Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

This was terrific advice. There were only so many rockers, and their throwing motions were obvious even if the rocks themselves were hard to see in flight. To avoid being flanked by Laks, Gopinder, and Ravi, the rockers who’d formerly been on the Indians’ left flank—shifted one at a time to the Indians’ right. Laks risked taking his eye off them long enough to glance left at Sam and Jay, now almost abreast of him. He got a rock in the rib cage for his trouble but saw Sam roll over onto his back and give a thumbs-up. Jay was up on his elbows pressing a soccer scarf against a laceration above his eye. “If you can, tuck in behind us,” Laks said.

“Roger that,” Sam responded. The mere fact that he could talk suggested he had got his wind back. As Laks moved past them, the Englishmen planted their sticks in the ground and used them to get up to their feet, then swung in behind. “You’re going to be my left wing when we get closer,” Laks said. “Make sure we don’t get flanked on that side.”

“Yes SIR!” Jay responded. Military style. Not sarcastic.

“Ilham. The stick guys. What’s that on their faces?” They’d now drawn close enough to see that the Bonking Heads stick fighters—who, to this point, had done nothing but make fun of them—had some kind of weird objects stuck to their noses.

Ilham, who was now trailing a safe distance in their wake, had access to all three video feeds, as well as image-stabilized binoculars. “Little cups strapped to their noses. Tubes coming out of them.”

Laks had heard of them, but never seen one, while working in the oxygen langars. “Nasal masks,” he said. “Like a mini oxygen mask, but it doesn’t cover the mouth. They’re on supplemental oxygen.”

“Explains why they won’t fucking shut it,” Jay remarked. He and Sam had belatedly got their earbuds in and joined the feed.

Laks asked, “Sue or Bella, can you get line of sight to the source?”

“On it,” Bella announced. Laks heard a drone bank and veer.

“Nice, Bella!” Ilham said a few moments later. “It’s a big oxygen tank, like welders use, lying flat on the ground behind them.”

“Gopinder and Ravi. When we engage, draw them away from the tank,” Laks said. “Don’t make it easy for them. At some point they’ll have to lose the masks. Sam and Jay, which of you is in better shape?”

“I’m going to say that’s me,” Sam answered. “Jay’s got blood in his eyes.”

“Sam, wing me on my left,” Laks said. “Jay, after we engage, see if you can cut around their flank and cut the oxygen lines.”

“Rockers are pulling back,” Ilham reported. “They’ll stand off and throw from a distance when they have a clear shot.”

“Jay!” Laks called and tossed Jay his dhal.

“Thanks, mate!”

But Laks did not hear it because at this moment—having not moved at anything faster than a geriatric mall-walker’s pace since exiting the bus—he pivoted toward the Bonking Heads’ position, sprang forward, and came at their foremost stick fighter—obviously their best guy, their ringleader—full speed, in exactly the same light-footed prancing style that this asshole liked to make fun of. Which worked great, actually, on a boulder field. At the same time Laks was whirling his stick up to a velocity where it almost disappeared. He was pleased to note that, at this altitude, air resistance was less of a factor. Despite the speed and suddenness of Laks’s advance, this guy was good enough that he reacted just in time, drawing back instinctively, rear weighted, front leg poised out in front of him. Laks performed a move he had been practicing against heavy bags in the gym since he’d been eight years old, letting his stick hand pass behind him for a moment and then bringing it out so that his entire body, from the soles of his feet up through his legs and torso and arm, cracked like a bullwhip. The end of the whip was the stick, whose last six inches impacted the shin of his opponent just below the knee with a crack whose reverberations were probably detectable on seismographs in Pakistan.

Nowhere near as loud, though, as the scream that followed a moment later. Enraged, the man moved forward to take a swing at Laks. But Laks was already drawing back, forcing him to over-commit. All his weight came forward onto the injured leg, which buckled. As the man staggered forward in an effort to remain upright, his oxygen tube snapped taut behind him, his head reared back, and the little mask popped off his nose and bounced in the dust. All these distractions ruined him, leaving him wide open for Lak’s follow-up, which was a simple pool-cue strike into the liver.

Another stick guy was trying to come around from the left, but Sam held the line on that flank. The Englishman made no effort to match the attacker’s kung fu rocket science but just barreled in close, stuffing and stifling the other’s moves, forcing him to back up on the terrible ankle-spraining ground. Sam had a walking stick that he gripped in its middle, tucked along the bone of his forearm so that he could either block attacks while protecting his arm, or else deliver short elbow strikes intensified by the knob on the stick’s end.

When they and half a million of their closest friends watched the videos later, after Pippa had had time to cut it all together, it was clear that the fight was already over at this point. Gopinder engaged another Bonking Head and gave as good as he got. At one point he got the tip of his short stick, in his left hand, under the guy’s oxygen tube and flicked it off.

Ravi pretty much got his ass kicked. He didn’t land a single good blow. He was forced to retreat. His opponent advanced to the end of his oxygen tube and faltered. This guy had put his outfit on after donning the nasal mask, so the tube was running under his clothes. He couldn’t just pull the thing off his face to get free.

Meanwhile, on the left flank, Sam had given his opponent a real gusher of a bloody nose by landing an elbow shot. The guy had retreated and sat down to go into shock.

He had to have been in shock not to see what Jay was doing right next to him. Jay during all of this had crept around to the oxygen tank. This began to peal like some exotic Tibetan gong as rocks struck it. For the rockers, standing off at a distance, had begun to zero in on his position. Jay used the dhal in his left hand to protect his bloody head. At the top of the oxygen tank was a round valve wheel—the main shutoff. Angling off to one side of that was a regulator with two dials. Sprouting from the low-pressure side of the regulator, then, was a Rube Goldbergian tangle of tees and wyes that had been kludged onto it so that it would feed something like a dozen separate oxygen tubes.

In a classic I’m-just-going-to-cut-this-fucking-Gordian-knot moment, Jay noticed that he was sitting on a big rock, flat and sort of triangular, like an arrowhead the size of a tabloid newspaper and a good six inches thick. It was heavy. He dropped the dhal, stood up, got his back into it, then his legs, and heaved it up off the ground. He cleaned and jerked the thing, got it above his head for one glorious moment, and then brought it down on the regulator.

On the video, Jay then disappeared in a huge cloud of oxygen-rich dust produced as high-pressure gas shrieked out of a crevice in the metal. That cloud moved away from him, though, as the cylinder began spinning and skidding across the moonscape like a pinwheel firework. The regulator and the tree of fittings were still hanging on. The tube attached to the guy who’d been fighting Ravi went tight, pulled him back onto his ass, and dragged him a short distance before his suit gave way at the seams and was stripped off his body.

The Bonking Heads retreated in disarray. The Fellowship advanced, reclaiming about a hundred meters of territory for India, but stopped and held their ground when other Chinese volunteer units began to converge. It might have gone badly for them then, but Indian crews, who’d seen this all happen from a distance, rushed forward to camp out along the new position of the Line of Actual Control.