Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“You are surrounded,” said a woman’s voice from the drone. Perfect English with a light Indian accent. Laks thought it might be the same lady who did the recorded announcements at Indira Gandhi International Airport. With the same tone of mild regret that she might have used to inform passengers that their departure gate had been changed, she instructed this man to disarm himself and then march in the direction helpfully pointed out by “the arrow.”

Which raised the same question in Laks’s mind that it probably did in that of this security guard: What the fuck was the arrow? But no sooner had Laks begun to furrow his brow in puzzlement than an arrow appeared on the ground, drawn out by a scanning laser. There was enough dust in the air that Laks could see the laser beam and back-trace it up to its source: yet another drone hovering perhaps twenty meters above them. The arrow, painted on the dirt in brilliant emerald green, began right in front of the security guard’s boots and executed an immediate U-turn, pointing back in the direction of the main compound.

The guard had now recovered his wits to the point where he had put a plan together in his head. Not a great plan, but a plan. He took a couple of steps forward as if following the arrow, but then suddenly pivoted, dropping to one knee, and fired his shotgun at the closest drone—the one with the built-in gun. This shuddered back from the blast and skittered across the ground leaving a trail of shattered parts in its wake.

Immediately the green arrow disappeared. Or rather the cone of grainy green laser light shrank and collapsed inward until it was just scanning back and forth across the man’s eye sockets. “Fuck!” he shouted and bent his face downward. The back of his head was now just an incandescent blob of green laser light. Another gun drone hummed in from a different angle and fired a second round. The shotgun jerked and spun out of the man’s hands and came to rest on the ground out of his reach.

Holstered on the man’s hip was another gun—a semi-automatic pistol. Laks wondered if the drone would try to shoot that as well. But it seemed that such measures were not even necessary. The man raised his hands and laced his fingers together on the top of his head. The blinding blob of green light spread out and reconstituted itself as the arrow telling him where to go. He began to follow it; and it changed its shape in response to his movements and preceded him across the mesa as he walked back toward the compound.

“Abdul’s an Arab name!” Laks shouted after the man. But the man either didn’t hear, or chose to ignore it. En route his arrow met, and merged with, that of a colleague who was being marched along by a different squadron of drones.

The smell of danger abated in Laks’s nostrils, or, to be precise, whatever equipment the medics had inserted between his nostrils and his brain. It was replaced by the scent of smoke. He turned around. The ATV he’d noticed earlier had gained the top of the mesa and parked. Two men were getting out of it. One was smoking a pipe: the source of the smoke. The other, who had been driving, heaved a backpack out of the cargo storage area behind the seats, got one arm through a shoulder strap, and began to lug it along in Major Raju’s wake. For the pipe-smoking man was he.

“Sergeant Singh!” Raju hailed him. For as of a few weeks ago this was Laks’s correct designation within the Indian military. Purely a formality, he’d been assured—a requirement of paperwork and documentation that would only ever become relevant under certain highly improbable circumstances. “A salute is traditional,” Major Raju reminded him.

Laks had seen characters saluting in video games and tried to imitate them as best he could remember. “You see,” Major Raju said, returning the salute, “if we’re seen observing these niceties, it’s easier for you to claim you were only following orders.”

“Wouldn’t that shift responsibility to you?” Laks asked. Then, noting an expectant look on Major Raju’s face, he added “. . . sir.”

“I’ll be on the other side of the river,” Major Raju said. “Shame, really. One feels that a leader should . . . well . . . lead. Command his men from the front. Not be shouting at them from the rear. Alas, I have clear directions to the contrary, from officers of even higher rank, even farther from the action.” He put his pipe in his teeth and spent a few moments taking in the scene. “Oh, see there!” he mumbled. “One’s just coming in now.” He pulled the pipe from his teeth and used its stem to point up into the air.

A ghostly shape, like an albino bat the size of a 737, was gliding in from the other side of the river. A gracefully curved airfoil with shroud lines converging down to a bullet-shaped burden. It passed over one of the nets in perfect silence and dropped the bullet, which plummeted into the net. The airfoil crumpled and drifted into the night on a light breeze.

“A safe re-entry from a brief sojourn to the stratosphere,” Major Raju said. “You know what it was doing up there, Sergeant Singh?”

A second ATV had crested the lip of the mesa and pulled to a stop next to the first one. Two men had climbed out of it. They did not carry guns or any other sort of equipment, save for cameras mounted to the fronts of their helmets. During Laks’s exploits in the Himalayas, he’d gotten used to people like this following him around. They had elbowed Pippa out of the picture very early, which he still regretted. They had a curious style of moving around and looking at things that, as he now understood, was all about trying to find the best angle. And looking directly at them was to be discouraged. So he looked at Major Raju. Who had positioned himself with his back to the moon so that its light would fall on Laks’s face as they conversed.

If you could call this a conversation. Laks began to answer the question. “They were . . .”

“ What were?” Major Raju broke in, like a schoolteacher trying to be of assistance to a slightly dull pupil.

“The shells landing in these nets,” Laks said, waving an arm toward them, “have just come back from spewing toxic chemicals into the stratosphere. It’s a layer of the atmosphere that knows no national boundaries—shared by all the peoples of the world. If you want to know why the monsoon was late this year, my brothers and sisters, look no further.”

“Well said. Now let’s do something about it, shall we?”

The guy with the backpack had just been standing there stolidly during all this. At a signal from Major Raju he stepped forward, swinging the pack down from his shoulder in a way that indicated he meant for Laks to take it. As Laks got a better look at this object he found it strangely familiar-looking: it was the rig he’d spent the last ten minutes learning how to operate via the PowerPoint deck. It comprised a tank of compressed air, batteries, and some electrical gear that fed a handheld pistol-grip business end on the end of a thick umbilical.

Laks turned his back and let the guy hold the rig up for him while he shrugged it on. The nearest net stanchion was only a few paces away. He hiked over to it, adjusting the shoulder straps. The valve knob on the air tank was sticking out next to his left ear. He reached across with his right hand and cranked it open, hearing the gas hiss into the system’s plumbing. The power switch was conveniently located down by one hip. Status lights came on. He double-checked the position of his visor, walked up to the plinth, and connected a beefy spring-loaded ground clip to a metal flange, worrying it back and forth so its serrated jaws would gnaw through the paint and make good electrical contact. He stood in what the PowerPoint deck had assured him was a safe location, put the nozzle to the steel, and pulled the trigger. A purplish-blue plasma arc jumped between the nozzle and the pillar. Hotter by a long shot than the surface of the sun, it would have turned his retinas into gravy had his visor not auto-darkened. In the night above the Rio Grande, with all other technology dead, it must have been more than a bit obvious. They could probably see it, not just in Mexico, but in Guatemala. At first he moved the arc too slowly. Then he noticed he was just widening a chasm in steel that had already been obliterated, and began to move it faster. Beyond a certain point, the slot he was cutting began to widen of its own accord as the tension on the net at the top of the pole began to pull it inward. Then he just had to make a quick slice around the other side and watch the thing topple. Still attached to the foundation by a flap of metal he had not got around to cutting through, the pole fell into the middle of the net and bounced gently up and down.