Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“All that stuff you told us about raising the value of Houston real estate was just bullshit,” Saskia said.

“Not exactly. That was me making sure it penciled out. But was it my only reason? ’Course not.”

“We’re stuck down here because India is pissed off at you,” Saskia said. “I’ve talked to people with connections in the Punjab. I’ve seen climate models suggesting that this thing”—she slapped the combustion chamber wall, and her palm came away black with carbon—“this thing right here could reduce crop yields there ! Is it any wonder they’ve sent people to blow it up? Perfectly reasonable, if you ask me.”

“If they’d bothered to ask,” T.R. said, “I’d have showed them Vadan. Sneeuwberg. Showed ’em the simulations my boys put together of how we can make it all work. Punjab’s gonna be fine.”

“ But you have to tell them that. ”

“They have to give a shit . They don’t. They just want to pull off a PR stunt, get votes in the next election.”

“I understand how democracies work,” Saskia said. “Believe me, I do. But their PR stunt might kill us. Isn’t that an indication that you might have made a mistake?”

“I don’t deny things have gotten a little out of hand,” T.R. admitted.

Saskia laughed out loud.

“But you gotta start somewhere. Sometimes you drill a well and you get a gusher. Makes quite a mess. But you just gotta deal with it. Get it under control, cap it off.”

Saskia just shook her head. They sat there in silence for a minute. Not perfect silence; it might have been her imagination, but through her back, which was leaning against the hard floor of the dome, she thought she could feel faint thumps. Footsteps, maybe.

“That’s why I need you,” T.R. said.

Saskia sighed.

“Sorry,” T.R. added. He seemed puzzled by her reaction.

“Oh, not at all,” Saskia said. “It’s just that there’s a lot of that kind of thing going around. I’m the Queen of Netherworld, did you hear?”

“I was so informed.”

“A prince gave me a jet.”

T.R. shrugged. “You crash a jet, someone gives you a jet, things even out over time.”

“You can’t just admit you need me and pretend that makes a difference,” Saskia said. “ You have to listen. ”

A blinding bright crescent appeared on the wall of the combustion chamber. Someone had opened the latch a crack. Silhouetted was the head of a person wearing some kind of getup that completely covered their head. They were breathing through a respirator. Visible just behind this person was a wall of plastic sheeting that had apparently been taped into place to create a barrier between the area surrounding the hatch and the rest of the mine shaft. They tossed a pair of bundles in and then closed the door.

Saskia was closest. She pushed herself up to her feet and carried a candle over to investigate. Each of the bundles was sealed in clear plastic: a coverall, neatly folded up, and a respirator.

Taped to one of them was a sheet of printer paper on which someone had written with a marker: RADIATION HAZARD! PUT THESE ON, THEN KNOCK.

“The cavalry, I guess,” T.R. remarked.

“There must be some kind of contamination up there,” Saskia said. One of the suits was a medium, the other a large. She tossed the large to T.R.

“I refuse to be the mom in the Cadillac,” she said, and ripped the packet open.

“Beg pardon?”

“Your story about Daddy blowing the carbon out of the cylinders, blasting down some Texas highway in the Cadillac, made it all sound very amusing for the kids in the back and the man behind the wheel. But all you said of your mother was that she hated it. I won’t be her.”

“Point taken,” T.R. said. “You won’t be.”

QUEEN OF THE NETHERWORLD

Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia’s new plane didn’t fly as high as the old one. The stratosphere was out of reach for her now; it was a realm where other people carried out wild schemes to change the climate, but not a place she would go. So the journey from Houston back to the Flying S Ranch took a little longer than doing it in a bizjet. But if she was going to take this Queen of Netherworld thing seriously she couldn’t keep doing things the old way. And it gave her that much more time to get acquainted with Mohinder. She’d met him briefly last year, when she and the other guests had lunched on brisket at his T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center. But they hadn’t really talked, of course. So during the flight now across the endless rangeland of West Texas he was able to acquaint her with some of his people’s traditions around funerals and mourning. And she was able to explain some of the practical challenges to him.

The case on Laks’s back, she explained, turned out to contain a small cylinder of Cobalt-60 dust wrapped around an explosive charge. Just enough to have rendered the Pina2bo gun unusable, if everything had gone according to plan. T.R. would have been forced to fill the hole with concrete. Instead of which, a small area on the surface, near the head frame, had been contaminated and would have to be buried and capped before anyone could go near the place.

Unfortunately Laks’s body was in the middle of it, and there was no way to stop buzzards and other scavengers from getting to it. Out of respect for the dead, and to prevent animals from spreading the contamination, the army had already covered the site in the only material that was near to hand in sufficient quantity: sulfur. Gravel and concrete were en route to finish the job.

By the time they were lining up the approach to the airstrip at the Flying S Ranch, Saskia had sat in the co-pilot’s seat during a dozen landings. Like a lot of modern planes, the thing practically flew itself. Ervin felt comfortable having her at the controls during the landing. He could take over at a moment’s notice. Or just let the thing land itself on Flying S’s long, dry, and swine-free runway.

> Down safe. Go to bed!

> Good luck and good night Mama

> Same to you, Your Majesty

> LOL

Their approach had swung well clear of the big gun. Part of that was just the usual precautions taken by pilots who didn’t want to get punched out of the air by supersonic bullets full of molten sulfur. There were no bullets in the air today, but there were other reasons to stay clear of that area. Still, they’d been able to view it from a distance. A lake of yellow sulfur had begun to form near the head frame, marking the extent of the contamination. Huge khaki-colored machines were moving around on tank treads. Those were the only impressions Saskia was able to take in, glancing out the side window during the preparation for landing.

The end of the airstrip closest to the terminal had become a little military hub. Several army planes and choppers were parked there instead of the usual lineup of bizjets. They’d stretched nets everywhere and set up defensive emplacements that Saskia recognized as being special transmitters that would supposedly knock drones out of the air by shooting out beams that would jam their electronics. And as a last line of defense, there were just a lot of soldiers cradling shotguns. But it was all precautionary; T.R.’s people, who had been feeding them status reports, were saying that no hostile drones had been sighted on the property since about noon yesterday, when the government of India had announced formal cessation of their Climate Peacekeeping action in the lawless, wartorn tribal region of West Texas.

She parked the plane where she was told to and thanked Ervin. He’d now have his hands full trying to figure out how to get a hydrogen truck through the military cordon. But she didn’t plan on going anywhere soon. She deployed the plane’s stairway and looked down the steps to see Amelia waiting for her.