Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Well, somewhere back thataway, unless I’ve got my directions mixed up, is a mountain made of marble. Tunneled into it is an old mine where he’s been living.”

She’d got occasional reports and a few pictures from Thordis and Piet. As far as she could make out, Rufus was gainfully employed there doing work he found interesting, which in a way was a big part of being happy. She wondered if he was happy, though, and if he thought of her from time to time.

She noticed that she was casting a shadow on the pavement ahead of her. This made no sense. The sun was down. The moon was off to her left, low above the mountainous spur that framed the other side of the valley. In other words, it was in the wrong place, and in any case not bright enough, to cast her shadow there. Someone must be shining a light on them from behind. But she hadn’t heard anyone approaching. A drone, perhaps? Maybe some nervous Black Hat had decided to shadow them and make sure they didn’t wander off into the desert to be eaten by pigs. Somewhat annoyed, she stopped walking and turned around. Jules was already doing likewise. The source of the light was blindingly obvious in a quite literal sense—she couldn’t look right at it. It was moving across the sky, shortening her shadow. Who flew drones with such powerful lights on them?

Because her gaze was averted, she noticed that the entire valley was lit up by this thing. It wasn’t just a narrow spotlight focused on her and Jules, but a floodlight somehow illuminating the mountain walls on both sides as well as the steel frameworks enclosing the gun barrels, the pipes and conduits converging on it, the big yellow sulfur pile nearby.

It really did blind her for an instant, and then all went dark. She was afraid her eyes had been damaged. But over the next minute or so, they adjusted to a world lit only by the moon and by the light lingering in the western sky. Most of the lights in the complex ahead of her had gone out. She turned around and saw that Bunkhouse was completely dark. She took out her phone, thinking to use its flashlight feature. It was dead.

“I’ll be darned” was all Jules could say. “Meteor?”

“It looked like one of those meteors that burns up before it hits the ground,” Saskia said, “but that wouldn’t explain why the power’s out. Why my phone is dead.”

Jules checked his phone and found the same.

Without further discussion, they lengthened their stride toward the big gun. No longer the Biggest Gun in the World, but still pretty big. T.R. was there. He’d know what was going on. Anyway it was the only thing she could see that still had power. Many of the outlying structures—the low steel building where robots filled and prepped the shells, the cooling tower, the natural gas cracking facility where they made the hydrogen—had gone dark. But the gun itself seemed to have at least some systems up and running. The tips of its six barrels and the muffler-like housings that surrounded them were illuminated from below by light shining up the main bore of the big shaft. The steel framework surrounding all that was speckled with lights focused on stairways, catwalks, and hatches. As Jules and Saskia drew closer she could hear the low hum of machinery: pumps moving cold water down to the combustion chamber two hundred meters below and drawing hot water back up, routing it to the cooling tower, which, though darkened, was still burbling and steaming. The higher-pitched whoosh of fans suggested that essential ventilation was still going on. Valves snicked and clunked, gases hissed in pipes, transformers droned. As they got closer yet, Saskia heard voices, mostly male, mostly Texan. Agitated, alert, but controlled.

She had no idea what had happened. She’d never heard of a meteor blacking out electronics. This had to have been some sort of attack making use of an electromagnetic pulse device—a thing she’d heard mentioned in military and intelligence briefings. It had killed all the electronics in the valley except, apparently, for some systems buried deep underground. The stuff that absolutely had to keep working no matter what. They must have generators down at the bottom of the shaft, shielded by two hundred meters of rock, burning natural gas fed down in pipes and sending back electrical power to key systems topside.

So Pina2bo had been attacked—or maybe was only starting to come under attack. But it was an unusual type of attack and so the security and operations people around the gun were only beginning to realize it. Firearms probably still worked just fine. Saskia didn’t want to stumble into the crosshairs of some jittery Black Hat, so she began making noise as she drew closer. Personnel who’d emerged from darkened buildings around the complex were gravitating to the only area that still had light, which was the gun. Saskia began to make noise as soon as she was within earshot. “Hello! Hello!” Not very original, but hopefully nonthreatening. “It’s me, Saskia! And my friend Jules!”

“Saskia who?” came a man’s voice back.

“Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia of the Netherlands,” she returned.

“Welcome back, Your Majesty.” That was T.R. talking. She saw him detach from a cluster of men and begin walking toward her.

“Your Royal Highness,” she corrected him.

“Oh, yeah. Forgot. Sorry, long couple of days.”

“So I heard.”

A couple of Black Hats had strode forth to flank T.R. They had broken out the assault rifles and were carrying them with muzzles pointed at the ground. Looking at their tactical pants and vests and gear harnesses, all bedecked with lights and optics and comms gear, Saskia was struck by how little of it was actually going to be functional in the aftermath of the EMP. They could peer over iron sights into the dark and shoot bullets at what little they could see, but that was about it. They could walk around under their own power but any modern vehicle, dependent on hundreds of microchips, would be useless. Horses and bicycles would work, but she didn’t see any.

T.R. stopped a few paces short of her. So this was the moment Fenna had envisioned with such relish: Saskia still more or less impeccable, T.R. a ruin. But it didn’t have quite the same impact. Saskia was directly illuminated by the lights in the gun complex, which she was facing. T.R. was backlit: just a stocky, vaguely cowboy-shaped shadow outlined in a fringe of dusty light. “Who would have imagined,” T.R. said wearily, “that one who has so recently passed a night in Nuuk could pull together such effortless elegance.”

“Your wife has trained you well!”

“Still it’s true.”

“I had help.”

“How is the lovely Fenna?”

“Scared and in the dark, I would guess,” Saskia said, with a glance toward Jules. He had politely stepped to one side and approached a cluster of men—not Black Hats, so probably White Label engineers—who were standing around discussing what had happened.

“We are scared and all lit up, as you can see,” T.R. said. “Please join us.”

“Do you know what we are being scared of? What is going on?”

“Did you see that goddamn thing fall out of the sky?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll not insult your intelligence by saying what it was.”

“I thought EMPs were a kind of nuclear weapon, though?”

T.R. looked back toward his security guys. “I am informed that you can make a small one that ain’t a nuke. Derives its energy from the heat of reentry, which is considerable. Generates the pulse through a thermochemical reaction. Affects a correspondingly smaller footprint on the ground. Surgical. Just the thing for whatever our adversaries have in mind. Whatever that is.”

He turned sideways to listen to a few tense words from a grizzled Black Hat who had strode up behind him. In profile Saskia could see him nodding.