Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Rufus was debating whether he should just come out and tell them the real reason: Saskia was down at Pina2bo. He’d heard the news over the Black Hat comms network before everything had gone down yesterday afternoon. She was probably being menaced by those drones. And a certain atavistic logic dictated that he must, therefore, ride to her rescue. But he wasn’t sure how that was going to play with this crowd.

“Why take those kinds of risks,” Thordis said, “to protect this crazy plan to mess with the climate?”

Rufus considered it. “It’s already been messed with,” he said. “It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the wheel. T.R. ain’t the perfect man to grab it, but I don’t think his whole plan is just to fuck up the Punjab and starve India. He’s trying to get a global system up and running. Criticize it if you want. But I don’t mind helping when an opportunity presents itself.”

He reached into the meef. His hand encountered something that had, over the last couple of minutes, grown very cold. But his eyes were fixed on the campfire: dry mesquite popping and crackling. “That’s my fancy explanation,” he said. “But the real answer is in the words of the Bible. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. I been holed up in this place long enough.”

By the time Laks climbed back into his six-rotor flying chariot, it had become a five-rotor flying chariot.

Major Raju had long since taken his leave and gone back across the river into Mexico. For at least an hour, it was just Laks walking around the site chopping down net stanchions, trailed by the videographers. From the way those guys went about their work, and the nature of some comments he overheard in Hindi, they were not livestreaming. They were going to edit this footage and release a cut later. Which made total sense, considering. Since he had come back to his senses and got most of his memories back, Laks had familiarized himself with the amazingly vast corpus of Big Fish–related content that had gone up on the Internet during his rise to fame and sudden fall from glory. It made much of his supposedly humble blue-collar origins as a fisherman and a welder. At one point his handlers had even gone to the trouble of renting out a welding shop for a day and shooting footage of him grinding metal and operating a cutting torch: two operations beloved of filmmakers because they generated lots of sparks. The images of him cutting down stanchions on the mesa would fit perfectly with that story.

Anyway, it all went pretty much according to plan (or so Laks assumed; it wasn’t like anyone had talked to him about what the plan actually was) except for an element of randomness introduced by those spent shells gliding down out of the sky every seven and a half minutes. These were the very definition of an accident waiting to happen. Laks didn’t know how they worked, but it was easy enough to see that they were supposed to home in on the nets. And maybe they had enough built-in smarts to find their way back to this general vicinity on their own, and perhaps line up a final glide path aimed roughly toward the mesa. But maybe there was some kind of robotic air traffic control system that was supposed to take over at that point and guide them in on final approach. If so, it was on the blink. Sometimes the shells happened to hit the nets, like the first one that he and Major Raju had watched, but sometimes they didn’t. And even when they were on target, they were dropping into nets that Laks was here to cut down.

Half an hour into the operation, he stood and watched as a shell plummeted directly onto hard ground that was covered with a completely flattened net. The thing belly-flopped in a cloud of rocks and dust and tumbled end over end for something like a hundred meters before coming to rest in a big tangle of shroud lines and silky fabric. For the mechanisms that were supposed to disengage the shells from the parasails were sometimes failing and so the tumbling shell was getting wrapped in its shroud lines as it careered across the mesa.

It made for great video but the potential hazard was obvious and so for the remainder of the mission the videographers were torn between fascination and terror as they waited for these ghostly visitations to glide out of the sky along slightly random vectors and crash somewhere nearby. Laks requested that they please inform him if any were headed directly for him, then adjusted his visor and went about his work.

Because he did not hear any such warnings from them, he was surprised but not especially worried when they suddenly began to cry out in dismay. He was in the middle of cutting down a stanchion. He could hear the distant sound effects he’d learned to associate with a shell crash-landing. It was far away and it wasn’t getting closer. So he ignored it until he was finished dropping this pole. It took longer than usual—he had the sense that the plasma cutter’s batteries were dying, and there was no question that the air tank was nearly empty.

He switched off the machine, pulled his visor down onto his chest, and looked around to see what all the fuss was about. He had been abandoned by his videographers, who were trotting across the mesa’s treacherous surface as best they could in the dim moonlight, headed back toward where the drone was parked. Laks ditched the backpack and followed them.

The drone had not taken a direct hit, at least. It was somewhat difficult to reconstruct what had happened because the drone’s six arms and eighteen rotor blades had become all involved with the shroud lines of the shell that had caused the problem. Consequently shell and drone had been dragged and tumbled, with multiple small impacts, a visual record of which was inscribed across a dozen meters of ground. Laks had a folding knife, which was fortunate since otherwise they’d have been untangling the mess until the sun was up. As it was, it took a quarter of an hour to cut it free to the point where they could assess damage.

One of the six arms was damaged beyond repair. It was a hollow tube of carbon fiber composite that buckled and creased but didn’t completely give way. About halfway along it just lost all structural integrity and dangled askew.

One of the other arms had a damaged propeller, but this seemed like it would probably still work. The videographers had found a new role for themselves, sending pictures of the damage back to experts in India.

The central hub, comprising the cockpit and some storage compartments, looked worse than it was. At first Laks was afraid to inspect it, because at a glance it looked disastrous. But when he did take a close look he understood that while most of it was quite sturdy, the hatches that closed over the storage bins were as flimsy as they could be. Those had taken quite a beating. One was just dangling by a few strands of carbon fiber. But this damage was basically cosmetic. The only possible consequence was that stuff might fall out during flight.

Inevitably, the tool chest in the remaining ATV contained a roll of duct tape. One of the videographers brought this back at a run, holding it out in front of him like Gollum with the One Ring. Laks—carefully filmed at every step—used it to patch up the damaged hatches. Along the way he got a look at their contents, which until now had been unknown to him. The biggest compartment with the most seriously damaged hatch contained what was obviously an earthsuit in a desert camo pattern. Others contained food and water. One contained a briefcase that was shockingly heavy. A sharp voice in his earbuds told him not to mess with that, but to make sure it was well secured.