Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Hot-wiring the earthsuits went fast once Rufus worked out the procedure. He had the notion he’d make everything ready during the wee hours, then catch a couple of hours of shut-eye, setting his alarm for a four A.M. departure. Then he realized he had no way of setting an alarm. All his timepieces were electronic. He had never owned a mechanical clock or watch in his life. If he had a star chart, he’d be able to estimate the time from the elevations of astronomical bodies, but you couldn’t do that while you were asleep. And the only way he knew to obtain a star chart was to download it from the Internet.

So he just stayed awake. Which, to be honest, he probably would have done anyway. The more he thought this thing through, the more obvious it was that Big Fish was going to have to do whatever he was going to do sooner rather than later. Might have done it already. Because it just wasn’t going to take that long for some kind of reaction from Black Hat, or from the cops. And when it came to that, the only way for India to hold them at bay was going to involve hostages. Such as Saskia.

“We should just leave,” he announced. “As soon as we’re ready.” He stood up from his soldering table, having finished with the last of the earthsuits. His eyes were still adjusting to the dark. With great care he walked, planting one foot at a time, toward the place a hundred feet away where Thordis, Carmelita, and Tsolmon had been working with Bildad, Pegleg, and the mules Trucker and Patch. And what he saw there was testimony to the power of something that Rufus had never really got the hang of: working in a coordinated fashion with other human beings. In his personal experience, this had always been pure foolishness, because you had to get them to do what you wanted them to do. And getting other people to do what you wanted them to do had, for Rufus, always been a sort of black art. Not worth the trouble of learning. In the army, they had people for that. Whole echelons of people.

But these three women might as well have been of a different species. Working quietly and assiduously while he’d been busy with his soldering iron, they had simply got it all done. The boxes containing Nimrod, Skippy, and Genghis were perched on the horses’ and mules’ croups. Looked like a bumpy ride to Rufus, but what did he know about eagles and their ways? If home for you was a tangle of sticks in the top of a tree on the edge of a cliff in the mountains, why, maybe riding on a mule’s ass was a Sealy Posturepedic.

And they’d packed all the other stuff too, looked like. Rufus was about to ask them if they had plenty of water but thought better of it since it would border on insulting.

Carmelita came out to meet him as he approached. “We decided we have to do it,” she announced.

“Why?” Rufus responded. “If I may ask.”

“For the profession.”

“The profession of falconry?”

“Yeah. If an opportunity to do something was presented to us like this and we just said ‘Naah’—”

“How could you look other falconers in the eye after that?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone have any idea what time it is?”

“One fifty-six,” said Carmelita, checking a mechanical watch on her wrist.

“Let’s saddle up.”

“ We’re ready. Are you?” Carmelita looked him up and down. “I was expecting you to be more strapped.”

Rufus had heard the term in old rap music. “You are referring to guns,” he said.

“Yeah. You don’t have any.”

“I’ll go and see to that now,” he said. “Shouldn’t take long. Y’all drink some water.”

PERMANENT DECOMMISSIONING OF PINA2BO CLIMATE WEAPON

Laks did not have the ability to page back to the first slide of the PowerPoint. These things only played in one direction. They were monitoring the movements of his eyeballs or something; they could sense when he was finished reading a slide. Then they’d turn the page and electronically shred the previous one. Still, he could remember seeing those words during the few moments before he pulled the visor off his head. What did they actually mean?

He had to wait a little while to find out. When he got back to the downed drone, he was instructed to eat food, drink water, and get some shut-eye if possible. Somewhat amazingly under the circumstances, he actually was able to get to sleep for a bit. He wondered if they’d wired a switch into his head that would knock him out from the other side of the world and wake him up again when his services were needed.

It seemed that during this little breather the powers that be had been figuring out whether it was faster to wait for the sun to come up and recharge the drone, thus enabling him to fly straight to “the objective,” or for him to simply walk. Laks could have told them that walking would be faster, but he sensed a large bureaucracy at work. Anyway, they got back to him at around three in the morning with a revised mission briefing that was all about walking. Stashed in one of the drone’s luggage compartments were a few sticks of black plastic and bits of black webbing that, as it turned out, could be snapped together into a sturdy backpack frame that weighed essentially nothing. Immediately, though, it began to weigh rather a lot as the first thing he was told to load onto it was the shockingly heavy briefcase he’d been told not to touch a few hours earlier. Getting that firmly attached consumed most of the available straps, bungee cords, and duct tape. With what remained he loaded on a few key earthsuit parts and several bags of water. Then he heaved the thing up onto his back, adjusted the straps, and started walking.

A few minutes later he was at the ridgeline he’d checked out earlier. He paused there to make a few adjustments. Something caught his eye. He swung his head around and looked back toward the big drone. It was engulfed in flames.

He turned his back on it and continued walking across the crest of the mountains. The night was silent except for the faint whirr of drones, shadowing him all around in some kind of intricate formation he could feel but not see.

The next sound Laks heard, other than his own footfalls, and the little avalanches they sometimes touched off as he descended toward the valley, was a human voice. A cheerful one. Surprisingly close by.

“Splendid morning for a ruck, isn’t it?”

Until that moment he had been in a reverie. At its beginning, it had been dark and he had been striding across level, bare ground at the top of the ridge. Now the sun was not exactly up, but the sky was bright enough that it might as well have been. He was picking his way down steep and extraordinarily treacherous terrain covered with viciously spiny vegetation, headed for the Pina2bo “climate weapon,” which was in plain sight a couple of miles ahead of him. To the extent his mind was up and running at all, it was entirely focused on deciding where to plant his feet so that he could absorb the massive burden of the weight on his back without turning an ankle, blowing up a knee, toppling forward, or impaling himself on a plant. He kept thinking he was almost to the bottom and that the going would soon get easier. It did not.

So the last thing he’d been expecting was to bump into another pedestrian at random. What were the odds? Slim enough for it to seem suspicious. And why had all those fucking drones not noticed this guy and given him some warning?

Out of batteries, probably. They hadn’t planned on Laks walking through the hours of darkness. Pretty soon, though, they’d all be able to recharge, and then they’d catch up with him.

The stranger was tall and lean, with thinning blond hair and a creased face. He seemed to understand that some explanation might be warranted for his startling appearance directly in Laks’s path. “I saw you up there half an hour ago,” he said, “silhouetted against the skyline, and it looked like the way down was tricky, so I decided to take a little break and just make sure you got down all right.” He spoke with a crisp accent Laks couldn’t quite place.