Termination Shock

Pina2bo

Rufus dug the silence of it. Oh, the sonic booms still crackled over the mountains every eight minutes. You had to get used to that. But the recovery was as peaceful as you could imagine. Suspended from their paragliders, the shells came gliding in over the Rio Grande. They didn’t cross the river until they were just a few hundred feet above the ground. By that point each was aiming for a specific net. There were four nets operational when Rufus first arrived, with four more getting their finishing touches. They were spaced up and down the length of a new road running along the top of a mesa that rose a few hundred feet above the river.

Each net was square, about half the size of a football field. It was suspended at each of its four corners from a steel pole that projected to a height of maybe fifty feet from a concrete footing in the ground. The setup couldn’t have been much simpler: At the top of each pole was a pulley with a steel cable running over it. One end of that cable was carabinered to a corner of the net. The other end ran down the pole to ground level where it disappeared into a winch. When all four cables were winched tight, the net stretched overhead like a roof, sagging a bit in the middle, but nowhere less than about thirty feet above the ground.

The empty shells coasted in from their sojourn in Mexican airspace, each vectored to a particular net. If the wind wasn’t blowing and you listened carefully, you might just be able to hear a faint flutter in the parasail, or singing in the shroud lines. When the shell sensed it was over the middle of the net it would actuate a mechanism that detached it from the parasail with a faintly audible mechanical snick, and it would drop, bounce once or twice, and come to rest at the bottom of a mesh funnel, so close to the ground you could almost touch it. The parasail would crumple and glide away on the wind like a puff of smoke. There was a team called sail chasers who would follow it across the mesa on ATVs until it came to earth, then wrestle it into a stuff sack. Meanwhile another team called net runners would unreel one or two of the winch lines, lowering the net. When the shell was on the ground, they would simply walk out, pushing a four-wheeled dolly, and pick it up. At this point in its duty cycle, after it had jettisoned its sabot, nose cone, and parasail, and burned its load of sulfur, the shell was light enough that a crew of two could lift it off the ground and deposit it on the dolly.

It took hours for these things to spiral down from the stratosphere. During that time the shell had cooled off and purged any lingering fumes of SO₂. The net runners would push the dolly over to a waiting trailer and hoist it into a cradle. Then they’d use the winches to reinstate the net. Downtime for a given net was rarely more than a few minutes. When a trailer got full of spent shells, a truck would drive up, hitch on, and tow it north to one of the installations that had been built along the arc road around Pina2bo. There each shell would be inspected and refurbished and sent empty to Pina2bo itself, where it would sit in the queue awaiting its next flight. Only at the last minute was the hot liquid sulfur piped into its tank.

Meanwhile a steady flow of parasail stuff sacks was accumulating in another trailer. When full, these were driven off the ranch and down the interstate to El Paso and across the bridge to Juarez, where they were unloaded in an air-conditioned maquiladora. Rufus hadn’t visited that place, but they’d showed him videos. Employees in white coveralls pulled out the crumpled parasails, spread them across huge clean tables, inspected them for scorpions, plucked out cactus spines, mended rips, and then carefully re-packed them so that they would deploy correctly the next time they were used. In due course they were trucked back to Flying S and installed in refurbished shells.

Sabot catchers and cone hunters were two other categories of employee. Their jobs were similar in some ways, different in others. The sabot enclosed the base of the shell during its passage up the gun barrel and fell off immediately afterward. It was made of some foamy ceramic, heat-resistant but lightweight and reasonably hardy. Most of them tumbled to the ground within a couple of hundred meters of the gun. Much of that area was under suspended nets with ribbons of fabric woven through them, which performed multiple roles: casting shade, providing some privacy, stopping any unwelcome low-flying drones. And, of course, catching sabots. As such, much of the sabot catchers’ work had to do with those nets. If wind was steady, the sabots all fell in the same general area. As a rule the sabot catchers never ranged as much as half a mile from the gun.

The nose cones were jettisoned at much higher altitude. Depending on wind, they could land practically anywhere on the ranch. Many were simply lost. Supposedly they were biodegradable, though in the Chihuahuan Desert there wasn’t a whole lot of bio to do the degrading. They sent out radio pings until the batteries died. Their bright orange color made it easy to see them from drones, and some of the propellerheads at White Label had ginned up a machine-learning program that could scan through aerial images and identify possible strays. That information was piped through to HUDs in the cone hunters’ earthsuits, to make their work more efficient.

On the nominal firing cadence of one shell every seven and a half minutes, Pina2bo launched 192 shells a day, and so that was the number of nose cones that, on average, fell to earth every twenty-four hours. Most of the cone hunters were Mexican American and many had worked in agricultural settings where they would be paid by the number of apples picked or heads of cauliflower harvested. Gunning ATVs across the desert “harvesting” strewn nose cones was in some ways similar, though both more fun and more dangerous. The best of them, working in two-person teams, recovered twenty cones a day, though that number was slowly trending upward as they learned the tricks of this new trade.

Rufus—who spent his first week on the ranch simply driving around and observing all this—had it in mind to sit down and spreadsheet it and figure out the size of the operation. At the mesa above the Rio Grande, typically they had two pairs of net runners, leapfrogging from net to net depending on where the next shell was coming in, and three pairs of sail chasers. One or two truck drivers seemed to be on call to ferry the loaded trailers and bring back empties. The sabot-catching could be handled by one person. Maybe eight pairs of cone hunters worked during the daylight hours. He had no idea how many chute packers worked in Juarez.

At Pina2bo proper there were the kinds of jobs typical of the oil business and of the chemical industry downstream of it. Unloading bulk sulfur from hopper cars and melting it was child’s play, mostly automated. Natural gas came in via pipeline from wells elsewhere on the ranch and was either shunted directly to the guns, or diverted to the cracking facility, where hydrogen gas—along with a concomitant amount of carbon black—was produced. This was a significant piece of infrastructure, but being a new facility it too was mostly automated, and controlled by engineers from the same bunker where they operated the gun. Likewise, the process of prepping the shells and slapping on the nose cone and sabot, mating it with the pre-packed parasail, running pre-launch checks on the electronics, filling it with hot sulfur, and putting it on the shell hoist—that was all done by robots. So one of the surprises for Rufus during these early days of wandering around and getting to know the operation was just how lightly staffed the actual gun complex was.

That—plus a few mission control types keeping an eye on things in Houston—was the operational side of Pina2bo. Everything else was classed as support. The ranch was so remote and the conditions so inhospitable that it might as well have been on Mars. So “support” had to include things like: Where could employees get food? How could they put gasoline or diesel in the tanks of their vehicles? What would they do if they had a medical problem? In that way it was different from an urban company where the city would just supply all that. It was, though, perfectly familiar to the oil business, where it was common for workers to live on offshore rigs or other remote installations for months at a time. So that stuff was all subbed out to companies that simply did that kind of thing. Roughly speaking, Rufus guessed that there was one support worker for every one on the operational side. With the exception, that is, of security, which was technically under Support but for various good reasons was a whole department unto itself.

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.

Carlos gave Rufus due credit for never having a dull moment in his life and promised to look into it. This had taken a little longer than expected because Carlos had had to reach out to attorneys in his firm who knew about things like the Federal Aviation Administration. But yesterday Carlos had called him back and briefed him.

“Legality-wise,” Rufus began.

“A contract should come through with your name on it,” Tatum said with a shrug. “Not my department.”

“Of, of course not, sir, that’s understood.”

“Then what is your question?” Tatum asked.

Rufus stuck his tongue out briefly, then remembered his manners and pulled it back in. “In terms of T.R.’s overall strategy here—which has a bearing on our jobs, yours and mine—as I understand it . . .” And at this point all he could do was repeat what Carlos Nooma had told him over the phone. “There’s no actual law against what T.R. is doing here.”

“If you have ever met a legislator in the flesh . . .” Tatum began.

“I have not had that honor.”

“Let’s just say it is not in their nature to even conceive of something like Pina2bo. Much less concoct a law making it illegal.”

“Right. Understood,” Rufus said. Again quoting Carlos Nooma: “And if they did? It would be a bill of attainder.”

“I have no idea what that means, Red.”

“According to my lawyer friend, Congress can’t just pass a law targeted specifically at one person. That’s called a bill of attainder and it’s unconstitutional. They’d have to pass a general law against certain activities. And even then, T.R. could argue that it’s just a thinly veiled bill of attainder.”

Tatum made his hand into a blade and whooshed it past his head, indicating total lack of comprehension and total lack of fucks. “Sounds great. What are you worried about?”

“Well, but T.R. is violating FAA regulations on airspace and whatnot.”

“He actually did apply for a permit, believe it or not.”

“Like with the model rocket club launches.”

“Yes, and the FAA granted it.”

“Because they didn’t know what he was actually going to do,” Rufus said. “But now that they know . . .”

“It’s probably just a matter of time before they cancel the permit,” Tatum agreed. “After that, further operation of the Pina2bo facility will constitute a violation of FAA regulations.”

“Understood, sir. But according to my lawyer friend—who was looking into it—the FAA enforces those rules by imposing fines.”

“What I have been told,” Tatum said, “is that they—the FAA—have no boots on the ground capability whatsoever. They can bring an enforcement action through the courts, and levy a fine if that is successful. There are limits on how high the fine can go. And my understanding is that T.R. has got lawyers who have been keeping their powder dry for this eventuality. They have got ways to slow the process down and drag it out in the courts for years. If the fine gets upheld in the court, T.R. could simply write a check for the full amount.”

“Just part of the cost of doing business.”

Tatum nodded. “But by that point Pina2bo will have been up and running for a couple of years and its beneficial effects will be known.”

“And the bullets ain’t gonna hit no planes because—”

“Because the gun don’t move. What pilot in his right mind would fly over the muzzle of that thing? The FAA will just put out a warning—declare it a no-fly zone.”

Rufus nodded, momentarily distracted by the thought of what one of those shells would do to an airplane. “So as far as our duties are concerned—”

“First of all, everything you and I are gonna do is strictly legal,” Tatum said, “in case that’s what you are worried about. We’re not pulling the trigger on the Pina2bo gun. We are just securing a piece of private property. Second, the worst-case scenario is that the feds levy a huge fine against T.R. and he goes bankrupt a few years from now and stops paying us. We go out and get other jobs. And the thing is, Red . . .” Tatum held his hands out, palms up.

“Shit happens,” Rufus said.

“Exactly.”

During the first week, Rufus kept his trailer parked at Bunkhouse, near the gun, but slept in a sound-insulated berth that happened to be available inside. This left him free to drive anywhere on the ranch where his truck was capable of going. Ranch roads—some barely discernible—ran all over the place. The only way you could follow some of them was by shifting into first gear, proceeding at about pedestrian speed, and keeping a close eye on the nav system, which kept insisting that you were on a road even when all evidence was to the contrary. But then you’d come up out the other side of a dry wash or top a stony ridge and see it before you, like a giant had dragged a sharp stick across the desert six months ago.

Such was Old Marble Mine Road, which he followed up into the mountains between Pina2bo and the river one day, for no other reason than he liked the sound of its name. According to the nav system it would eventually terminate in a sort of box canyon just below the crest of the range. Without the nav, Rufus never would have been able to follow it, or even known that it was there. The overall direction of movement was a little west of due south, but along the way it managed to veer through every other point of the compass.

He was penetrating a valley between two spurs flung out from the northern slope of the mountains. Lower down it was chockablock with breadloaf-sized rocks that had washed down out of the higher places. The tires of his truck just had to feel their way over those. But beyond a certain point he was driving on smoother terrain that just consisted of exposed bedrock. He passed into the shade of the spur on his right, or west. Sun still shone on the opposite face of the canyon, making the sedimentary layers obvious. One of those layers was white. At first it was high above him, but over the next few miles he gained altitude and rose up to its level. That was where the road ended, in a shady cul-de-sac with a flat floor strewn with rusty old hulks of mining equipment: most notably a rock crusher. The surrounding wall consisted entirely of that white stratum of rock, and the obvious assumption was that it was marble. You could keep driving beyond that point but you’d be driving into the mountain. A hole in the rock face, obviously man-made, served as the mine’s entrance.

The map claimed that another road joined up at the same place. Rufus could see it clearly, headed down a distinct watershed in the next valley off to the west. Such a road would have to exist for this mine ever to have been viable; heavy equipment wouldn’t be able to come up the way he’d just done. Inevitably this was labeled as New Marble Mine Road. Tire tracks indicated that someone had been here within the last few months. On the peak that loomed over the mine entrance, perhaps a hundred feet above, was a new steel tower with solar panels and electronics enclosures. That was probably why.

Rufus got out of his truck and was pleased to discover that it wasn’t hellishly hot. The altitude was something like a mile above sea level and this box canyon almost never received direct sunlight. After making sure that his iffy was working, he strolled a few yards into the mine. It was not one of your narrow claustrophobic tunnels. He could easily have driven his truck into the place for some distance. There was bat shit—there was always bat shit—but not that much of it; this wasn’t one of those guano-choked holes housing millions of bats like you saw in East Texas. Stood to reason; there weren’t enough bugs for them to subsist on. The whiteness of the natural stone made it seem clean. Rufus knew very little of mining, but it was plain to see the structural logic at work: to keep the ceiling from falling in, they had to give it a domed roof, and they had to bolster that with pillars of stone. These were as fat as they were high. They were simply carved out of the rock. So the pillars didn’t just dive into the ground but funneled broadly outward as they merged without any clear seam into the floor or the ceiling. The whole thing sloped generally downward.

He hit on the idea of bringing his trailer up here. From the looks of it, New Marble Mine Road would be good enough, if he took it easy. Because of the cell tower, he was getting five bars on his phone. Obviously there were no utilities beyond that. But he could fetch gas for his generator and water to put in the trailer’s tank. Getting rid of sewage would be an inconvenience, but he could manage it. And Tatum had said anywhere.

So the next day Rufus towed his trailer up New Marble Mine Road and parked it just outside the mine entrance. In the shady space just inside, he set up a camp table and chairs. This area was largely bug-free and comfortable for much of the day, but sunlight bouncing in from the canyon walls made it bright enough to read and work. He got busy upgrading his drones with the transponders that had been supplied to him by Black Hat.

He had been on the ranch for about a week when Tatum sent him a little follow-up message stating that if Rufus really wanted to make a positive contribution to the overall security of the ranch, it would be a good thing if he could get himself squared away and his equipment up and running “before the shit hits the fan geopolitically.”

Rufus roger-wilcoed him right back, as soldiers did. But in fact he had no idea what Tatum was talking about.

The next morning he got his computer on the Internet, using his phone as a hot spot, and went to a video site and set it playing videos about Pina2bo while he spread out his tools and drone parts on the folding table. During the first half hour or so, he had a disconcerting feeling that he had got way behind on current events in the world. A week ago, when he’d driven his truck through the ranch gate, T.R.’s project had still been pretty much secret. People had figured out that he was building something big in the desert—that much was obvious just from satellite photos—but they could only speculate as to what it was or when it would become operational. Rufus’s arrival had roughly coincided with the moment when the gun had been “brought up,” meaning that the whole system had gone into operation, and it hadn’t stopped since. During that time he hadn’t left the ranch and had paid no attention at all to news feeds. So he was taken aback by the sheer volume of Internet traffic that had come into existence concerning T.R.’s project while he had been unaware.

So much of this was flat-out wrong, though, that it put him back on his heels for a little while. His confidence began to bounce back a little as he realized how much better informed he was than everyone else. T.R.’s staff had released explanatory videos presenting the facts, and a few nerds had found those and then released videos of their own that seemed credible enough, but for each of those there were twenty more that were just crazy talk. Official news outlets had done stories about it, but all they wanted to talk about was how people felt about climate change, and what a wacky dude T.R. McHooligan was in his old videos. Even more highbrow sites couldn’t get off the mentality of what the political repercussions were going to be, who was for it and who was against it, and so on. It was difficult to connect any of this with Tatum’s reference to the geopolitical shit hitting the fan.

So he called Alastair. They’d stayed in touch, sending occasional texts and pictures back and forth. Alastair didn’t pick up right away, but a minute later he called back. “Sorry,” he said, “I was inside flagging down the barkeep, didn’t hear you.”

The scene that now completely filled the screen of Rufus’s laptop was a curious through-the-looking-glass inversion of Rufus’s situation. Rufus was at the head of a box canyon, one of whose walls was in shade, the other lit by the morning sun. Alastair was standing at an outdoor table on the sidewalk of a dead-end street in London. The buildings on one side of it were lit up by the evening sun. There were a couple of parked cars in view, but the whole street was monopolized by people on foot. Apparently he was right outside a pub. A pint glass of something caramel-colored accounted for much of the screen real estate. He was wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt, open collar, no tie. The same was true of many visible in the background. There was some variation in the darkness and color of the suits, and the same could be said of the contents of their pint glasses. There were some women and they looked quite confident and well put together. They were all being extremely sociable.

Rufus understood that it must be quitting time in London. This must be the City that Alastair had alluded to, the part of it that was run by that guy Bob, the lord mayor. Even though Alastair was out of doors, the roar of conversation around him was such that he had to fish out headphones and put them on before he showed signs of being able to really hear what Rufus was saying.

“Looks like a very pleasant afternoon where you are.”

“It’s been filthy hot until yesterday. More like Spain. This is a little more like it.”

“Maybe Pina2bo is doing its job.”

“That is exactly the joke that is going around! Not thirty seconds ago people were raising pints to T.R. McHooligan.”

“Is it a joke?” Rufus asked. “I mean, could it be having an effect?”

“Not here. Too soon. However, coincidentally or not, it’s been cooler in East Texas the last couple of days. As you may be aware.”

“I was not.”

“Where the hell are you? I see your trailer behind you but—”

A sonic boom sounded, and the user interface on the videoconference indicated that Alastair’s audio feed had been silenced in favor of the overwhelmingly louder signal from Rufus’s microphone. Alastair looked confused and astonished and made efforts to say something, but the sonic boom continued to echo for a few moments off the canyon walls and so Rufus could only see his lips moving.

“Was that what I think it was!?” he finally said, after he had got audio back. His eyes darted from side to side as if he’d just been let in on a delicious secret.

“Yup.”

“You’re there!?”

“A few miles away. Found a good place to set up.”

From the bemused way that Alastair looked around, Rufus got the idea that he was thinking If only these people knew that I was talking to someone who is right there!

“So people are talking about it, I guess,” Rufus prompted him.

“Oh, yes. Biggest news story of the year to date, I’d say.”

“What are they saying?”

“Too early to know, really. It was such a surprise. People have talked for decades about doing this.”

“Putting sulfur into the stratosphere.”

“Yes. And almost from the moment it was first mentioned, the idea was loathed by Greens. Just anathematized. To the point where you couldn’t even really talk about it in public or you’d get canceled. So in general I would say that the Greens were like—” Alasdair released his grip on his pint long enough to whisk the palms of his hands together.

Rufus understood the gesture and nodded.

“We’ve put paid to that nonsense,” Alastair said, “no need to concern ourselves with it any more, let’s move along to the real program of, as T.R. puts it—”

“Getting China and India to stop burning shit.”

“Exactly. Which somehow hasn’t worked,” Alastair said, deadpan. Then he continued, “So I would say that the chattering classes, who live in that sort of bubble, were knocked off balance quite badly and are still having a hard time believing it’s real. Even I, who’ve seen it . . .” Alastair shook his head and took a swallow. “That’s why I reacted as I did when I heard the sonic boom just now. Had this mad impulse to turn my phone around and show everyone in the pub.”

“Have you been in touch with the Dutch?” Rufus asked. He was going to say “Saskia” or “the queen” but, just as Alastair had difficulty believing that Pina2bo was real despite having seen it with his own eyes, Rufus couldn’t believe that he’d done what he’d done with certain other parts of his body.

“Just touching base, status updates. I’m to have a chat tomorrow with some of her staff. Possibly her as well. She has to go lay a wreath or something. Foam disaster. Might run late.”

“What are you actually doing for them?”

“I’m to write a report on what it all means for the Netherlands.”

“Doesn’t the Dutch government have . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Commissions and experts and so on? All very much in the bubble. Everyone already knows what those lot are going to say.”

“What are you gonna say?”

Alastair grinned. “Remember Eshma?”

“Gal from Singapore. Seemed nice.”

“She’s in charge of climate modeling for their government. Chatted with her the other day. And you know what? She can’t get instances.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s a cloud computing term. When you need a virtual machine in the cloud, or a whole cluster of them, you go on Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors and spin up an ‘instance.’” Alastair used air quotes. “There’s all different sorts—you literally choose the one you want from a menu, and then clone as many as you need. If you are running a computational model of the climate—which is what Eshma does for a living—there’s a particular model, a piece of software, that most in that discipline have standardized on. And it runs best if you set up a cluster, in the cloud, consisting of a particular item on that menu—one sort of instance that the model has been optimized for. So when she got back from that little junket to Pina2bo, she got busy doing exactly that.”

“Running the computer model on a bunch of instances to see what the effect of Pina2bo was going to be. On Singapore,” Rufus said, just to be sure he was following.

“Singapore yes, obviously, but because that is such a small nation-state, they need to know how it will affect China. India. Australia.”

“Because of the geopolitics of it,” Rufus said.

“Of course. And what Eshma told me was that this was all proceeding normally enough until about a week ago when Pina2bo went live. And after that—do you remember, Rufus, when COVID-19 hit, and for a few weeks you couldn’t buy toilet paper?”

“Sure do!”

“It’s the same way right now with these instances.”

“The particular ones Eshma needs to run the model. Make the predictions.”

“Yes. It’s an open market. Supply and demand. There are only so many of these instances that can be spun up at a given time. And right now, the shelves are bare, as it were. The price has skyrocketed.”

“Because Eshma’s not the only one in the game.”

“We can reasonably assume,” Alastair said, “that Eshma’s counterparts in Beijing, Delhi, and many other places are subsisting on late-night pizza delivery. Or whatever they eat in those places. No one wants to be the last to figure out what this all means.”

“Assuming it keeps going,” Rufus said.

“Do you know of any reason why it wouldn’t?” Alastair asked sharply.

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s a smooth-running machine. I haven’t noticed it go down at any point.”

“Supply lines still clear?”

“A trainload of sulfur every day. Parasails are repacked off-site in Juarez, but I guess that could be moved here if there was a problem.” Rufus checked himself for a moment now, wary of divulging information he shouldn’t. But Alastair had signed the NDA. He’d been to the ranch. And he worked for someone whom T.R. apparently hoped to enlist as an ally.

“What does T.R. want from her?” Rufus asked.

“From the person I work for?”

“Yeah.”

“If I had to read his mind—terrifying thought, that—he’s hoping that he can keep that gun running for a few weeks, perhaps months, before anyone tries to shut him down.”

“He can do that,” Rufus confirmed. “They’re building up a nice big pile of sulfur at the end of the line, just near the gun. Food, water, fuel are all stockpiled.”

“Not even the air force can shoot down a bullet in flight,” Alastair said. “And from what I hear, the descent happens in Mexican airspace.”

“Confirmed.”

“And the Mexican government officials are signaling that they are fine with it,” Alastair said. “The State of Texas has something to say about it . . . but if this spell of cool weather continues, it makes everyone downwind . . .”

“Austin, San Antonio, Houston,” Rufus said. “A few voters live there.”

“. . . feel that T.R. has done Texas a favor.”

“He’s one of them,” Rufus nodded. “Native son. Built a huge gun. Thumbed his nose at the environmentalists. They’ll go full Alamo for him.”

“So it comes down to what’s left of the United States government, and what they might do. And that can be delayed in committees and court filings for a long, long time. Long enough that the specter of termination shock enters the conversation.”

“What’s termination shock?”

“A bogeyman—to be fair, a legitimate concern—that always comes up when people debate geoengineering,” Alastair said. “It boils down to asking what the consequences might be of shutting the system off after it’s been running for a while.”

Rufus considered it. “In this case—the sulfur’s up there bouncing back the sunlight—cooling things off . . .”

“If the government intervenes—if they suddenly shut it down, might there be a disastrous snapback? More destructive than letting Pina2bo keep operating?”

“Does anyone know the answer?”

“No,” Alastair said. “Nor will they, until—”

“Toilet paper’s back on the shelves,” Rufus said. Alastair looked completely nonplussed. “Eshma can get instances,” Rufus explained.

“Yes. But to answer your question, Red, I’d guess T.R. wants allies. People who can vouch for what he’s doing. And who can support him, when the time comes, by raising the specter of termination shock and what it might do to their countries.”

“And Saskia might be one of those.”

“Perhaps. Her support would only be symbolic. But it could influence the people . . . and the people elect the States General.”

“Who doesn’t like it?” Rufus asked. “Other than folks who hate geoengineering on principle?”

Alastair shrugged. “Any country whose ox is gored by the knock-on effects.”

“When I talked to T.R. last week he said ‘some people are gonna be pissed.’ He meant what you mean,” Rufus said. “Countries who run the model like Eshma and look at the results and say, ‘Oh, shit!’”

“Years ago some people ran models to predict the effect of aerosols—sulfur, basically—being injected into the atmosphere from different parts of the world. What happens if we do it from Europe? North America? China? India? The outcomes were surprisingly different. It really matters where you do it. And it then affects each part of the world differently. But if I had to place a bet right here, right now, in this pub, based on what I’ve seen, I’d say it’s going to come down to China versus India.”

Another sonic boom sounded and shut off Alastair’s audio. Rufus signaled as much by sticking his fingers in his ears and looking up into the sky for a few moments.

“I heard you say China versus India.”

“Frequently, in these forecasts, what’s good for one is bad for the other. Monsoons, very important.”

“But you didn’t say who will be on which side. Whose ox is gonna get gored?”

“Ask me in a week. Or—belay that—don’t bother. Watch the news.”

Rufus nodded. He didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that he and the other people living at Flying S Ranch might end up being the news.