Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

By and large, the ranch as a whole felt like a fracking operation out in the Permian Basin or North Dakota or some such, which was a way of saying that the employees tended to be young single males who lived in trailers and got around in pickup trucks. The trailers were clustered in residential compounds spaced along the Arc, which was what they called the approximately circular road that ran around Pina2bo from about nine o’clock in the west to about four o’clock in the southeast, at a radius that kept the sonic booms from being too obnoxious. The missing southern part of the Arc, from four around to nine, was unlikely ever to be completed because of mountain ranges and the Rio Grande. Anyway there were three of these residential compounds. Two of them were 100 percent bachelor. They were called simply Nine and Four, and they were at the ends of the Arc. At the third, women and families were part of the mix as well. That one was called High Noon, or just Noon, and it lay along the main road-and-railroad artery leading from the ranch gate down to Pina2bo.

Spread over all this as a separate world unto itself was Security, which seemed opaque to Rufus, and was probably meant to be. There was an over-arching contract with a big international private firm that, he had to assume, kept tabs on threats from a distance just by monitoring the Internet, looking at remote imaging data, and conducting private investigations. Another firm basically did what rent-a-cops did on corporate campuses: performed routine patrols, checked credentials at gates, investigated calls. Basically they handled the 99 percent of security-related activities that did not require a lot of training, decision-making, or acceptance of physical risk. Their job was to be visible and call for help. They wore brown hats.

The other 1 percent of such situations were handled by a collection of individuals who were all employed by a company T.R. had set up called Black Hat Practical Operations and who by and large were some combination of weird, dangerous, and expensive. Rufus was one of those. As far as he could make out, this operation was more French Foreign Legion than SEAL Team Six. It was motley and international. Of course, there were American ex–Special Forces types, but he heard plenty of accents that were not of this continent. He was not an expert judge of such things but he was pretty sure some South Africans were in the mix—at one point he heard one of them talking on the phone in a language that sounded a lot like what Saskia and Willem and Amelia spoke, and he guessed that what he was hearing was Afrikaans. But they were by no means all white English speakers.

The overall boss of the Black Hats was an American man of about sixty (albeit the type of sixty-year-old who seemed to spend half of his waking hours doing push-ups) named Colonel Tatum. He was not, of course, actually in the military and so the “Colonel” was more of an honorific nickname. He was an Anglo Texan, but apparently not the sort who hated nonwhite folk—or if he was, he did a good job of hiding it during his interview with Rufus. Obviously T.R. had briefed Colonel Tatum and everyone understood each other.

They conducted the interview in Tatum’s office at the Black Hat ops center, a reinforced concrete structure half buried in the ground near the intersection of the Arc and the main ranch road. It would not have been wrong to describe it as a bunker. But a lot of ranch architecture was massive, half buried, and made of concrete, so the line between bunker and any other kind of structure was a little blurry.

Tatum, like others in his unit, was dressed in an outfit that you could think of as the inner layers of an earthsuit. Hanging on a rack in the corner of his office were other components, plugged in to keep them all charged up and ready to go. Next to that was a long steel box that was obviously a gun safe. The portions of the earthsuit that Tatum was wearing right now just looked like normal, albeit military, clothes for the most part. You could buy this stuff in various styles and patterns. All the people in Tatum’s unit had, reasonably enough, opted for desert camo. Tatum was no exception. So this scene looked and felt like interviews Rufus had experienced in the service when he’d been deployed to locations in the Middle East.

“You’re not in my chain of command. You and a couple of other consultants report to T.R. But you are in my department and I don’t want you getting shot because of some fuckup, so we are gonna have a talk about how it all works,” Tatum said after he and Rufus had exchanged the briefest of pleasantries.

How it all worked was that they had purchased and installed some kind of high-tech system that used cameras and machine vision to notice human-shaped objects moving around on the property, and then attempted to perform “IFF” on them. Rufus knew from the military that this meant “Identification Friend or Foe.” If the imagery was good enough, facial recognition would do the trick, but lots of times it wasn’t, and in any case people frequently wore earthsuits that got in the way of the optical path. So everyone was encouraged to wear a little device called an “iffy,” which seemed to be a cross between an ID badge and the kind of transponder typically installed on aircraft so that air traffic controllers could tell one blip from another. The iffy, which was about the size of a phone, was apparently complicated and expensive. So you could get along without one if you were just working inside a building that had the usual security barrier at the entrance. But anyone roaming around the property at large needed to have an iffy that was up and running. When the high-tech system noticed a free-ranging humanoid life-form on the property who was not so equipped, drones would head that way with Black Hats in hot pursuit. Naturally all the net runners, sail chasers, et cetera had iffies as a matter of course.

What applied to humans applied to drones as well. Rufus was welcome to fly his drones around but they had to be registered and he would have to install transponders on them. “T.R. has spoken to me with great admiration of your skill with drones,” Tatum said drily.

Rufus nodded. He had to suppress a smile as he imagined what that conversation must have been like.

“He refers to you as . . .”

“The Drone Ranger. I know, sir.”

“Well, that being the case, I’ll leave it to you to interface with your tech staff about making the necessary modifications to your equipment.”

“Yes, sir.”

“T.R. says you are self-sufficient in your trailer. You can park it anywhere you like.”

“You mean Nine or Four or Noon?”

“I mean anywhere you like . Obviously, the places you mentioned have more conveniences.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What kind of weapons you packing?”

“My job until recently has been killing feral swine. To a first approximation, those are similar to humans,” Rufus pointed out.

This phrase “to a first approximation” he had picked up from Alastair, and he liked it.

“So,” Rufus continued, “by and large . . .”

“You are equipped with firearms designed for killing humans. In other words, military. I get it.”

“Yes, sir. Simplifies the decision-making process by a good deal.”

“All right then.”

“But only three pieces. An AK. A bolt-action with infrared scope. And a plain old nine mil Glock.”

“Nothing weird. Nothing full auto.”

“Oh, no sir.”

Tatum nodded. “We’ll set you up with a two-way radio that works on an encrypted channel. But to be honest, phones work almost everywhere on the property and they usually work better.”

Tatum’s sensible attitude around “weird” firearms now emboldened Rufus to bring up a topic that had been somewhat on his mind. The drive from Cotulla to the Flying S Ranch had been long enough that the old mental hobgoblins had been able to get some purchase in Rufus’s brain. He’d called Carlos Nooma, a half-Mexican, half-Comanche lawyer in Dallas whom Rufus had met in the army when Carlos had been working off his student loans in the JAG. Now he was part of a firm. He’d helped Rufus over a few of the humps associated with his separation from Mariel and starting his business. Once he and Carlos had spent a few minutes catching up and shooting the breeze, Rufus had explained the nature of what was happening at the Flying S Ranch, and of his proposed role.