Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Thanks.” Laks had been thinking of taking a little break anyway, so he unbuckled the pack’s waist belt and swung it down onto the ground. Then he stood up straight, rolled his shoulders back, and stretched.

“Communications are down, you know, and so if someone has an emergency, we all have to rely on each other.”

Something about this guy’s nervous insistence on explaining himself was setting off alarm bells in Laks’s head. “That’s very considerate of you,” he said.

But he was interrupted by the voice of the lady from the airport. “Halt! Move your hands away from your sides and keep them in plain view. Refrain from sudden movements, as a defensive response may be initiated under algorithmic control. Serious injuries may result.”

Both men looked around to see several drones silhouetted against the sky, which, because of stratospheric sulfur that had been hurled into it by that big gun right over there, was bright. Anyway, the drones were obvious now. They must have been hanging back, lurking, conserving power. But now they were out in force. Expending their reserves.

“Goodness! This is unexpected!” said the man, not very convincingly. He was complying exactly with the instructions, with the gratifying side effect that the announcement was not repeated. He squinted at one of the nearby drones. “Does that thing have a gun on it!?”

“Yes.”

“How very Texas.”

“They are not from around here, actually,” Laks said. “I don’t think it’s going to shoot you if you follow the arrow.”

“Arrow?”

Laks looked around. The man followed his gaze. The laser arrow was harder to see in the daytime, but it was there. He shrugged. “Just do what it says. I think you’ll end up with the other . . .” Hostages? Detainees? Prisoners? “. . . people.”

The flash caught Rufus’s eye about an hour after the sun rose above Pina2bo. He was alone, riding Pegleg across flat open terrain along the base of the ridge. He was still in the shadow of the mountains, but the complex was awash in the amber light of early morning. Closer to him, about a mile away, was Bunkhouse. Farther in the distance was the gun complex, mostly concealed under stretched camo netting, but easily seen because of the head frame and the exposed muzzles of the six barrels with their bulky flash suppressors. The flash that had caught his eye, though, had not come from the big guns. It originated from open territory between the base of the ridge and the Bunkhouse.

His first thought was that there’d been an explosion. An old instinct left over from working in places where IEDs were a problem made him tense up, awaiting the crack of the shock wave. But then he understood that someone out there was signaling him with a mirror. And he had a pretty good idea of who that would be.

The others had been shadowing him along a parallel course, higher up the slope. They were on rougher terrain and trying to be less obvious than Rufus, so they made slower progress. Rufus dismounted, giving them a chance to catch up, and took his rifle from the soft fabric case he’d strapped alongside the saddle. This was not the Kalashnikov but the long bolt-action number with the scope, the one he’d built for drilling big boars from long range.

Another flash caught his eye. Turning around and looking up, he could see a hot spot of bluish light scribbling all over the mountainside as Piet wiggled the mirror around. He must know it was hopeless to hit Rufus, or any other fixed target, with anything more than the odd lucky flash. There’d be no Morse code transmissions on this channel. But a lucky flash carried a lot of information. Rufus found a patch of ground where he could lie flat on his belly without collecting hundreds of barbed spines in his flesh. He stacked a rock on another rock and used that to steady the barrel of his rifle, then pulled the dust covers off the ends of the scope. He peered through it, sweeping it this way and that across the area where he thought he had seen the flash. This took several minutes. But finally he saw a human figure walking alone across the alluvial flat, headed down off the mountain. As best as he could tell at this range, he was not headed toward the gun, but rather toward Bunkhouse. Which fit with Rufus’s general picture of how this was going to go: personnel herded into a pen, and forced to remain there, by drones. At this range he could not see drones in the objective lens of the scope, but he knew they must be shadowing Piet. Piet must have slipped the mirror out of his pocket and used it while he was taking a piss break or something.

Rufus wished he had a way to communicate with Thordis, Carmelita, and Tsolmon up above him, but he didn’t. They too might have been hit by the strafing beam of light from the mirror. They might have seen Rufus peering through his scope. In case they’d missed all that, he stood up, tapped the telescopic sight, and then used two fingers to pantomime looking down the valley. They had the binoculars with them. If they saw and understood the gesture, they might use those to see what he’d seen.

The sun had hove up over the ridge during all this and felt warm and welcome on his skin for about ten seconds before turning unpleasantly hot. As long as he was stopped anyway, Rufus opened up the saddlebag where he had stashed his earthsuit and changed into its under-layer, which as far as he could tell was a glorified spandex bodysuit. It was khaki, so it wouldn’t stand out too bad in the desert, but it would be going too far to call it camouflage. He put on a white broad-brimmed hat to protect his head and then got “strapped,” to use Carmelita’s terminology: a semi-automatic pistol on his hip and a pump shotgun slung over his shoulder on a strap pendulous and gleaming with extra shells. He had the idea that such a weapon might be capable of taking down drones. If it worked on clay pigeons . . .

Fussing with these things was one of those deals where the longer it took, the longer it took. Between that and the slowness with which the three falconers were obliged to travel, Rufus began to feel that they were terribly behind schedule and that they had wasted the cool part of the day. He couldn’t believe, in retrospect, that he had contemplated grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep last night.

Finally he climbed back up into the saddle and began to ride Pegleg toward the Biggest Gun in the World.

By the time he was, at long last, able to lengthen his stride down into the flat between him and the big gun, Laks was in a quite ambivalent frame of mind about the whole drone thing. On the one hand, this whole operation would have been unthinkable without them. On the other hand, batteries. The big drone had been forced to land well short of its objective because it was low on batteries, and this had led to knock-on effects as the smaller drones escorting him had run low on juice in the dark. Several of the ones that still worked had then been spent on the weird blond hiker, leaving Laks bereft of air cover. So he’d been ordered to sit on his ass for a while as a couple of mothership drones spread their photovoltaic wings in the sun and recharged their broods.

On the other, other hand, he’d made an honest effort to read some military history, since it seemed he was bound for a military career, and found it to be a whole lot of repetitive accounts of armies running out of things. Usually energy. Whether that meant food for troops, grass for horses, or fuel for trucks. Electrons for batteries was just the modern equivalent of that. Hitler’s invasion of Russia had stalled in the dead of winter, in a place from which the Germans could actually see Moscow. Now, in the dead of the Texas summer, India’s invasion of the Flying S Ranch was stalled at a place where Laks could see the huge flash suppressors on the gun’s six barrels, protruding from a lake of camouflage netting. Choppers and planes were beginning to cross high overhead as word apparently got out that something bad was happening here.