently they timed it. Willem didn’t know. He’d slumped down until he was on the floor of the SUV. All he could see out the windows was the blue-black stratosphere, as yet unmarked by streaks of SO 2but occasionally diced by the rotor of a helicopter. There was another helter-skelter transfer. Not at the official helipad—which frankly was nothing to write home about—but some alternate site. And then they were in the air. Were people shooting at them from the ground? One had to assume so. But you couldn’t see the bullets, so they’d have no way of knowing unless they got hit. To make that less probable the pilot was operating the chopper in a way that involved all the passengers getting slammed to one side of the cabin or other every couple of seconds. They hadn’t had time to buckle their safety belts; the chopper hadn’t even really landed, getting into it had been like diving through the window of a moving car. Willem ended up supine on the floor, gasping like a landed fish, vision desaturating until Amelia’s hand grew vast in his field of view, reaching toward his face with a hissing oxygen mask.

TRAIL

Who have you been talking to?” Dharmender asked him a few hours later as they were pulling out of the gas station under cover of darkness. Laks was naked in the back seat of Dharmender’s Subaru, the better to writhe into his black wet suit. His black waterproof pack was strapped into the passenger seat. On the floor in front of that was a not-so-waterproof care package that had been assembled during the last few hours by Gurmeet and others, containing sufficient provisions for Laks to crawl to Texas on hands and knees. Dharmender had already solved a potentially awkward problem for Laks by indicating, discreetly, that all of it would end up being eaten by bears at a nearby campground.

“What do you mean?” This was one of those conversations that was going to happen through eye contact in the rearview mirror.

“You flew straight to YVR from Hyderabad. But you only spent a couple of days in Vancouver before you came here.”

“That’s true, yes.”

“Do your parents know?”

“No.”

“So you did not talk to them about what you are doing.”

“I was told not to. They think I am going to relax in one of your little cabins and do a lot of fishing.”