Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

> Incoming!

He could hear a drone coming up the valley, following the road. He could tell from the tone of its rotors that it was a big boy—the kind they used to deliver sacks of groceries. Rufus got to his feet, cupped his hands around his mouth, and hollered up to the peak that loomed over the mine entrance. “Drone coming!” he shouted. “We got any birds in the air?” Eagles—especially when they were wearing 3D printed gauntlets—could take down smaller surveillance drones with impunity, but the rotors on cargo carriers were beefy enough to cause injury. Carmelita hollered down with the information that all birds were safely in their boxes.

The big drone banked into view, slowed momentarily, then came right for him. Someone back at High Noon was piloting it off a video feed. As it came closer he gestured toward the other table, a few feet behind him. The drone settled there, released a cardboard box that had been grappled to its belly, then whooshed straight up until it was clear of the canyon walls and headed back north. Rufus pulled a knife from his pocket, unfolded it, and slit the tape.

Inside, under a layer of wadded-up paper, was a drone, bigger than his hand but smaller than a dinner plate, looking a little the worse for wear. Had it been one of his, he’d have rated it as just barely worth fixing. It had been slammed against something hard and lost a rotor. The motor’s axle was bent and the chassis had taken some structural damage.

He carried it back over to his laptop and sat back down. Pippa was evidently using other windows on her screen to look stuff up, but she was still on the call.

“What do you know about the Punjab? The monsoons?” Pippa asked. “I don’t want to tell you stuff you already know.”

The mention of monsoons put it all together for Rufus. He still talked to Alastair from time to time. That topic had come up once or twice earlier in the summer, when people had been afraid the rains would never begin.

“There is concern,” Rufus said, “in the minds of some folks, that Pina2bo here is going to mess up the monsoons and create a big problem for farmers who depend on that rain.”

Pippa nodded. “To tell you the truth, it’s probably a bigger deal than all that drama around the Line of Actual Control. If I’m an Indian military planner, a few hectares of gravel and ice at six thousand meters above sea level is symbolically important, sure, but famine in the Breadbasket is where I really need to focus.”

“So what am I going to do?” Rufus mused. “If I am that military planner, I mean. Send troop ships up the Rio Grande and make an amphibious landing at the Flying S Ranch?”

He thought better when his hands were busy. He found that he had deployed a little screwdriver from the multitool he kept on his belt and was removing the screws that held the drone’s outer shell to its chassis. “Send long-range bombers halfway around the world? Does India even have those?”

“They are more about rockets, I think,” Pippa said. She was multitasking too. “Nine hundred miles.”

“Eh?”

“I’m nine hundred miles away from you. Depending on which part of that huge ranch you are on.”

“The old marble mine.”

“Got it. What’s that, a day’s drive?”

“A very long day,” Rufus said. “Depends on how you drive.”

“Conservatively, as befits a guest in your country,” Pippa said, “but I have friends.”

Rufus had got the drone opened up and was checking out its guts. He already knew that it was of no make or model he had ever seen before. There was not a speck of branding on the thing. Not mass produced. 3D printed from carbon fiber composite—an expensive process. Too polished, though, to be what you’d call a prototype. Some of the parts, like batteries and motors, were off-the-shelf—stuff you could source over the Internet anywhere in the world. Made sense. Even the kind of esoteric R & D program that had 3D carbon fiber printers wouldn’t bother manufacturing its own batteries from scratch. Same went for ribbon cables, connectors, fasteners, and a lot of other bits. Circuit boards were what mattered. Those, and the propellers. The propellers were machined out of some light metal and anodized black. He could tell by the shape of them they’d been optimized to a fare-thee-well. They reminded him of the rotor blades on the most advanced stealth choppers he’d seen in the service, the ones used by JSOC squads for insertions into crazy places. But why go to all that trouble to optimize the rotors on a quad-copter drone? To eke out a little more range? To make them quieter? Or just to flex?

Most circuit boards had markings silkscreened onto them: a part number, a company logo, labels for the I/O connectors. Not these. Just chips. And even the chips were unmarked. Who the fuck made their own chips? More to the point, why bother?

Ribbon cables ran from the edges of the board to various subsystems. But there was also a pair of plain old wires, red and black, that ran to a plain old switch mounted on the outside of the chassis. He flicked it on and was rewarded with a green LED coming on. Normally it would be hidden beneath the black carapace. For this thing had been made to run dark.

Pippa meanwhile had gone into another round of clicking on things. “Look, India’s not going to mount a twentieth-century-style military operation against West Texas. No matter how bad it gets.”

“Let me guess,” Rufus said. “They’ve been getting shit done in the Himalayas without firing a single bullet by using the new tactics of, what did you call it—”

“Performative war, Red.” In the Kiwi accent it came out as “Rid.”

“Pina2bo’s more of a threat—which means, more of a target—than a bunch of kung fu fighters freezing their asses on the top of the world,” Rufus said. “But old-school war ain’t an option. So what they gonna do? Performative war. And who’s the best they got?”

“Big Fish,” Pippa said. “I’ll see you in a day, Rid.”

Rufus was getting ready to explain to Pippa why this was not a good idea when he was distracted by joyous, excited whooping from the top of the peak. Thordis and Carmelita were up there, taking the evening air. “Shooting star!” were the only words he could make out. He looked up at them and saw them pointing excitedly into the northern sky. He turned his head that way and saw a line of brilliant white being drawn across the navy blue heaven. It did indeed look like a meteorite. But after a certain point it seemed to stop moving. It just kept getting brighter.

Rufus hadn’t played that much baseball, but he’d caught enough fly balls during his day to know that if you are staring at the ball, and it doesn’t seem to be moving, you’re in the right place to catch it.

“Don’t look at it!” he shouted. “ Don’t look at it! ”

“Don’t look at what?” Pippa was saying. “What’s going on, Rid?” But he was moving away from his laptop. He’d turned his back on it, and on the shooting star, and was looking up at Thordis and Carmelita, trying to get their attention.

He needn’t have bothered. The shooting star had grown so bright and so close that it was illuminating the whole north-facing side of the peak, casting stark shadows. No one could look at it. Thordis and Carmelita had both turned their backs to it.

Then there was a momentary flash that was even brighter, and then darkness.

Absolute darkness. The screen of Rufus’s laptop had gone black. The lights in the windows of the trailers had gone out. The generators had stopped running. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and tried to turn on its flashlight app. It was bricked. In his other pocket he had a little LED flashlight. It didn’t work either.