Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

To the extent Laks understood the plan, anyone who looked down from those planes and choppers would see a congregation of ranch personnel all together in the residential part of the valley, and it would be understood that—for their own protection, of course—they were being temporarily detained there while the Indian military conducted a “climate peacekeeping” mission—the smallest and deftest of surgical strikes—at the gun complex. Which was Laks’s job. In his mind’s eye he reviewed the instructions from the most recent PowerPoint. He was to hike to the “head frame,” which was easy to find; he could see that already. At ground level there would be a door to a lift. The lift ran down a deep shaft into the ground, where the guts of the gun were protected beneath hundreds of meters of rock. His job was to get the heavy briefcase down to the bottom of that shaft. If the lift was operating, he could just walk into it and hit the “down” button. However, this was deemed the unlikeliest of scenarios. The shaft, according to their intelligence, was a chimney, open at the top. It was cluttered with equipment, but not so cluttered he couldn’t simply drop the briefcase down it and let gravity handle the rest.

That done, he was supposed to just travel upwind as fast as he could manage.

Laks would have to have been an exceptionally dense and slow-witted fellow not to have asked himself the obvious question: Am I carrying a nuclear weapon on my back? He wasn’t sure how small you could actually make such things. He’d heard of backpack nukes and suitcase nukes. This thing was smaller yet. A briefcase. And it felt like most of it consisted of lead. Not much spare room on the inside, then.

His mind circled around it, considering various possibilities, as he just sat there on the ground waiting for batteries to charge. It was a beautiful place, in its way. Pretty quiet, since not much was alive. Lizards began to come out and dart around. Far away on an opposite slope he could see a brown dog. No, of course that would be a coyote. There were a few birds hopping and flitting about. A screech high overhead drew his gaze up into the sky. An eagle, or at least, some kind of big raptor, soaring on a thermal high above the flats beyond Bunkhouse. Laks leaned back and propped himself up on his elbows, to enjoy a better view. The eagle banked round once, twice, then folded its wings and went into a power dive. Before it reached its prey it disappeared from view behind a rise. Must be a bad morning for some poor gopher or whatever it was eagles feasted on in these parts.

It was only a few minutes later that the peace of the morning was disturbed by a familiar humming sound as an echelon of drones passed over him: small camera drones first, at higher altitude, followed by the bigger ones that had guns and lasers and such. They conducted a crisscross grid search over the area that Laks would pass through next, if he simply stood up and walked in a straight line toward the gun complex. It all seemed a bit silly until he heard Airport Lady’s voice issuing a now familiar set of commands. A few hundred meters away—a place he’d have walked through only minutes from now—a man had just climbed to his feet. He looked like a rag doll. He was wearing one of those camouflage suits—Laks couldn’t remember the name—that was a mess of fabric strips, flopping loose all round, to blur a man’s outline and make him nearly undetectable by the human eye. He was holding his hands out to his sides, making him look even more like a scarecrow.

That guy had just been waiting for Laks. Hunting him like an animal. Laks would have walked right past him. Laks was still just gaping at the man, being amazed by this fact, when the man did exactly what you weren’t supposed to: made a sudden move. Laks saw a pistol in his hand, silhouetted against the bright sun shining on the valley floor in the distance. He jerked this way and that, as if doing some kind of weird dance. As he was collapsing to the ground the reports of three gunshots reached Laks’s ears.

During the hours after Saskia took refuge with T.R., Conor, and Jules at Level Zero, gunshots continued to echo down the shaft from time to time, but less and less frequently. And it seemed to Saskia that they were becoming more distant, though this was difficult to judge. One thing that certainly did not happen was any communication of any sort from above. The picture she conjured up in her head was that the drone swarm had basically succeeded in forcing the people on the surface to disarm themselves and march away and was now sweeping the area around the gun to ferret out any die-hard Black Hats who had concealed themselves. Every so often, they found one.

Meanwhile they took stock of what was down here. Plenty of water. A cache of snacks. A toilet of the type seen on RVs and boats. Few weapons. Though it appeared weapons were pretty useless against the drone swarm topside, and so T.R.’s sidearm, a semi-automatic pistol with two spare magazines, would be more than enough, assuming it had any value at all. Levels Zero and Minus One, since they served as a sort of control room, were furnished with rolling office chairs, a couple of tables, whiteboards, and flat-panel screens. But everything was run off laptops now, so there was little in the way of control panels as such. Life safety equipment was ubiquitous and clearly marked. This mostly took the form of full-face respirators with compressed air tanks, to be donned in the event the complex had to be flooded with argon as a last-ditch anti-explosion tactic.

Below Minus One, there wasn’t much to see until you got to the bottom. Those levels were really just there to provide access during inspections and maintenance. Boxes of tools and other gear were stacked here and there. Some of it looked to be left over from the early phases of the project. In one of them Jules found a cache of climbing gear: long, neatly coiled ropes of the kind used by mountaineers, a couple of climbing harnesses, and a device called a descender that could be used to ratchet one’s way up a rope or, on a different setting, to slide smoothly down it. He took the initiative to sling this stuff over his back and climb the ladder partway up the shaft above Level Zero in the hopes he might be able to see or hear something. He anchored a rope up there so that he could use the descender to come back down rapidly if he had to. But after going to all that effort he came back down with nothing to report. It was quiet up there and he daren’t climb too high lest he be detected.

Jules and the others just wanted to feel that they were doing something. There was, however, nothing to do except wait for the situation to be resolved. Painful for them, but business as usual for Saskia, who’d made a living standing around in situations like the foam disaster at Scheveningen waiting for others to do their jobs.

This would have to get resolved soon. The attackers had bought themselves some time by knocking out all electronic devices within a certain range, and it sounded like they had parlayed that into some leverage by rounding up hostages. But this couldn’t possibly last more than a few hours, or at most a day. The cavalry must be inbound; it was just that they had to travel a long way. So all they could do was wait.

Accordingly she climbed down to Minus Five, made herself as comfortable as she could, and went to sleep.

As a young man Rufus had disappointed some of his white army friends who had wanted him to be a whole lot more authentic, according to their version of what that was. But this had been back in the days before Rufus had developed his theory—the theory he’d explained on the train to Saskia—that Comancheness was a viral thing that could hop from brain to brain, regardless of skin color, and that—using the early Texas Rangers as a vector of infection—it had completely taken over America a long time ago. Old-school Christian values and straight-out racism had held it at bay through the world wars and the fifties, but then the barriers had fallen one by one and before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and-blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian–style bison headdress. And just like Comanches with their raids, those people didn’t stick around and try to plant their yellow rattlesnake flags on the Capitol dome. They just wandered off, having counted coup on democracy and taken a few cop scalps, and melted back into their nomadic trailer park encampments. Point being, Rufus hadn’t worked all that out in his head back when he’d been a buck private; he had not had the mental equipment to explain to his white brothers in arms that the Comanches had won the long war. The war between men’s ears.