Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

For their parts, Willem and Amelia had shunted into that mode of carrying all their luggage with them at all times. With equal ease they could hole up here, go to the airport, or try to get back to Uncle Ed’s in one piece.

Someone finally just propped the conference room doors open. Various aides to T.R. and Sister Catherine began to dart in and out without ceremony. Senior ones claimed table space and unfolded laptops. Amelia found a comfy chair in a corner and dozed.

It was still dark, but only a little before dawn, when it came to Willem’s attention that he was surrounded by heavily armed Chinese men who had not been there a few moments earlier. He had gone up to the roof to get some air. It was as cool as it ever got in Tuaba. Not what you’d call peaceful though. The gunfire and the booms had abated somewhat, but their aftermath kept rolling up to the emergency department on the ground floor. In a pool of light down there, bloody people were being dragged out of cars, triaged in the parking lot, laid out dead or dying in the grass if it was too late, hooked to IVs if not critical, hustled inside if they were somewhere in between. These were decidedly not the kinds of patients apt to be brought in on helicopters and so the roof was pretty quiet: just a few employees up here on cigarette breaks and a couple of guys with rifles.

Which just made it all the more startling to be suddenly in the company of young Chinese men. Had he gone to sleep on his feet and slumbered through something? There had been an outbreak of raucous hissing noises in the last minute or so, which he’d guessed might be steam venting from a boiler.

A flat silvery-gray object—a Frisbee-shaped disk the size of a compact car, but apparently not as heavy—clattered down onto the roof in a burst of dust and pea gravel. A second one landed right on top of it, neatly stacking.

He heard another of those intense hissing sounds and realized it was right out in front of him, above the hospital courtyard where they’d dumped the chopper yesterday. Enough light was radiating outward from the windows of the building to make the source clearly visible: another of those silvery disks. When he caught sight of it, the thing was still falling. For it had simply dropped out of the sky. Plumes of white fog were screaming out of nozzles spaced around its perimeter—just like rocket exhaust, but cold, with no fire.

And people were falling from it. Four people.

Not exactly falling, though. They were being dropped on thin cables. At first glance it looked like a quadruple suicide. But the disk stopped falling almost violently under the influence of those cold thrusters. It slowed to a momentary halt and then sprang back up. The four humans—who, just a moment ago, had been plunging toward the ground at what looked like fatal velocity—fell slower and slower the closer they got to terra firma. Those cables were being paid out in a programmed way, killing their velocity. It all unfolded in maybe two seconds of elapsed time from the moment the thing had begun hissing to the point where those men were safely on the ground. The object that had dropped them, having just shed probably five hundred kilograms of human baggage, sprang into the air just as those thrusters petered out.

At that point Willem’s attention was captured by another hiss, this one above the helipad. He couldn’t see the source, but the helipad was well lit and so a second later he saw four men plummeting toward it—again, at a speed that seemed sure to prove fatal. But again they were being slowed down the whole way. The cables released when they were mere centimeters above the pad, and then they were just standing there. It was a squad consisting of three men with rifles and one carrying a larger automatic weapon. In unison they reached up to their faces and pulled off what looked like oxygen masks.

He’d seen similar mechanisms depicted on NASA animations when they landed rovers on Mars. Sky Cranes. Once they had let their payloads down to the Martian surface they usually just flew away and crashed somewhere. But these things apparently had enough smarts and enough battery power to manage a controlled landing nearby. And, when possible, they politely stacked themselves.

Most of the groups being landed were squads like the one that had just touched down on the helipad. Others looked like snipers or comms specialists. None of them showed much interest in Willem, so he wandered over to examine a sky crane that had landed nearby a few moments ago. It had a spherical bulge in the middle, like a classic depiction of a flying saucer. Probably the vessel where the compressed gas was stored under some heinous pressure.

He couldn’t understand why these things were basically white—which didn’t seem very stealthy—until he got close. Then he saw that the whole thing was jacketed in a thick layer of frost. Humidity had condensed out of Tuaba’s air and frozen on contact. It must have been dropped from the stratosphere—from an airplane flying so high it couldn’t be seen. It had fallen for miles through air at nearly cryogenic temperatures and become ice cold. That explained the oxygen masks that these guys all wore.

Those hisses seemed to be coming from all over the place. They died down, but then they started up again. Waves of planes, flying dark, invisible in the stratosphere, deploying these things by the rack.

A man less tired, more on the ball than Willem would have counted the hisses and multiplied by four to estimate the total number of troops the Chinese had dropped. But it was too late, he had long since lost track. There were at least a hundred just on the grounds of St. Patrick’s. Presumably more at other key points—the bridges, the airport, the barge port on the river. And now, as the sky grew brighter, he began seeing parachutes as well: big triple chutes dropping cargo pallets at the airport and on the floodplain, and paragliders carrying individual men, spiraling down into areas that the skyhook guys had already secured.

A chopper came in. It descended vertically from a great height, maybe to avoid small-arms fire. If so, an unnecessary precaution, for the city had grown quiet, except for a few localized bursts of intense fighting. Willem was expecting this thing to have Chinese military markings. But it was a Brazos RoDuSh helicopter, probably just flown down from the mine.

T.R. emerged from the elevator. In tow were a couple of his senior staff and Amelia. She was pulling her wheeled bag with one hand and Willem’s with the other. Willem strode over to join them. T.R. saw him coming. “We got word,” T.R. explained. “Wheels up in fifteen. After that the airport’s gonna get real busy.”

Once they were all in that helicopter, it took all of sixty seconds to reach the airport. They set down near a business jet parked at the south end of the runway, lights on, engines running, pilots and flight attendant waiting for them at the foot of the fold-down stairs.

There was a minute’s delay while the bags were taken by the pilot, one at a time, and stowed in the jet’s luggage compartment. Willem had positioned himself at the end of the short queue of passengers so that he could snap a selfie to send to Remi. For Remi would be getting ready for bed in Leiden, worrying about the latest reports from Tuaba, and he’d sleep better if he had a picture of his husband about to board a plane that would take him to a more stable part of the world. Or to Texas at any rate.

He saw an opportunity to frame the shot more perfectly by walking a short distance away from the plane and positioning himself with the plane behind him and a spectacular Pina2bo dawn behind that.

“May I?” someone offered. One of the Chinese guys who was hanging around. A senior military officer who had broken away from his claque of aides, just to come help Willem with his selfie.