Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

None of which changed anything about the actual situation. But it gave him a few moments for his mind to catch up. He let the goggles dangle around his neck for now. He finally complied with the furious gesticulations of the men waving him toward the big drone. He sat in the cockpit and immediately felt a rising hum as the rotors began to spin up. While being flown around the Himalayas and the Karakorams in military choppers he’d learned how to buckle a five-point safety harness, so he did that as the drone was lifting off in a cloud of dust. The drone leaned forward. Air began to stream over his face as it picked up speed. He pulled the visor up to protect his eyes from wind blast. Once he’d blinked the tears from his eyes he saw the edge of the pecan orchard disappearing beneath him as he crossed the road. Beyond the barbed-wire fence on the road’s other side, a wild desert landscape stretched to the horizon, lit by a full moon. Some kilometers ahead was a range of mountains. The drone banked left to circumvent them on their moonlit southern flank, which ramped down a long rocky slope for a while and then fell off into the valley of a river.

This wildly beautiful vista was then blotted out by the splash page of a PowerPoint deck.

MISSION BRIEFING

PHASE 1

NET SYSTEM DEMOLITION

U.S. BANK OF RIO GRANDE RIVER

In the upper-right corner were two time readouts, updating once per second. One was labeled MISSION ELAPSED TIME and seemed to show how long it had been since Laks had lifted off from the pecan orchard. The other was TIME TO INSERTION and was counting downward from about fifteen minutes.

He’d assumed NET SYSTEM DEMOLITION was something to do with a computer network. But the next couple of slides showed pictures of literal, physical nets stretched between steel poles that stuck out of the ground on a plateau above a river. Presumably the same river the drone was carrying him toward right now: the Rio Grande. It was explained that his task was to topple the steel poles. He would be using a machine called a plasma cutter, which would be supplied. There followed ten minutes of instruction on how to operate a plasma cutter, which was all old hat as far as Laks was concerned, since he had used to do it for a living: you clamped a ground cable to the object you wanted to destroy, opened a valve on a gas tank, turned the machine on, and pulled a trigger. The goggles would prevent him from going blind as he sliced through the steel poles. Good advice was supplied on where to stand to avoid being crushed when these fell over.

Almost as a footnote, a mere afterthought, there was information on “hostiles.” The whole site was studded with surveillance cameras, which would not be operational, and motion-activated lights, which would not be operational. These were reinforced by camera drones. Those would not be operational. All were connected over a private, secure network, which would not be operational, to a command center some miles to the north. Security personnel at the actual net site usually got around on four-wheeled ATVs, which would not be operational, and communicated over encrypted radio headsets, which would not be operational. All, because, as Laks understood, what had happened to the electronics in the semi had also happened to all the other electronic devices in this whole area. It all had to do with that flash of light in the sky. It was some kind of special bomb that fried electronics but didn’t do a lot of other damage—at least, not when you set it off miles above a godforsaken desert. Even mechanical systems like the engines of trucks and ATVs had electronics in the loop, and so those were all dead.

Of note was the obvious fact that all the gear that had been in the shipping container still worked perfectly. Perhaps the container was shielded from the effects of the detonation? But the stuff they’d planted in Laks’s head to help fix his brain seemed to be working normally too, so maybe they had ways of making chips that were invulnerable to that kind of attack.

And the van they’d been driving. Vintage, almost antique. From the 1960s, probably—before the automakers had put chips in everything. They’d gone to the trouble of sourcing a getaway vehicle that would keep running even after every other car, truck, and ATV in the vicinity was bricked.

Security personnel themselves were presumably feeling just fine, unless they had pacemakers. And their guns, unless they were very special and weird, would presumably shoot bullets just as well as usual. This was a detail that Laks only began to ponder toward the very end of the flight, when the mesa above the Rio Grande was rushing up toward him and the stretched nets—gleaming in the moonlight like pools of fog—were filling most of his visual field. For a moment he feared that one or more of the drone’s six propellers would snag in a net and culminate in a Cuisinart-tangle-blood storm. But whoever, or whatever, was piloting this thing tilted it back hard at the last minute to kill its velocity and then brought it down softly on the ground, only a few steps away from a concrete plinth from which erupted a thick steel tube. TIME TO INSERTION had counted down to zero.

Laks unfastened the safety harness while waiting for the propellers to stop moving. When it seemed safe to do so—“Safe” being a relative term here, of course—he climbed out. No one was nearby. No lights were operational. It seemed a tidy, orderly facility. About a hundred meters away was an ATV that had just been abandoned where it had died. There was a system of dirt roads that looped around all these big nets and connected them to a cluster of office trailers and shipping containers that seemed to be the nerve center. That was a few hundred meters away.

It wasn’t entirely clear what he was supposed to do now. He’d been told that a plasma cutter would be supplied. He did not see any lying around.

The brink of the mesa was not far away and so he ambled over to it and had a look down toward the river, which was maybe a hundred meters below. Some patches gleamed and rippled in the moonlight. Others were stamped with the sharp-edged silhouettes of scrubby vegetation growing on its banks and bars. He could hear the purr of a small engine down there, its tone rising and falling as it revved up and down. His revamped ears were pretty good at direction-finding. He swung his head back and forth until he was able to identify the source: just a gray mote angling up the slope below him, cutting its own switchback up the flank of the mesa in a rooster tail of churned-up dust. So at least one vehicle—it sounded, and moved, like an ATV—had survived the flash. And, allowing for switchbacks, it seemed to be headed in his direction.

“Freeze!” someone shouted. “Hands where I can see ’em, Abdul!”

Laks wasn’t surprised. During the last minute or so he had begun to smell danger, and its odor was now very strong. He extended his hands out away from his sides and turned around slowly to see a man in a sort of military getup, standing about five meters away and aiming a shotgun at him. Approaching from the direction of the compound, he’d crept up on Laks while Laks had been enjoying the vista.

Before either of them could take any further action, a light came on above, creating a pool of illumination around this man. A second and a third light appeared, catching him in an equilateral cross fire with the intensity of the midday sun. Three drones, making practically no sound, that had been stalking this guy through the night.

A fourth drone descended into the pool of light until it had interposed itself between the barrel of the shotgun and Laks. This one had a short tube projecting from an apparatus in its belly. The tube was on gimbals that enabled it to pivot this way and that, and to angle up and down. Initially the tube was aimed right at the man, but once it had got his attention it angled downward. A bolt of fire spat from it and dust erupted from the ground just to one side of the man’s boots. The drone jerked back from recoil as a loud bang reached Laks’s ear. A spent shell casing twinkled as it bounced in the dirt.