Termination Shock

The Chihuahuan Desert

This was the most forbidding landscape Saskia had ever seen. The Sahara might be even bigger and more arid, but it looked soft—a world of dunes. This was a world of rocks. Rocks that had never been rounded and smoothed by water. What little rain fell on it seemed to have been sucked up by plants with no purpose other than to produce spines and serrations. She gazed out the train’s window for hours without seeing a trace of surface water. Even before global warming, this landscape would kill anyone who tried to walk out of it.

“Welcome to the Flying S Ranch!” T.R. proclaimed, raising a stein, as the Beer Car crossed the property line. Here the railroad track ran side by side with a gravel road, and both passed between a pair of stone gateposts blazoned with a letter S bracketed between wings. Adjacent to that was a reinforced-concrete guardhouse topped with solar panels and antennas. A man in a brown cowboy hat stood in front of it, armed (disappointingly) not with a pair of six-guns but with a Glock. He unhooked a thumb from his belt and waved at people who were apparently waving at him from other windows on the train. No stranger to modern security measures, Saskia observed that the road had not just a gate, but also retractable bollards sturdy enough to stop any vehicle that might attempt to blast through.

“It’s so ridiculous!” Amelia muttered in Dutch to Saskia. The two of them were at a table in the Beer Car’s saloon with Rufus and Eshma, who had come over and befriended them. Amelia was sitting with arms folded, getting a load of the gate, like a student puzzling over a math problem. She caught Rufus looking at her and switched to English. “These Texas ranch gates! We have seen a number of these now. So huge and grand. But they don’t connect to anything.” She waved her hand off to the side. Each of the two massive stone gateposts was buttressed by a wing of stone wall, maybe two meters high and extending for a few meters away from the gate. There it gave way to chain-link fence, newly installed, which ran off into the desert for no more than thirty meters before giving way to standard-issue ranch fencing: strands of taut barbed wire that rose no higher than an average person’s midsection.

Rufus pondered the question long enough to clue them in that they had stumbled upon some kind of major cultural/conceptual gap. “They’re connected to fences,” he pointed out, which was true.

“Yes but—” Saskia began.

“Traditionally the gate is the weakest point in a perimeter defense,” Amelia pointed out. “Not the strongest. It’s just basic logic. Surely as a military veteran you—”

Rufus nodded. “I got you.”

“Is it all just for ostentation? Show?”

“Extetics,” Rufus answered with a nod. They’d heard him use the word before. It was his pronunciation of “aesthetics.”

“It’s a signal too,” he continued. “You’re on my property now. Best respect it, or get you gone.”

“That makes sense,” Saskia said.

Rufus looked at Amelia. “Past that—as a military veteran, like you said—don’t look at the barbed-wire fence and say it’s nothing. Look at where it is. This is defense in depth. Maybe when we get where we’re going, they’ll let us go out in some ranch vehicles, some ATVs or four-wheel drives. That desert might look open and flat from out the window, but if you leave yonder road and try driving across it, you’ll learn real soon it is a barrier. Even walking is hard—every footstep requires you formulate a plan.”

Eshma nodded. “I’ve gone hiking in such terrain. It’s exhausting. Mentally exhausting,” she hastened to add. “The cognitive load of having to think about each step.” Eshma tapped her forehead.

Rufus processed that and nodded with the distracted air of a man who was soon going to look up “cognitive load” on the Internet and spend an hour clicking on links. “That’s why people who knew this land used horses. The horse handles the cognitive load. You just tell it where to go and how fast.”

In case anyone had missed the entry to ranch property, event staff were now passing through the saloon handing out baseball caps, bandannas, and steel water bottles bearing the same winged S symbol they had seen on the gateposts. Only for a moment had Saskia assumed that this was the ancient name of the ranch. T.R. had rebranded the place. Literally rebranded, since the Flying S logo was a mark designed to be burned into the hide of a cow. The S was obviously Sulfur.

Eshma happily pulled on her baseball cap, first drawing her ponytail through the little opening in the back. The Cinderella of last night had reverted to the studious and efficient nerd girl. She was just socially awkward enough that she had walked up to their table a few minutes ago and sat down without so much as a “by your leave” and a complete absence of any of that “Your Majesty” nonsense. Saskia was pleased that she’d done so and made a mental note to ask her, later, about those computational climate models that seemed to be her stock-in-trade. She had gotten the impression from Alastair that risk analysts in the financial world were basically unable to do their jobs until they got numbers from people like Eshma. They viewed the Eshmas of the world as a cross between all-knowing supergeniuses and borderline charlatans reading the future from sheep guts. In any case, the respect with which he and Mark Furlong treated Eshma was conspicuous.

Amelia’s gaze was fixed on her new baseball cap, but she wasn’t really seeing it. She was still processing Rufus’s defense-in-depth argument. “You could snip the wires and drive through anywhere—” she began.

“At three miles an hour,” Rufus said, completing her sentence. “Might as well get out and walk. At least get you some exercise.”

“Some vehicles could go faster.”

“Tracked vehicles,” Rufus nodded. “Even they would break down. Fixing them used to be my job. But I don’t think ol’ T.R. is planning to stop an armored brigade. If it comes to that, it means his strategy failed on a whole other level.” He looked to Saskia as he said that. One of those moments, which she wished she never had to put up with, when she abruptly stopped being an ordinary participant in the conversation and was reminded that she was a queen.

The train had dropped to a deliberate speed, perhaps fifty kilometers an hour, as it felt its way across the unbelievably vast ranch—one-quarter the size of the Netherlands—on tracks that had not been built to a modern standard. If Saskia was any judge of such things, the rails themselves were in good repair—T.R. had upgraded them—but the line itself had been laid out long ago with sharp turns and steep grades. Most of the grades were uphill. Her ears popped more than once. She already knew that their destination was more than a kilometer, but less than a mile, above sea level. Not high enough that you’d really notice the thin air, but enough to buy some small advantage for the project.

They passed an airstrip. Parked there were two bizjets, three single-engine prop planes, and a helicopter. Willem had already told her that a Dutch jet would be landing there later to take them home tomorrow. So that helped her fix her location on the map. They were going southwest, directly toward the Rio Grande. The range of mountains where T.R. had built his facility was the last watershed one would cross before descending into that river’s valley and reaching the U.S./Mexico border. The Flying S Ranch ran all the way to the river’s bank.

“That off to the right, in the distance, is the Sierra Diablo,” T.R. announced, apparently referring to some craggy mountains north of them that somehow managed to look even more forbidding than T.R.’s property. “Site of the last armed conflict between Texas Rangers and Apaches in 1881.”

At the very end of the journey, the railroad track and the road became one, a strip of pavement with embedded rails, as they funneled through a short tunnel that had been blasted through a rock spur. The spur had nearly vertical sides and served as a natural barrier between the northern expanse of the Bar S, which was mostly alluvial flatland, and more broken and rugged terrain beyond that straddled the crest of the mountain range. Once they’d emerged from that tunnel—which the train passed through at no more than a brisk walking pace—they entered into a natural bowl, a few kilometers long, embraced by the primary crest of the mountains, which now loomed above them, and the smaller but more precipitous offshoot spur they’d just tunneled through. The railroad track curved round and sidled along the base of the spur before terminating. This was the end of the line. The curve enabled them all to peer forward out the windows and see that, ahead of them, the freight cars had come to a halt adjacent to various cargo handling facilities in what was apparently the main complex. This was underwhelming visually, but Saskia knew from satellite pictures that most of it was belowground. Separated from that complex by a stretch of open, uneven ground was a neat village of mobile homes, surrounded by a wall of shipping containers. It reminded Saskia of military outposts she’d visited in places such as Afghanistan.

“Welcome! We made it!” T.R. announced, and then paused for a brief round of polite applause. “You’ll notice a distinct lack of luxury accommodations. Or accommodation of any sort, really. That’s what this train is for! Not just to get y’all here, but to keep y’all comfy during your stay! For your staff, there’s plenty of space in yonder bunkhouse.” T.R. waved toward the village of mobile homes. “You are of course free to get out and walk around. Look for the individuals in the white cowboy hats! They are the good guys! And gals! You should know as much from the movies! They are here to help you and keep you safe from rattlesnakes, dehydration, hyperthermia, hypothermia, and other unique and special hazards of the Chihuahuan Desert.” Saskia looked around and noticed that several of the event staff had indeed put on white cowboy hats.

“Brown hats are ranch staff—also very helpful,” T.R. continued. “The guys and gals in the black hats are also here to keep you safe, in another sense which is perhaps hinted at by the color of their headgear. They are bad dudes and dudettes. They will not be bad to y’all, of course, but they will be bad in your service and for your protection should any issue with trespassers of the two-legged sort arise. They are, as a rule, less approachable than the white hats or the brown hats. But you may certainly approach them if you need anything. Just don’t sneak up on them. They hate that.”

The Biggest Gun in the World was so big that it had its own elevator, shoehorned into a space between two of its barrels. The elevator could only accommodate three people in comfort. So T.R. did the tour in two shifts: first Sylvester and Michiel, and, an hour later, Bob and Saskia.

Only a few buildings on the whole site rose to more than a single story aboveground. The most prominent was the head frame: a term from the mining industry referring to the aboveground machinery that bestrode a mine shaft. It was maybe ten meters high and consisted largely of open steel framing through which large reels of cable, motors, and other lifting-and-hoisting sorts of gear were visible. Pipes and cables converged on it from other parts of the complex and plunged down into the shaft.

Of course you couldn’t dig a shaft without raking up the rock and dirt you were displacing. This material—“spoil”—had been distributed around the complex and used to buttress, or to completely bury, outlying facilities such as tanks, processing plants, and buildings that seemed to have a lot of expensive people in them (“command and control” in T.R.-speak). Without being terribly obvious about it, the designers had, in other words, hardened the site. Rufus, at a glance, had identified some of the spoil-piles as “revetments,” obliging Saskia to look up the word. It meant a sort of blast wall built around a potential target to protect from near misses by artillery. It didn’t take a military expert to know that a cruise missile could obliterate anything on the surface. But it seemed proof against small, furtive attacks such as bomb-bearing drones or mountaintop snipers. Large areas were screened by nets with strips of fabric woven through them. Their purpose wasn’t entirely clear to her, but they would definitely stop drones, provide much needed shade, and make things complicated for surveillance satellites.

Projecting straight up from the top of the head frame was a neat array of six tubes. Each of these was fattened at its top by a construct that Saskia could not help likening to the flash suppressor on the muzzle of a carbine.

A white-hat drove her and the lord mayor in a small ATV to the head frame’s ground-level entrance, where T.R. awaited them, sporting a huge ornate Flying S belt buckle. Looking up from this perspective it was evident that those six tubes were arranged in a radial pattern, like the barrels on a Gatling gun. They ran straight down into the mine shaft. Because the six barrels, at about one meter, were so much smaller in diameter than the shaft, which was big enough to swallow a small house, there was abundant space in between them for other stuff. The exact allocation of that space had obviously been the topic of much brain work among engineers. Through a kind of verbal osmosis, Saskia had picked up a new bit of technical jargon: “routed systems,” which was engineer-speak for long skinny things like pipes and wires that had to go from one place to another. The results of the lucubrations of the routed systems engineers were summarized in a cross-sectional diagram posted near the door: a big circle with the six smaller circles of the gun barrels evenly spaced around its periphery, and everything else a fractal jigsaw puzzle of advanced industrial cramming and jamming. But the biggest single rectangle in the whole diagram was the elevator shaft. Second biggest was a circle labeled “shell hoist.”

“Y’all do your homework?” T.R. asked, not the least bit seriously, as they got into the elevator. The outward-facing door was solid, but the walls were open steel mesh.

He was referring to a set of YouTube links he’d shared with them last night on the topic of how mine shafts were dug.

“I actually did click through,” Bob admitted. “I’ve a toddler-like weakness for construction equipment.”

Saskia shook her head. “I don’t.”

“Start at the top,” T.R. said. “Place charges. Blow shit up. Scoop out the spoil. Repeat. The whole rig for setting the charges and scooping up the spoil gets lowered into the shaft by this”—he slapped one of the steel members of the head frame—“as you go. That’s the point of this”—slap, slap—“to move stuff up and down. Line the walls with reinforced concrete a few feet at a time on your way down. Pretty simple really. Just got to keep at it.”

He pulled the elevator’s door shut behind them. The three of them fit into it without touching each other. Four would have been a crowd. “Anyone claustrophobic?” T.R. asked. This was merely a formal courtesy, as event planners had already asked Saskia (and presumably Bob) this question three times in the last twenty-four hours. Both she and Bob shook their heads. T.R. hit the “down” button, overhead machinery whined, and they began to descend. “We had a head start on digging this hole,” T.R. continued, “because of an old abandoned coal mine that was already here. But it was only four hundred feet deep, and not wide enough.”

“But you just had to use it anyway, I’ll wager,” Saskia said. “Because of the symbolism.”

T.R. nodded, but didn’t respond other than to get a slightly mischievous look on his face. Their surroundings were clearly observable through the lift’s steel mesh walls. The shaft became more and more crammed, as per the diagrams, during the first few meters’ descent, as various underground pipes, conduits, ducts, and cables sprouted through its walls and turned vertically downward. Past a certain point, though, it didn’t get any more crowded, because it couldn’t. Horizontal stripes and numbers had been painted on things so that you could tell you were moving. A panel on the lift’s wall gave the depth belowground in meters and showed their progress on a cutaway diagram.

“Not the world’s fastest elevator,” T.R. remarked. “Obviously, the device is not manned when it’s running. It is as automated as a zillion bucks’ worth of robotics can make it. So whisking people up and down was not a priority for us.”

“And if I understand the nature of your plan—” the lord mayor began to ask.

“Our plan, Bob. Our plan.”

“It will be running all the time. Nonstop.”

T.R. nodded. “The design spec is for it to run for two years with ninety percent uptime before it needs an overhaul.”

Bob furrowed his brow. “How do you overhaul something like this?”

“There’s always a way,” T.R. answered. “But the real answer is, you probably don’t. Just fill it up with dirt and build another one. Remember, in two years the world is gonna be a different place. A cooler place, for one thing.” He looked at Saskia. “I had my eye on some of your old coal mines for a while. Down in the southeastern corner of your country. Some nice deep shafts there. Saves some digging. Great symbolism. Decided against it though.”

“I think I know the place you mean,” Saskia said. “Very close to the German border. The neighbors would complain about the noise.”

T.R. nodded. “The Greens would lose their fucking minds.”

“They will anyway,” Bob said.

The lift slowed as it approached 215 meters below ground level. Their view was improving as, it seemed, some of the routed systems got routed elsewhere. It was now possible to see the six steel barrels of the gun arrayed around them. The lift eased to a stop. Through a window in its door they could see into a well-lit chamber beyond. It wasn’t a large space but it was definitely external to the main shaft. “See, down here at the bottom we did a little more blasting and hollowed out some extra volume,” T.R. said. He opened the door and led them into the side shaft. It was not much larger than the bedroom Saskia had slept in last night on the train. The walls were bare limestone, still bearing the marks of the pneumatic tools that had carved them out. The floor was a grate through which they could look straight down into another story below. No wonder she’d been warned not to wear heels. Two men and a woman stood against the back wall wearing air tanks on their backs connected to respirator masks dangling free on their chests. “Safety first!” T.R. said, waving at them. “This area has plumbing for four different gases, three of which can kill you. One, natural gas—basically methane, which we get for free from a well right here on the ranch, about ten miles away. That is the fuel we burn to power the gun. Two, air, which we use to burn the methane and which, incidentally, keeps us alive. Three, hydrogen, which is the light gas we compress to drive the projectiles up the barrels. The air in the peashooter. We obtain it by cracking natural gas in a plant upstairs. Either hydrogen or methane would cause an explosion if it were to mix with air, as the result of a leak or malfunction, and be ignited by a spark. So, four: as a backup system we have stored down here a large quantity of compressed argon, which is an inert gas that does not support combustion. Or life. Now, to be clear, the methane and hydrogen lines have been totally disconnected. We’re not stupid. There’s no way such a leak could happen right now. If one were to occur, it would be detected by these here doohickeys.” He indicated a white box mounted to the stone ceiling that looked like a smoke detector as designed by the Pentagon. Saskia now noticed more of them all over the place, merrily blinking. “If that were to happen, an alarm would sound and argon gas would flood this whole volume and drive out the air and render the atmosphere non-combustible.”

“And then we would all suffocate,” Saskia said.

“Good news, bad news!” T.R. confirmed. “That’s why we have portable air supplies. Each of these fine people is wearing one and has a second one handy. If the alarm sounds, they’ll do what it always says to do in those goddamned pre-flight announcements.”

“Got it,” Bob said. “So, if we hear a loud noise, we should wait for one of them to get after us with an air tank.”

“You shouldn’t have to wait long,” T.R. assured them, “and the argon won’t hurt you while you’re waiting. It’s—”

“An element,” Saskia said.

“Bingo. An inert gas. A noble gas, Your Majesty. There will be plenty of time to ride the elevator to the top, where we will serve drinks.”

“Sounds like my kind of emergency!” Bob said—a joke at his own expense.

“Any questions? Good. Having gotten the safety briefing out of the way, I propose to show you how the Biggest Gun in the World works from the bottom up, as this is the easiest way to understand it. And we are not quite at the bottom yet. This is Level Zero. I am told you both feel comfortable with ladders. Let’s put that to the test by descending to Level Minus One and beyond.”

A ladder was bolted to the stone wall, descending through a human-diameter hole in the grating. T.R. waited as one of the safety crew climbed down it, then followed with a certain amount of comical slapstick grunting and groaning intended to put them at ease. “Keep going!” he said to everyone. “’Til you cain’t go no more!”

Saskia and Bob took turns with the other crew members in descending to Level Minus One, then Minus Two, and so forth. At each level Saskia looked out at what was in the adjoining shaft, but after Minus One there was nothing to see except a blank wall of steel, curved to fit perfectly in the shaft. “The cylinder,” T.R. said at one point, noting her curiosity.

Minus Four sported a massive round hatch, a meter in diameter, let into the wall of that cylinder. Minus Five had nothing but routed systems of the smaller and more intricate type: sensors, probably networked to computers elsewhere. At Minus Six, the ladder stopped and they bottomed out on a natural limestone floor. “This is the base of the excavation,” T.R. said. “This is all the farther we dug. And this here”—he rapped a knuckle against the cylinder wall—“is the base of the cylinder, where the methane burns.”

Another round hatch was let into the steel wall here, and it was ajar, with an extension cord running into it from an outlet on the wall. T.R., with help from a crew member, shoved on the hatch, which was slow to get moving but then glided serenely. It opened inward. Saskia could see that it was designed to withstand internal pressure, like a bung on a barrel. The space beyond was illuminated well, if harshly, by an ordinary work light plugged into the extension cord. T.R. bent over and stepped through, beckoning Saskia to follow.

“The wall is so thick!” she exclaimed as she was stepping over the threshold. “To withstand pressure?”

“Ain’t really as thick as it looks,” T.R. demurred. “It’s got a cooling jacket all around it, coupla inches thick, but hollow—we pump water through it to keep it from overheating when it is bang, bang, banging away.”

“That would explain the cooling tower I noticed topside,” Bob said.

“Yep, and a lot of pipes and pumps along the way.”

They were now in a steel-walled chamber about five meters in diameter. Its floor was concave, a flattened dome, so they had to mind their footing. Below the level of the port, at about knee height, it was ringed with an array of stainless-steel orifices. Other than that the walls were featureless to a height of about four meters above their heads, where a sturdy steel ring had been welded into place, projecting just a few centimeters inward from the wall. Directly above that was a flattish dome that completely sealed off the portion of the cylinder above it. “That thing moves. You’re looking at the underside of the piston,” T.R. explained. “Down here, where we are, is where we explode shit.” He bent down and tapped one of the orifices. “These are coaxial. They let in compressed methane and compressed air at the same time. They let it in fast to keep reload time to a minimum. When we get the amount we want, we plug our ears and spark it off with these.” He pointed out a tiny detail Saskia hadn’t noticed before: little white ceramic knobs between the nozzles, with tiny metal parts projecting from the ends. “Plain old ordinary spark plugs from the car parts department at T.R. Mick’s. Volume discount.”

There wasn’t much else to say. They took turns stooping down and exiting the port. T.R., the last one out, carried the work light with him and pulled the extension cord out in his wake. The crew members pulled the hatch shut and latched it while others ascended the ladder to Minus Four, where earlier they’d seen another port-and-hatch. Entering into this one—which was just the upper portion of the same cylinder—they found themselves again on sloped footing, as they were now standing on the top of the domed piston whose underside they’d been gazing up at a few minutes ago.

Once they’d all found places to stand, T.R. said, “This here upper part will be filled with hydrogen gas, which is the working fluid that actually pushes the shell up the barrel. The physics of it is beyond me, but they say that the maximum velocity of the projectile can’t be any faster than the speed of sound in the gas that is doing the pushing. The speed of sound in light gases like hydrogen and helium is higher than that in air. Enough to make a difference for our purposes. We looked at helium. The world’s helium supply actually comes from up Amarillo way. It’s safer, but it’s expensive and hard to work with. If you build one of these at the doorstep of Germany, Your Majesty, you’ll want to take a hard look at helium. I can help you get some.”

“Very considerate of you as always, T.R.!”

“Anyways, we settled on hydrogen. Some of it’s gonna leak out and burn, but it’s a desert, so who cares? It’s easy to make more, on-site, from natural gas. So, at the same time the methane-air mix is filling the chamber below, we fill this volume with a certain amount of H₂. When the combustion chamber”—he pointed straight down—“goes boom, this piston we’re standing on gets forced upward, compressing the hydrogen. Which only has one way out.” He drew their attention to the top of the cylinder, ten meters above their heads, where it tapered inward like an upside-down funnel to an orifice in the middle about the size of a manhole. If the entire cylinder was a bottle, that was its mouth. “Let’s see where it goes!” he suggested, touching off another round of extension cord wrangling, hatch closing, and ladder climbing that took them up above the top of the massive steel cylinder to Minus One.

If the lower levels had been straight twentieth-century tech with their spark plugs and pistons, Minus One was all modern robotics. Slightly below them was a massive construct that could only be the “mouth” of the “bottle”—the upside-down funnel that accepted and channeled the pulse of hydrogen gas being driven upward by the rising piston. A short distance above that were the bottoms of the six barrels, which were simply cut off at their bases, open to the room. In between those obvious and easy-to-understand elements was an elaborate, massive, rotating contraption that, if Saskia was any judge of these things, had consumed the lion’s share of the engineering resources. She couldn’t really puzzle it out until T.R. issued a command that caused a vertical conveyor system to go into motion. This thing—“Shell hoist” on the cross-sectional diagram—had run parallel to the elevator all the way down from ground level. It served a similar purpose to the lift, but it was smaller and it ran much faster. After it had been whirring along for a minute or so, it slowed.

A giant bullet descended into the room. The bullet was a bit longer than Saskia was tall, and somewhat fatter than a beer keg. It was machined aluminum in some places, carbon fiber in others. It had a Flying S logo and was stenciled “RETURN TO FLYING S RANCH - REWARD” in English and Spanish. It glided down past them on the hoist and was seized by a massive robot arm, which pulled it away, indexed around, and fed it point-first into the base of one of the gun barrels. Another mechanism, pushing up from below, then rammed the shell upward until it had completely disappeared into the barrel. Something went kerchunk. The robot arm retracted, but the shell did not fall out.

“Now, let’s say we want to send it on its way,” T.R. said. He nodded to a technician, who pressed some buttons.

The whole massive robotic platform went into motion, pirouetting around the central axis of the main shaft. Saskia couldn’t help thinking of the big cylinder in a cowboy’s revolver. It had a single large orifice in its top, offset to one side, matching the diameter of the gun barrels. When this was positioned below the breech of the barrel that had just been loaded, the whole thing rose upward in a swift, smooth movement until the connection was made.

“That’s how the hydrogen flows to the barrel,” Bob guessed.

“There’s now a direct unimpeded channel between the two,” T.R. confirmed. “If you were Spiderman you could go back down to Minus Four, into the same port we just used. You could climb up the cylinder wall, through that funnel we looked at, and up a short, oblique, snergly tube to where you could reach up into that barrel and touch the base of that shell we just now loaded.”

“And it’s all hot?” Saskia asked.

T.R. nodded. “Good point, Your Majesty. The shell was pre-heated above, and it’s still hot now—hot enough to keep the sulfur in its molten state. For as long as it sits in that barrel waiting to be fired, it will be kept hot by electrical heaters built into the barrel walls. The space on the other side of this window is quite warm—and it’s about to get warmer.”

“How many of those barrels are loaded?” Bob asked.

“As of now? Six of six. All we gotta do is get out of here and turn on the gas.” He checked his watch. “And then we should be ready for this month’s meeting of the Flying S Ranch Employees’ Model Rocketry Club!”

The elongated bowl, four thousand feet above sea level, in which this complex had been constructed, was referred to by T.R. as Pina2bo (“Pin a two bo”). Anyone familiar with the literature on climate change and geoengineering would get the joke. Pinatubo was the name of a volcano in the Philippines that had exploded in 1991. It had blasted fifteen million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The result had been a couple of years’ beautiful sunsets and reduced global temperatures. The two phenomena were directly related. The sulfur from the volcano had eventually spread out into a veil of tiny droplets of H₂SO₄. Light from the sun hit those little spheres and bounced. Some of it bounced directly back into space—which accounted for the planet-wide cooling, as energy that never entered the troposphere in the first place couldn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect. Other light caromed off those droplets, billiard-ball style, and came into the troposphere at various oblique angles. Since that was where humans lived, those who lifted their gaze saw that light as a general brightness of the sky. This was hard to notice in the daytime but quite obvious when the sun was near the horizon, the sky was generally dark, and the light was red.

Pinatubo was hardly the first volcano to explode during the time that humans had lived upon the earth. Earlier such events had been followed by cold snaps and awesome sunsets that had entered the historical record in anecdotal form. But Pinatubo was the first, and so far the only really big one, that had happened during the modern era when its results could be scientifically studied.

After a smaller eruption in the 1960s a high-altitude plane had flown through the plume and come back with a residue on its windshield that an Australian scientist had evaluated by licking it. “Painfully acid” was his verdict. He’d experienced exactly the same sensation as Texas oilmen sampling sour crude on their fingers. So there was already evidence, prior to Pinatubo, that volcanoes hurled sulfur compounds into the stratosphere. The 1991 blast found scientists ready to make more sophisticated measurements than windshield licking, and provided the basis for decades of research and modeling of so-called solar geoengineering—the term for any climate mitigation scheme that was based on bouncing part of the sun’s rays back into space.

So Pina2bo was what T.R. called the complex where he planned to do basically the same thing, on a smaller scale. Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO₂ into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes. Since the stuff began to fall out of the atmosphere after a few years, the best that Pina2bo could ever achieve was just a fraction of the real Mount Pinatubo eruption. But enough to begin making a difference. And if the first one worked, more of them could be built.

The gun complex—complete with its natural gas cracker (a sort of mini-refinery), its cooling tower, its tank farm, and its plant for loading and prepping the huge sulfur-filled bullets—was at one end of the valley. “Bunkhouse,” a miniature town, was at the other end. Between was a no-man’s-land, mostly open space, perhaps amounting to a square kilometer of broken ground. It seemed to be used for any purposes that didn’t fit neatly into one end or the other. There was a track around its perimeter scoured by ATVs. Piles of coal that had been heaped up a hundred years ago and scantly colonized by weeds and cactus. A makeshift shooting range, with bullet-ridden pieces of junk strewn along the base of a slope. Huddles of heavy equipment parked out in the open. And a picnic area consisting of a few aluminum tables sheltered from the sun’s fury by canopies and linked to Bunkhouse by a faint trail in the dirt. Though even in dim light you’d be able to follow it just by using bright red beware of rattlesnakes signs as a bread crumb trail. Canopies and picnic tables alike were lashed to massive concrete blocks or bolted directly to the stony ground.

The Flying S Ranch Employees’ Model Rocketry Club held its meeting in the picnic area two hours after the conclusion of Bob and Saskia’s tour. It was unusually well attended, and so the event planners had erected aluminum bleachers and pitched more sun canopies. About fifty meters away, on open ground, a folding table had been set up, and beyond that was a row of five contraptions with whippy vertical rods sticking up out of them to various heights, none rising to more than about three meters above the ground. Threaded onto each rod, and resting atop the contraption that served as its base, was a miniature rocket. Three of these were tiny children’s toys. The last two were considerably larger. The biggest was maybe a hand span in diameter and twice the height of a man.

Yellow caution tape had been strung between orange cones to surround all this with a perimeter. A few children, presumably the offspring of Flying S staff, had been credentialed to step over—or, for younger rocket scientists, under—the tape. To judge from the nature of the paint jobs, these kids were the creators of the three smaller rockets. They were doing a creditable job of keeping extreme excitement under control. The two bigger rockets were being fussed over by adults.

Saskia had not expected such a range of ages, such small-town wholesomeness. It stood to reason that the ranch in general, and Pina2bo in particular, would have full-time staff, and that some of those would have families. Willem had shown her satellite imagery of the place. This had revealed clusters of mobile homes outside of the Pina2bo valley but within driving range. Some of the employees must commute for some distance. She’d been in Texas long enough to know that driving an hour or more was nothing to these people. So there was a sort of extended community here of—just guessing—maybe a thousand people all told? Spread thin over the vastness of the Chihuahuan Desert, they were held together by gravel roads and dusty pickup trucks and they came together for events like this one.

Inevitably T.R. came out to say a few words to the crowd on the bleachers over a PA system, which inevitably malfunctioned and obliged him to holler through cupped hands. Refreshments were being served to the crowd on the bleachers.

“Free earplugs for everyone!” was how T.R. began. He wasn’t kidding; ELog people were handing them out from salad bowls. “The Rocketry Club has been holding these events every month for almost two years—rain or shine!” The rain part was apparently a joke. Saskia was slow to get it but the Texans were suitably amused. “It is a very safety-conscious organization! Lou here is the range officer. He is going to cover some important technicalities about federal regulation of airspace. First, though, let’s launch some rockets!”

Lou, a cowboy-hatted engineer in his fifties, sheepishly came to the fore. The PA system had been dialed in and so he was able to speak into a microphone, which was fortunate since he lacked the stentorian YouTube-trained diction of T.R. “First, Jo Anne will launch an Estes Alpha,” he announced. His complete lack of awareness that no one in the crowd knew what that meant, and that some further explanation might be in order, confirmed his status in Saskia’s mind as some kind of inveterate geek—probably one of those people T.R. had poached from the Johnson Space Center. There was some mumbling and fumbling at the table as a girl of perhaps nine executed a procedure with some switches and wires. Lou held the mike in front of Jo Anne as she counted down in a thready but spirited voice from ten. Then the smallest of the rockets gave out a little hiss and leapt from its launch rod on a spurt of smoke. The engine burned for less than a second. The rocket, barely visible, coasted for a few seconds more, then separated into two pieces and deployed an orange parachute. “Congratulations, Jo Anne, on her first launch!” Lou intoned as applause died away and the Estes Alpha began drifting toward the ground. “We’ll retrieve that later. For now, the range remains closed!”

Two more such rockets, each a little bigger than the last, were launched in short order by other children. “And the range is open!” Lou then announced. This was apparently the signal for the kids to run out there and find their rockets among the cacti and the rattlesnakes. While they did so, Lou delivered the promised peroration on federal airspace regulatory policy. “Those rockets y’all just saw can’t go higher than fifteen hundred feet,” he said. “The engines is just too small, they ain’t got the impulse. Impulse is a little old scalar variable defined as the product of—” He noticed T.R. making a throat-cutting gesture and broke off before he could supply the mathematical formula. “Point is, the FAA don’t care ’cause we ain’t messing with their airspace! But these two big boys still on the pads here,” he said, waving at the remaining rockets, “that is a different story! These have . . .” He trailed off, performing a mental calculation. “Sixteen thousand, three hundred and eight-four times the impulse of Jo Anne’s little old Estes Alpha! They can go high!” He pronounced it “hah.” “So hah they could maybe hit a plane, or vice versa. So every month when we hold a meeting of the Flying S Ranch Employees Model Rocketry Club, you know what we gotta do?” It was probably meant as a rhetorical question but still elicited a smattering of “No! What?” from the bleachers. This knocked Lou off his stride but he soldiered on. “We gotta get us a permit from Uncle Sam! It ain’t that hard. They’re real nice about it. We fill out a little old form says we are fixing to launch a couple of high-power model rockets from the Flying S Ranch on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time and you better spread the word to all the pilots not to fly over the area! And that’s exactly what they do! Just like that, the FAA sends out a Notice to Airmen and warns all the pilots to steer clear of the area and keep that box of airspace—you can think of it as a box—empty. Now, some of these cowboys round here have pilot licenses. I guess there’s Meskin drug runners too, but we don’t care if we hit them. Anyhow, they don’t bother reading the Notice and come flying around anyway, so we go belt-and-suspenders on it. We got watchers posted all round, watching the sky to warn us of any of them interlopers. If they tell us the sky’s clear, which it usually is, we’re good to go!” This seemed an obvious applause line, so the crowd made scattered “Woo!” noises while Lou conferred with a younger club member who was wearing a headset and tending to a radio—or, at any rate, a mess of cabled-together laptops and mystery boxes that seemed to answer to the same purpose as a radio. This culminated in a lot of serious nodding. “Skies are clear! Visibility is excellent! Sheng’s gonna launch a high-power rocket, take some pictures of us from ten thousand feet. Say cheese! Take it away, Sheng!”

Sheng, a man of East Asian ancestry, didn’t have much to say, but did show awareness of the crowd’s dwindling attention span by opting for a truncated countdown that started at three. His rocket, the second largest, howled off the pad on a considerably larger stick of yellow-white fire and very rapidly disappeared from sight.

“Sheng’ll go out in an ATV and try to find that thing later and post the movie it took,” Lou said, as Sheng awkwardly high-fived a couple of his buddies. “But now our main event: a sounding rocket that’s gonna top out at somewhere round a hundred thousand feet and send back telemetry about winds in the upper atmosphere and lower stratosphere. Helps us calculate windage on any giant bullets that might be headed up that way.” He conferred with the radio guy again. To judge from their body language, the skies were still clear.

This rocket had a larger crew of important-seeming engineers, most of whom were in White Label logo-wear, others in Flying S livery. The distinction was a little blurry, since they all worked for T.R. When it launched, it roared and screamed and took slightly longer to get going, leaving an impressive column of smoke behind. A few seconds after it disappeared into the blue heaven, the valley resonated with a thunderclap. “Sonic boom,” Lou explained. “Get used to it!”

Get used to it. Saskia hadn’t thought seriously about the problem of sonic booms, but hearing one in the flesh focused her attention. She tapped Willem on the shoulder. “Could you pull up those images of the ranch—the whole ranch—again, please?”

A few moments later he handed her a tablet showing the view of the Flying S Ranch from space. Pina2bo was understated, largely because of the netting, which among other things served as camouflage. But once she had found it, she centered it on the screen and zoomed out until the outlying settlements—the bedroom communities, as it were—came in view. The clusters of mobile dwellings and prefabs where the employees lived. It was obvious now that these were arranged around an arc at a certain distance from Pina2bo. It was interrupted on its southwest limb by the Rio Grande—there were no settlements in Mexico. Or were there? She saw a small cluster of trailers on the Mexican side, right along the imaginary radius. “Most of these people,” she concluded, “are housed outside of sonic boom range. So they can get some sleep!”

After the launch of the sounding rocket, it was all just nerds looking at computer screens and virtual displays for several minutes. Spectators drifted to the refreshment table and to a row of oven-hot portable toilets lined up nearby. Everyone seemed well hydrated and cheerful but no one knew exactly what was going on. No one, that is, except for T.R., who was using a nearby SUV as a makeshift command center. Senior engineers were jogging back and forth to it as they were summoned or dismissed, and T.R. could be seen gesticulating, talking on the phone, consulting laptops and tablets thrust in front of him by aides. Finally he emerged from the SUV and trudged over to the PA system. His body language was heavy. He had an air of resignation. So Saskia was expecting bad news. But she was wrong about that. T.R.’s body language was that of Caesar sloshing across the Rubicon.

“As long as the FAA has been so good as to clear the airspace,” he said, “we’re gonna launch some more stuff. Might want to plug your ears.” He set the microphone down, turned his back on the crowd, and faced the complex at the other end of the valley. The crowd grew silent. An alarm klaxon could be heard in the distance. T.R. stepped carefully over the caution tape, strolled out into the open near the rocket launchers, and checked his watch.

A spark of light gleamed from the top of the head frame, then winked out. A few seconds later the valley was walloped by a sonic boom. T.R. was looking almost vertically up into the sky, but there was nothing to see. He checked his watch again, then turned back and indicated the microphone. An ELog employee snatched it from the table and ran it over to him. “Next one’s in seven minutes,” he said. “You’ll want to come out into the open if you are hoping to see anything.”

People slowly, then suddenly evacuated the bleachers and came toward T.R., stepping out of the canopies’ shade and into direct sunlight. The caution tape was severed and allowed to flutter in the breeze.

“The muzzle flash’ll catch your eye,” T.R. said. “But if you look at that, you’ll miss it. Shell’s already long gone. You got to look into the space above. Next one’s in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .”

Saskia just glimpsed it, moving straight up at fantastic velocity, as the muzzle flared and extinguished below.

A third barrel fired seven and a half minutes later, and this time she was able to track it for a few seconds before it became too small for the naked eye to see. Each launch was followed by another sonic boom equal to the first.

“Holy shit,” said the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor.

“I know,” said Daia Chand, next to him. “Even after all this, I didn’t actually believe he was going to pull the trigger.”

“It’s happening,” Alastair said. “After all this—it’s actually happening. I sort of can’t believe it. We are fixing the climate.”

“Changing it, anyway,” Eshma returned.

“This’ll bring the temperature down?” Rufus asked.

“If he can keep firing that gun,” Saskia said.

“Sounds like fixing to me,” Rufus concluded.

Not far away, the three Venetians were engaging in a round robin of embracing and kissing. Sylvester was standing with his arms folded, looking dumbfounded. After the third sonic boom, he walked up to T.R. and shook his hand, grinning broadly under the brim of his borrowed cowboy hat.

The Biggest Gun in the World fired each of its barrels three times, launching a total of eighteen shells, before it fell silent. The test lasted for a couple of hours, not counting shell recovery time. Well before the end of it, Saskia had begun to feel dizzy from the heat. She and many others retreated to the air-conditioned comfort of the train cars to watch the proceedings on video screens.

“So this is what it looks like with an N of eighteen,” Alastair mused over a bottle of Corona. Saskia had spent enough time with him to recognize this as statistician-speak. Launching a single shell—an N of 1—would have taught T.R. a lot. Launching two would have taught him a little more. An N of eighteen was big enough to do some statistical analysis and get a picture of the range of outcomes.

The positions of the eighteen shells were plotted and updated on a real-time map displayed on a big monitor. They were spread out like beads on a string along a trajectory that rose straight up from the Flying S Ranch and then spiraled down through Mexican airspace. They all seemed to be following the same basic flight plan, like cars in an aerial train. Each had two video cameras, one aimed forward and the other aimed back. The twin feeds from one shell were up on the video screens. They couldn’t have been more different. The view forward was of a black sky above a curved horizon limned in blue. The view back was an endless series of flashes, which became so visually annoying that the pane had to be minimized. But it confirmed that the sulfur-burning pulse jet had ignited and was farting away.

At one end of the car T.R. was doing an interview with a tame journalist. With a couple of beers in him, he had become amusingly and colorfully exasperated by this person’s stubborn misunderstanding of the muzzle flash. “It is just a by-product. We would eliminate it if we could. If we used helium, it wouldn’t happen at all—and it wouldn’t matter because the purpose of that gas is just to be like the air in a peashooter. Unavoidably, some of it leaks out of the muzzle after the shell has departed. We control that as much as we can with check valves and such. But it’s safer to burn it off than to just have it drifting around god knows where.” He caught the eye of an aide who seemed to specialize in media communications. “We need more animations or something to better illustrate that—it is just gonna be a chronic misunderstanding.”

Another invited journalist asked a question that Saskia couldn’t quite hear. T.R. nodded. “The gun just lobs the shell up to the altitude we want—the stratosphere. About eighty thousand feet. Where sulfur does no harm—and much good. Now, at that point it’s just gonna fall straight back down unless we do something. We could just detonate it with an explosive charge and it would disperse the sulfur. Hopefully some of it would burn. That was actually plan A. But our aerospace engineers didn’t think that was fancy enough and so they ginned up the idea for a sulfur-burning engine that can keep the shell airborne for a little while. It’s got the worst performance characteristics you can imagine but we don’t care—it gives us a few minutes for the shell to remain at altitude and disperse the SO₂ more widely where the jet stream can catch it and begin spreading it around. Then the shell runs out of fuel and glides to the ground and we try to catch it.”

T.R. drew the journalists’ attention to a feed from another camera, this one near the ground, aimed at a stretch of ranch property covered by nets stretched between poles. “This here is all there is to it,” T.R. said. “Same as you see at the circus. It’s a few miles from here, down toward the Rio Grande.”

There followed a few minutes’ futzing around with video feeds and camera angles that only gave a helter-skelter picture of what was going on. “The point,” T.R. eventually said, after his frustration had reached a crescendo and then collapsed in a farrago of basically humorous cursing and hat-throwing, “is that we are recycling the goddamn shells. We catch them in the net and toss them in the back of a truck and drive them back to the reloading facility. Providing jobs, good safe jobs, on the ground. Come out here if you want to see what I mean.”

Saskia and others followed as T.R. led the reporter out of the Beer Car and across a few meters of open ground to a flat area where another one of those ubiquitous pop-up sun canopies had been pitched. Beneath it, a giant bullet rested on a display stand. T.R. shooed a white hat out of the way in mid demo. “Most of the shell is hollow. Empty space. It’s a container for sulfur,” he said. “That being the entire point.” He patted its base, which was flat. “This here is just a sabot for the hydrogen to push against while it’s in the gun barrel. It falls off immediately and we retrieve it.” He yanked the sabot off and chucked it on the ground. Revealed was a conical hole penetrating into the middle of the shell. “The nozzle bell where combusted sulfur dioxide shoots out of the combustion chamber.” He walked around to the pointed nose of the bullet, and simply yanked it off. “Another disposable part. Falls off in the stratosphere, comes down like a badminton birdie. We find it and reuse it. Or not.” Revealed under the nose cone was another tapering hole, like the intake of a jet engine. “Where the air comes in.” He stepped back. By the removal of the sabot and the nose cone, the bullet had been transformed into a jet engine. “Now it can generate thrust by exhausting sulfur dioxide, which has the interesting side effect of saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars from the effects of global climate change. But from a strictly aerospace engineering point of view we have a problem, which is that it can’t generate nearly enough thrust to stay aloft for long.” He opened a hatch on the top of the shell to reveal a shallow but broad compartment just underneath, wrapping partway around the upper part of the shell’s cylindrical body. It was full of orange fabric. “This is too unwieldy to display here, so here’s a picture of what it looks like when it’s deployed.” He gestured toward a poster, mounted on a slab of foam core zip-tied to the canopy’s frame. It depicted one of those parasailing wings often seen towed behind speedboats in seaside resorts: a curved leading edge, a wing of taut fabric behind it, and a system of shroud lines converging on, and supporting, the payload. “This object deploys and gives it some appreciable L over D,” T.R. said, “which means it can stay aloft for a little while through a combination of running the engine and shedding altitude. The more sulfur it burns, the lighter it becomes. The farther it descends, the thicker the air. Both work in our favor. By the time the tank is empty, this thing is pretty damned airworthy and it can glide for a long ways. Even if it’s out over Mexico somewhere it can glide back and try to hit one of those nets.”

“Now I see why everything around here has nets stretched over it,” Saskia said, “what with all these sabots and nose cones and shells raining down out of the sky.”

“A certain kind of person would almost say God made West Texas for this,” T.R. said. “We got concentric circles drawn all over the map. Circular error probables—CEPs—for all that stuff. We know where shit’s gonna hit the ground. Sounding rockets give us the initial conditions. After that we track each shell to get an accurate picture of the upper-level winds. We can make stuff fall where there ain’t nothing to fall on save rocks and snakes.”

“It’s an expensive way to kill snakes!” some wag joked.

T.R. looked at him coolly. “Not if you figure in the appreciation of my Houston real estate portfolio.” His gaze shifted to Saskia. “Others can make similar calculations. Remember the figure I quoted earlier?”

“You’re a figure-quoting machine, T.R., you’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

“Over Houston. In the drone. What kind of money we talking? Remember? Anyone? One point seven five trillion dollars. That’s the value of all the real estate in greater Houston. Let’s say my buddies and I—the kinds of people who live in big houses on stilts along Buffalo Bayou—own one percent of it. That’s about twenty billion dollars’ worth of real estate. If the value declines by ten percent, that’s two billion in value that just went up in smoke. If it goes up by ten percent”—he turned and waved his arm in the general direction of the gun— “that alone pays for all this.”

“You’re altering the climate all over the world,” Bob translated, “to make a profit on a portfolio of real estate that is limited to Houston.”

“The numbers check out,” T.R. confirmed. “Those of y’all who don’t live in Houston may wish to make calculations of your own. ‘Sea level’ is the same everywhere.” He checked his watch. The afternoon was getting on. “Oh. And as long as I dragged y’all out here into the heat, don’t forget to collect your party favor.” T.R. indicated a solitary boxcar that had been parked on a nearby side track. A canopy had been set up next to it. Beneath that was a table staffed by a highly presentable young woman whose white cowboy hat made for an incongruous combo with the earthsuit that covered everything from her jawline down to her cowboy boots. Saskia, sans earthsuit, was nearing the limit of how long she could remain outdoors, but decided to venture over.

The boxcar looked as if it had been chosen specifically to stand as a visual emblem of decrepit Industrial Revolution tech. It looked like it had traveled a million miles during its career, survived a few derailments, and finally reached the end of the line. Rust was blooming through old faded graffiti. No part of it was flat or straight. It was full to overflowing with coal, and excess coal had spilled out on the ground all around it.

As Saskia drew closer to the blessed shade of the canopy, she saw a row of bell jars on the table, similar to the ones T.R. had displayed last night at dinner. Each sat on a wooden pedestal. Each contained a golden cube that Saskia would have mistaken for half a stick of butter had she not spent so much time in the last two days looking at, and talking about, sulfur.

“Welcome, Your Majesty; would you like to take your parting gift? I can have it packed for travel and delivered to your lodgings.”

“You are too kind,” Saskia said. She’d now drawn near enough to read the words engraved on the brass plaque attached to the wooden pedestal:

TEXAS GOLD

THIS AMOUNT OF PURE SULFUR

neutralizes the global warming caused by

ONE BOXCAR OF PURE CARBON.

Each shell fired from Pina2bo carries 20,000 times this amount of sulfur.

“Such propaganda!” said a nearby voice. Saskia turned to see that Cornelia had followed her over. The tone of her voice was somewhere between disdain and admiration. She had admitted defeat and traded any pretense of fashionable attire for an earthsuit. But thanks to that her face looked a lot cooler than Saskia’s probably did. Saskia was in Face Zero, which was what she basically used for gardening and swimming.

“He has a gift for the catchphrase,” Saskia said. “One can easily imagine him hawking these on YouTube. Texas Gold.”

“Jumpsuit Orange, if he’s not careful.”

“I have no idea as to the legalities. Do you?”

“No.”

“Presumably there’s not a specific law against shooting bullets straight up in the air and letting them fall back down on your own property.”

“In Texas? No, there won’t be any such law,” Cornelia scoffed. “The feds will try to get him on the airspace violation. Something like that.”

“Unless he has a permit. Which he did today.”

“They’ll stop issuing them!”

“And then he’ll go over their heads. To Congress. To the president. And he’ll take it to YouTube.”

“And . . . to you, Your Majesty,” Cornelia said. “What was the lord mayor’s unattractive phrase? The eight-hundred-pound gorilla.”

“The gorilla is hot,” Saskia said, “I’m going inside.”

> T.R. said something that reminded me of you.

> ???

> Lift over drag. Sorry. Private joke. Probably not funny.

The text hit Rufus’s phone from an unknown number with some kind of weird area code. He was peeling the foil from a burrito in a sort of food court that occupied the middle of the area that these people called Bunkhouse.

> Who this?

> Sorry. Saskia. Are you available for a chat? Leaving for NL early tomorrow.

> Half an hour okay? Going to take a shower.

> Of course, I am taking a bath!

Rufus consumed the burrito a little more quickly than had been his original plan, then found the men’s locker room, which included a row of shower stalls. Everything about this place put him in mind of the army. It was, in fact, made of army surplus housing modules that they hadn’t bothered to repaint. This was what the military threw together when they needed an outpost in some place like Afghanistan. Though, to be honest, most parts of that country were more hospitable than West Texas. Nothing was fancy, but everything was okay—at least up to the standards that many enlisteds could expect in the kinds of places where they lived stateside. Rufus had walked away from that deal after he’d put in his twenty years and hadn’t missed it. But it sure made it easy to find his way around the so-called Bunkhouse here at Pina2bo. He scored a toothbrush and miniature tube of toothpaste from a vending machine, found himself a shower stall, cleaned up using the liquid body wash from the dispenser on the wall—all army standard. He put on a clean Flying S swag T-shirt and, lacking a change of underwear, decided to just go commando beneath his cargo shorts. In flip-flops from the shower he walked slowly to the train, trying not to break a sweat or run afoul of any rattlesnakes or barbed plants, carrying his dirty laundry in a wad. This he stowed in the compartment they had assigned him in one of the Amtrak cars. He walked up to the fancy antique railway car where the queen and her staff usually hung out, but none of the Dutch were there except Amelia, standing at the far end of the coach. Her body language indicated that she was on duty, so he didn’t bother her.

> Where should I go?

> Just come to my compartment.

Just as a routine, automatic precaution, Rufus asked himself what were the odds that following these instructions could lead to his getting shot. The person most likely to do the shooting in this particular scenario would be Amelia. She and Rufus had gotten to know each other during the past few days, having a few meals together while the bigwigs did their thing, sharing vehicles. He’d have been interested in her if he wasn’t almost old enough to be her father. She wasn’t going to pull her Sig out of her shoulder bag and double-tap him. And yet still it was weird. It put her—Amelia—in an awkward spot. Rufus walked up the aisle toward her. She watched impassively through dark glasses that more than likely had a built-in AR display. She was a fine-looking woman in her big-boned, broken-nosed way.

“Her Majesty has invited me to—”

“I know, Red.”

“Okay.” He turned his back and began retracing his steps.

“Thanks for checking in, though.”

“Oh, no problem at all, Amelia.”

“That shirt looks good on you.”

“Think it’s my color?”

“It’s not our proper Dutch orange.”

“I know. It’s got a little Southern sunburn.” He threw her a glance over his shoulder and saw evidence of a dimple forming beneath those dark glasses.

He knocked on Saskia’s door. “Come in!” came the answer.

She had been in the bath. It was muggy and fragrant despite the best efforts of the modern A/C system that this car’s owner had shoehorned into the old-fashioned cabinetwork. Saskia, in a terrycloth robe, was flapping a towel, trying to dispel steam.

“I’ll leave the door open.”

“No,” she said.

“Might help get some air moving.”

“The air will be fine.”

What he had really been getting at was that people might get the wrong idea. Of course she was blind to that possibility. It was the kind of consideration her man Willem got paid to think of. Willem didn’t seem to be around, though. So Rufus was trying to step into his shoes, do his job for him.

Saskia actually stepped past him, brushing by close in the small compartment, and shoved the door closed. And locked it. “Everyone wants to pay their respects to the queen,” she said. “Not that many royals show up here.”

“How many of these people are what you’d call royals?”

“None of them. But I understand your confusion.” She smiled. In circumstances like this she could be taken for an affluent American woman of a certain class, the kind of lady you might see getting lunch with her lady friends at an upscale mall after Pilates. Not one of the snooty type, though. He’d seen her chopping celery. “‘Royal’ means actually a king or queen, or someone in their immediate family. I am the only such person here.”

“What’s up with that Cornelia?”

“She has a royal bearing and she comes from a family that is much older than mine. But Venice never had royals. They did have noble houses, self-selected, who elected a leader. That’s where she comes from.”

“She’s got a chip on her shoulder about Venice.”

“You could say that, yes.” Saskia smiled at him sweetly.

“The lord mayor?”

“He’s elected. You don’t inherit that job. But once you win the election—which is a very strange one, very English—you become a lord. Still, quite different from being a royal.”

“How so?”

“Broadly speaking, royals have tended to be like this with the nobility in most times and places.” She was banging her little fists together.

“Oh, see now that’s a new idea to me because I thought they were all on the same side.”

“If you were a medieval peasant it would certainly seem that way. In general, however, it is not the case. But of course that is all ancient history; very little of it really applies in the modern era of constitutional monarchy.”

“Speaking of which, what are you doing here? I never asked you,” Rufus said. “According to Wiki it’s more of a symbolic role.”

“Well, for one thing, I personally own a significant percentage of Royal Dutch Shell.”

“Shell? The Shell? The oil company?”

“Yes. So, even if I were not the Queen of the Netherlands, I could exert some influence over who sits on their board and so on.”

“And Shell has a lot to answer for, global warming wise.”

“Indeed we do!”

“Well, that is interesting. But you are.”

“I am what?”

“The Queen of the Netherlands.”

“Yes.”

“And in that capacity—”

“I can do nothing,” Saskia said, “except change my facial expression while reading an annual speech that is written for me on Budget Day.”

“Whoa, you lost me there!” Rufus chuckled.

“In, let me see, about ten days,” Saskia said, “the Dutch Parliament will open. It is the tradition that the king or queen goes there in a fancy carriage—”

Rufus waved her off.

“You’ve read about it on Wikipedia.”

“Yeah. Oh, I don’t mean to be rude. Just sparing you the effort. You got to go there and sit at the front of the room, all the ladies wearing fancy hats, and you read out a speech.”

“That is exactly what I do. The speech is written for me. It would be improper, you see, for the monarch to write his or her own speech.”

“Who writes it?”

“Parliament. In the Netherlands we call it the States General.”

“And who you reading it to?”

“The States General.”

“So you could just be cut out of the loop and save yourself the trouble!”

“It has symbolic importance. And I get to adopt facial expressions.”

“Yeah, that’s where you lost me.”

“Also, I can pause. Raise or lower my voice. Adopt various positions. Talk slow or fast. When I do these things it’s thought that I am, perhaps, reflecting the attitudes and priorities of the Dutch people.”

“Well, you must be very good at it.”

“That is very kind of you, Rufus. What makes you say so?”

Rufus’s face warmed as he became aware that he had stumbled into something. “Oh, I didn’t mean nothing by it. Just that you have a very . . . beautiful presence that is warm and that expresses your feelings.”

Saskia blushed.

He thought it might help extract him from what had become a bit of an awkward situation were he to draw a contrast: “Ol’ Sylvester Lin, now, he would not be the man to give that speech.”

She shook her head and smiled at the thought.

“Or maybe he would, but you wouldn’t have a clue what the man’s emotional state was!”

She nodded, still smiling, and averted her gaze. It would seem that a lot was going on in her mind.

“And you’re saying,” Rufus continued, “that by the power of that you can affect what happens.”

“So it is said,” Saskia replied. “And!” She clasped her hands together. “In that vein . . .”

“What vein?”

“Saskia letting her feelings be known.”

“Oh.”

“From the first moment we met in Waco, and you bravely put yourself in harm’s way to assist Lennert, I have admired you, Red, and felt grateful to you. Those feelings only increased and deepened as you helped us get out of the airport and down the river to Houston. After that, T.R.’s program pulled you and me in opposite directions and so I never got around to expressing my gratitude—as well as expressing my admiration for all that is so personally attractive about you, Red. And now suddenly I find myself on the eve of departure. A summer storm is blowing up in the North Sea and forcing us to depart early in the morning so that we can get there before the winds become too high. I’m afraid that much time might go by before we cross paths again. I didn’t want to let the opportunity just slip by.”

“Opportunity?”

She made a face and shrugged as if to say, Who knows?

“For what?”

“Well,” the queen said, and a thoughtful look came over her face for a moment, as if she were pondering an important phrase in her speech to the States General and wanted to be quite certain that she said it in just the right way and that the millions of Dutch people watching would feel what she was feeling. “A blow job would not be totally out of the question, but I was rather hoping to see those cargo shorts hit the floor.”

Rufus had been expecting her to give him a medal or a letter of commendation. Blow job hadn’t entered his mind. He got tunnel vision and felt his heart pounding in a way that hadn’t happened since he had been on the runway at Waco, closing in on Snout and unslinging his Kalashnikov. He now wished that he had taken an extra minute to put on clean underwear, since his penis was getting bigger and rubbing against the rugged mil-spec stitching. “You have a problem with cargo shorts?” he asked, stalling for time.

“Only when they are in the way. I see their practicality.”

“Well, I just wouldn’t feel right about the first option you mentioned. It doesn’t seem decent given your dignity and so on. I would feel bad.”

“It was just an example.” Saskia’s phone buzzed and her eyes flicked to it. “My daughter,” she said, “demanding a progress report.”

“On the conversation you and I are having right now!?”

“On my romantic life in general. She worries about my solitude and wonders if something similar is in her future.”

Saskia’s face then fell as she perhaps realized that the remark was double-edged. Rufus too was solitary. But he had no Lotte to look after him. Just occasional check-ins from Mary Boskey.

“What about that Michael character?”

“You mean Michiel?”

“Yeah. I saw you checking him out.”

“Did it make you jealous, Rufus?” she asked hopefully.

“Oh, I never dared have any such thoughts. There’s a history here, in Texas and in the South—”

“I know.”

“One of the worst lynchings was actually in Waco.”

“I shouldn’t have gone there. You asked about Michiel. He is obviously attractive. The sort of man that the tabloids would set me up with, if they had the power. But there isn’t the connection.” She pointed back and forth between herself and Rufus.

“Of what happened on the runway, you mean?”

“Partly that. But . . . both of us suffered losses some time ago and have been alone since then. That’s really what I meant.” Saskia’s phone buzzed again. With exaggerated annoyance she picked it up and held down the button that shut it off.

Rufus made himself a little more comfortable by plucking at his shorts and leaning forward, elbows on knees.

“It has been a long time for me,” he said. “I’m worried I forgot where everything goes.”

“We can google it.”

“You think Google will come up with anything?”

They both laughed.

“I ain’t coming over there because of the history I alluded to,” Rufus said. He looked at the chair he’d been sitting on. It was narrow, hard, old-fashioned Antiques Roadshow stuff. He eased down out of it and sat on the carpet, back against the wall. “Plenty of room here now, though, if you are feeling disposed to come on over my way.”

Saskia glanced at the door (still locked) and the window (curtain still drawn), then padded over and sat down next to him, very close. She put her head on his shoulder. This felt so good he was stunned for a few moments. Then he summoned the presence of mind to put his arm around her.

“You have beautiful arms,” she said.

“Push-ups,” he explained. “Got no time for gyms. Look now, in case something happens and we get carried away, I gotta ask . . . birth control?”

“Taken care of. We have socialized medicine.”

“These cargo shorts contain many things,” he said, “but it’s been a long time since I packed a . . .”

She reached into the pocket of her bathrobe and produced a condom in its little foil packet. “Any particular size?” she asked.

“That’ll do.”

Her thigh came up over his, making contact along the way with two different knives, phone, notebook, spare magazine, a couple of Sharpies, and other sundries.

“Ouch. Those really do have to come off,” she announced.