Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Fortunately Pegleg didn’t roll onto his left side, which would have pinned Rufus’s leg. He seemed content to just stay on his belly. Rufus yanked his foot out of the stirrup, raised the shotgun, and looked back the way he’d come. A trail of downed drones and furious eagles was spread across the track Pegleg had taken, but there were no drones aiming guns at him now. He reloaded the shotgun’s magazine before doing anything else, then stood up, bent over Pegleg, and drew the rifle from the padded case alongside his saddle. Blood was running down Pegleg’s right flank from an entry wound to the right of his tail. Deep into the muscle. Enough to bring the animal down but probably not enough to kill him. Rufus felt that some kind words, some expression of gratitude, was now in order, but there was no time to lose, so he just stroked the horse’s nose as he took his leave and told him what a fine fella he was.

Then he ran down to the far end of the shipping container and ducked around a corner. He could hear a drone overhead, above the net, but it probably couldn’t see him. He aimed straight up through the net and blasted it, then pivoted and ran for a gap between two more containers.

A freight train was parked on the railway that ran along one side of the depot and continued directly to the gun complex. It consisted entirely of hopper cars loaded with sulfur. At the opposite end of the train from where Rufus was, a pile of sulfur—a smaller version of the one on the Houston waterfront—sat on the ground like a huge yellow traffic pylon. Near it, he knew, was a shallow pit under the railway where the hopper cars, one by one, discharged their loads. Empties then coasted under gravity power onto a siding where they could be reassembled into trains that would deadhead back to Houston.

From that pit under the tracks, an angled conveyor carried sulfur up from the pit to the apex of the pile; and from the far side of the pile, other conveyors took the stuff into a building where it was melted and poured into shells. Anyway, the pile was a conspicuous landmark that Rufus could aim for. From there it was a couple of hundred yards to the head frame.

Rufus had the idea that by running alongside the parked freight train he’d be able to cover some more ground while enjoying at least partial cover. In the open, the drones could come at him from all sides. If he was next to a hopper car, that gave him cover on one side. Better than none at all.

Movement through the depot was a mixed blessing as the nets made trouble for the drones but also kept the eagles out of the action. He just had to keep moving and not let the drones zero in on him. Whenever he ventured into an open space there was a few moments’ grace period before a drone was able to swing around and aim its gun at him, and he could take advantage of that by moving to cover, or just blasting it. The shotgun had been the right choice. But he had to be conservative with ammunition and so finding cover was better. Moving in a somewhat random path—partly out of necessity, partly by design—he was able to approach the railway siding within a few minutes, spending half a dozen shells in the process and twice getting shot at without result. If the drones were being aimed by humans, the latency of their network connection had to be a factor. As long as he kept moving he could use that to his advantage. Standing still and staring a drone down, High Noon style, was not his move.

When he reached the strip of open ground along the railway siding, he found that all three eagles had taken down drones that had apparently been lying in wait for him there. Rufus ran across it, thumbing shells into his magazine, and crouched to duck under the closest hopper car just as a round pinged off a steel wheel. On one knee he pivoted toward the sound of the shot and punched the offending drone out of the air with a shotgun blast, then got up to the other side of the train and ran along it for a car length before ducking under to avoid a drone and coming out the other side. He ran another half car length and then ducked and rolled across the tracks again. Any drone chasing him down the left side of the train would be out of luck when he dodged over to the right, and vice versa. After a few repetitions of that, one of them got the idea and tried to follow him by crossing over the top of a hopper car just as he was diving under it. Which might have actually worked—except that the downwash of its rotors kicked up a cloud of loose powdered sulfur as it skimmed over the top. Rufus rolled over on his back and looked straight up to see the thing hovering, blind in a sunlit yellow cloud. He shot it out of the air, kept rolling, pulled a shell from the strap, reloaded. Down to half a dozen shells now. An eagle came out of nowhere twenty feet ahead of him and crunched its talons into a drone he hadn’t even seen.

He was measuring his progress in hopper cars. Three more to go before he reached the pile. Two more. He’d been running on adrenaline since he started his gallop. His ticker was going like crazy and tiredness was beginning to take hold of him. Diving and rolling across railroad tracks was brutally unpleasant even for a man half his age. He knew he was covered with bruises and abrasions. He could sense himself beginning to flinch from the impact of shoulder on gravel, beginning to slow down.

A human figure caught his eye, crossing the open ground between the depot and the head frame. Carrying a heavy pack and dragging one leg. But still making better time than Rufus with all this foolishness about the drones. This man kept turning his head to look toward the sounds of the gunshots. He was a couple of hundred yards away. Hard to see details, but obviously Big Fish. Piet was wrong; Rufus wasn’t too late; Big Fish had been delayed, hadn’t reached the objective yet.

Rufus lost sight of him, though, during a nearly fatal cluster-fuck that took shape at the head of the train—the last hopper car, poised over the unloading pit. Multiple drones were waiting for him there and it turned into an utterly confused mess of plunging, screaming eagles, shotgun blasts, clouds of airborne sulfur, and Rufus rolling to and fro. Inevitably gravity had its way and he fell off the side of the track—which, here, turned into a little trestle on steel I-beams—and into the pit below. But the floor of the pit was no more than eight feet below the track, and it was half full of sulfur, so he didn’t fall far and he landed on something with a little bit of give. A cloud of yellow powder went up and got into his lungs. He coughed, gagged, and pulled the earthsuit’s spandex neck gaiter up over his mouth and nose. During those moments a drone came into view and lined up to take a shot at him. He rolled and drew his legs up, instinctively going into a fetal position, felt an ice-cold knitting needle pass through one calf and graze the other. He’d let go of the shotgun during all this; it was half buried in sulfur an arm’s length away. He scooped up a handful of the stuff and flung it at the drone. Then he pushed himself up on one knee, banged his head on the underside of the railroad tracks above him, got his pistol out of its holster, and just blasted away at the thing until it splintered.

Vaulting out of this pit wasn’t an option with his leg messed up. The obvious escape route was the conveyor. This was not moving. It consisted of a broad band of flexible rubbery stuff, maybe six feet wide, running over rollers that folded it into a U-shaped cross section to contain the powder. From his point of view right now it was just a ruler-straight yellow brick road to the sky. He had only one decent option, which was to go up the thing until the pile was beneath him, providing a surface—soft and yielding, he hoped—that would cushion his fall. Breaking very much out into the open, he began climbing the conveyor, taking long strides with his one semi-good leg and then toppling into the flume of sulfur in the belt as his other knee came down. No drones came after him. Either they were running low on those, or his move onto the conveyor had surprised them and they needed to re-vector the ones they had.