Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, though, and now they picked up one mote of green light. He stepped toward it. It was on the table next to his dead laptop.

It was the power LED on the drone’s main circuit board. That was still working just fine, apparently.

FLYING S

As first world problems went, it was hard to top this one: being limited to relatively short-hop flights because of the unusual fuel required by the brand-new, state-of-the-art private jet that had been given to you as a personal gift. And yet by the time the airstrip at the Flying S Ranch finally rolled into view over the jagged horizon of West Texas, Saskia did feel she had some legitimate grounds for complaint. She and her new best friend Ervin, an ex–U.S. Air Force pilot from Baldwin Hills, California, had flown from the Line back to Vadan, where a hydrogen tanker still awaited them, and thence to Schiphol for an overnight stop and a quick check-in with the new Queen of the Netherlands. Fenna and Jules had hitched a ride from Vadan to Schiphol and then talked their way aboard for the remainder of the journey, cramming into the two passenger seats in the back of the jet’s tiny cabin as they tacked back and forth across the great circle route. From Schiphol they had flown to Aberdeen, then Reykjavik, then someplace called Nuuk in Greenland, where they’d been stuck for a day awaiting hydrogen. Then Gander, Newfoundland. Then Ottawa, Chicago, Denver, and finally the Flying S Ranch. They were low on fuel by the time they landed, but they’d solve that problem later. Or to be precise, Jules would. Managing hydrogen deliveries over a sketchy voice connection had turned out to be this young man’s unheralded superpower. There was, Saskia supposed, a kind of logic to it: divers had to know all about compressed and liquefied gases or else they would die. Hydrogen was only a small stretch once you knew everything about compressed air, oxygen, helium, and other staples of the diver’s trade. But a professional background in that area was only part of his qualifications. More valuable, as far as she could determine from overhearing his half of conversations with ground personnel, was his manner of talking. The reputation of America and Americans might be in tatters in elite cultural and diplomatic circles, but on the nuts-and-bolts level of the petroleum and mining industries, they still seemed to get a lot done in the world. The easygoing southern drawl, stiffened with traces of calm cool military discipline and implied know-how (“Yes, sir!” “No, ma’am.” “Copy that!”) seemed to open doors, or at least prevent random strangers worldwide from immediately slamming down the phone when Jules cold-called them out of nowhere with his outlandish requests.

Not that anyone actually slammed down the phone nowadays. Those things were delicate and expensive. But the point remained that Jules was good at this, to the point where Saskia wondered, during endless hours of flying across the North Atlantic and the Canadian Shield, what would happen if she were to task Jules with sourcing a plutonium bomb core. She was a little afraid that after a few hours of polite, laconic phone work, he might succeed.

“No, sweetheart, I can’t have you doing this! You are no longer my employee but a beloved friend.”

“A beloved friend who knows what you need,” Fenna said. “Shut up and look at the ceiling!”

Saskia obeyed, and saw corrugated steel, obstructed from time to time by the briskly moving hand of Fenna, who was up to something involving the increasingly complicated zone between the ex-queen’s lower eyelid and her cheekbone. “It’s not like I have anything else to do here!”

They were in the tiny settlement called Bunkhouse, in a shipping container that had been converted to a barracks and then buried in sandbags to muffle the sonic booms. Still, one could feel the thuds every few minutes, transmitted through the ground.

“We’ll figure out a way to get you and Jules to New Orleans,” Saskia assured her.

“Don’t worry about it. Jules wants to visit the gun. See how it works.”

“Then his best bet would be to just come with me now. I could ask T.R. to arrange a tour tomorrow, but he’s a little distracted.”

“Not as distracted as he’s about to be,” Fenna predicted, with a degree of confidence that Saskia had not felt about anything in decades. “You are going to look fantastic while he will be ruined from the endless flight from China or whatever.”

“Papua, dear.” Though if things kept going the way they had been, it would soon enough be Chinese.

“Whatever. Point is still the same.”

Not for the first time, Saskia wished that Fenna’s conception of reality—according to which people with the best styling inevitably prevailed—actually made sense. But it didn’t hurt to pretend that it did.

“Would you care to join us?” Saskia asked.

Fenna wrinkled her nose in some combination of disbelief and horror. “Visiting the gun?!”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen it before. And again at Vadan. Loud bullet-shooting things are not my area of interest!” She threw a wry look at Jules. He had the military man’s ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, and was taking advantage of it in the corner, sprawled out on a pile of luggage. “He’ll be thrilled though. As for me, I have a date with Amelia! We are going to get beers and burritos from the vending machines.”

“Sounds like a good time. Raise a glass for me.”

“Can is more like it. Do they have a golf cart or something to take you to the gun?”

“No, Jules and I are going to walk.”

“Walk!?”

“Yes. I haven’t walked more than a few strides in days and days, as you know.”

“You should have told me, the wind will—”

“There is very little wind, I checked. It will be windy tomorrow. But not now.”

“Maybe you should ride a horse! That would be so cool to see.”

“They don’t take them near the gun. It would be cruel. And anyway the last thing they need is horse shit all over.”

“It can’t be that pleasant for you either.”

“Every evening, during the shift change, the gun goes silent for an hour. It’s a chance for the system to do some kind of maintenance and recalibration or some such. The engineers inspect things. I don’t know all the details. Anyway, T.R. is going to be there for that and he said it was all right for me to ‘tag along,’ whatever that means.” Saskia checked her watch. “I need to get going. Jules! Let’s go!”

The young man could wake up as quickly as he could fall asleep. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, rolling up to his feet.

“Aren’t there snakes?”

“Yes, but there is also a paved road that we can walk on, where snakes will have no place to hide. Besides—look!” She stuck out one leg to draw attention to the fact that she was wearing cowboy boots. Scored half an hour ago from Bunkhouse’s self-serve swag kiosk. “I’d like to see the rattlesnake that could punch its fangs through these!”

“I wouldn’t.”

By the time those cowboy boots were striding down said paved road, the sun had set behind the mountains separating Pina2bo from the Rio Grande. Conditions would have been downright pleasant if not for the flash and boom of the gun. Through some peculiarity of how the sound waves propagated, standing near the gun itself—directly in the shell’s wake—wasn’t as bad as being off to the side.

Once or twice as she and Jules strolled along, Saskia turned back and let her gaze follow the serrated ridge of the mountains north and west, until it melted into the dark purple sky.

“What’s to see up there, ma’am?” Jules asked.

“Do you remember Rufus? Red?”

“Oh, of course.”