Termination Shock

Rijsttafel

“India’s pissed off.”

This obviously wasn’t news to T.R., but it was enough to pull him away from his phone for a minute. He had just concluded some kind of virtual meeting in the conference room on the top floor of the T.R. and Victoria Schmidt Medical Pavilion. Willem and Amelia had been loitering in the reception area along with something like a dozen members of an Indonesian family who had come here to serve them dinner. Now they had all flooded through. Willem and T.R. retreated to a corner while the conference table was set and the dishes arranged.

“What are they pissed off about now?” T.R. asked.

“The monsoon.”

T.R. cackled. “The monsoon that’s in full swing right this minute?” He pulled his phone back out. “Hang on, let me check the weather in Amritsar. Oh, look!” He held it up so that Willem could see a pictorial weather forecast. “Right now it’s raining cats and dogs in Amritsar.” He put his phone back in his pocket. “So what’s India got to be pissed off about?”

“Perhaps,” Willem said, “they regret you did not consult with them before building a giant machine that fucks with the weather.”

It was almost midnight. The view from this corner was as good as it got, in Tuaba. The nighttime cityscape was spread out before them, and they could see part of the airport’s single runway. The most prominent thing on the skyline was the half-collapsed ruin of the Sam Houston Hotel, lit up by work lights that had been trucked down from the mine. All the fires had long since been put out, but recovery and demolition work were putting enough dust into the air that the ruin appeared to be wreathed in smoke.

The signal to eat was given. Most of the restaurant clan cleared out, though the matriarch stayed for a minute while Willem switched into her language to express his gratitude for their staying up so late, and to remark on the astonishing beauty of the dishes’ presentation.

When she had finally taken her leave, beaming, Willem turned to see T.R. appraising him.

“That’s what you do, ain’t it?” T.R. said.

“What? Talk to people and make them feel seen and appreciated? That’s part of it.” He sat down and reached for his napkin. “I can also be a cold-blooded son of a bitch.”

“And under what circumstances, pray tell, would you allow that side of your personality to come out?”

“When it was necessary to achieve the goals of the state.”

“Would that be . . . Netherworld?”

Willem laughed. “Seems everyone has heard of it.”

“Is that why you’re here? To bring Papua into Saskia’s orbit?”

“It’s fascinating,” Willem said, “that people have such inflated notions about Netherworld, which a few days ago was just a word painted on a bedsheet in Venice.”

“It’s fascinating to me that you’re so clueless about marketing. If I saw a hashtag go viral that fast, I’d have a hundred people on it the next day.”

“For all I know, Cornelia has done just that. It’s all her doing.”

“Mm!” T.R. exclaimed. “We Texans brag about our tolerance for spicy food but our stuff is child’s play compared to Indonesian! This is fiery!”

Willem let the remark pass without comment. T.R. had been born here. The hotness of Indonesian food could not actually have come as a surprise to him.

“Look, man,” Willem said, after they had spent a few moments enjoying the meal, “you have to have known from the beginning of all this that the great powers of the world weren’t just going to sit by and watch while you implemented a scheme on your ranch that was bound to alter the climate everywhere.”

“I would remind you,” T.R. said, “that I convened a group of people last year, including you and Saskia, to start the conversation.”

Willem was irritated by T.R.’s offhand use of the familiar name “Saskia,” but decided to let it go. She had encouraged people to call her that during their sojourn in Texas. “Start it, yes. But you chose small countries. Microstates. Venice, for god’s sake.”

“Gotta start somewhere. I invite China and India to such a meeting, what do you think’s going to happen?”

“Nothing,” Willem admitted. “They’d find ways to stop it.”

“My point exactly.”

“And now you’ve gone and done it . . . and they are stopping it by other means.”

“Is that what you think is happening? To me it looks like they are demanding a seat at the table. Now that I gone and done something. They’re happy someone did it.”

“They’ve a funny way of showing it.”

T.R. scoffed and waved him off. “It’s just full-contact football,” he explained, in a helpful tone. “Like when the linebacker comes through and lays a good lick on the quarterback. A sign of respect. Game on!”

Willem was only beginning to organize, in his mind, some of his objections to this metaphor, when there was a light knock at the door. Then it opened a bit and Sister Catherine stuck her head in. She had a shy-schoolgirl look about her very different from the bus driver avatar in which she had manifested yesterday. Both men threw their napkins down and stood up. Willem was closer to the door; he got to it first and held it open for her as she bustled into the room. Looking over the top of her habit—not difficult, for she was of not very great stature—he saw the anteroom, and the corridor leading to it, now populated by at least a dozen Papuan men slinging weapons ranging from AK-47s down to the machete-like choppers known as parangs. Engulfed in them was Amelia, looking at him wryly. Willem gave what he hoped was a polite nod to the one who looked oldest and best equipped, then gently closed the door. T.R. was greeting Sister Catherine, even trying out a few words in one of the local languages.

She took a seat at the table and partook of the meal. The conversation that followed was polite, awkward, and peculiarly dull in the way that important conversations sometimes had to be. Everyone here must know that something was up. But they couldn’t yet talk about it directly. Ultimately it was about copper and gold mines—not really of interest to Willem. As Sister Catherine had made crystal clear yesterday, these people would worry about climate change later.

“It is my recommendation,” Sister Catherine said, when they’d got through the polite stuff, “that you get out of here.”

“What do we know about conditions at the airport?” Willem asked. He directed the question at T.R., supposing that T.R. might actually know something. But—a bit disconcertingly—T.R. just looked across the table at Sister Catherine. She made a gesture indicative of her mouth being full, so T.R. looked back at Willem. “Need a lift?”

“Now that you mention it, if you could find room for me and Amelia . . .”

“Certainly. As long as you don’t mind going to Texas.”

“We’ll find a way to make the most of it.”

> Going to Texas apparently Willem texted Princess Frederika.

Sister Catherine washed down her food with a swallow of beer and said, “Now would be a bad time. Indications are that the airport will be up and running by mid-morning. You might need special clearance to take off, but . . . arrangements can be made.”

T.R. nodded. “For the benefit of my people who are trying to wrangle the logistics of it all, who do we need to talk to about that?”

“You need to talk to me.”

Willem’s phone vibrated and he glanced down to see a cowboy hat emoji.

> C U there.

The meal didn’t reach a firm conclusion but sort of devolved into what showed every sign of becoming a slumber party. Sister Catherine basically lived here, albeit in another part of the complex. The compound where T.R. had been staying was across the river, not convenient to the airport, and so if they really were looking at a departure in less than twelve hours there was no point in his risking the drive back just so he could then risk a separate trip to the runway a few hours later. For the night had become lively with sporadic exchanges of gunfire and occasional deep booms audible through the conference room’s windows. More than once, Willem looked at those askance, wondering if they might at any point turn into a horizontal storm of glinting cubes propelled into the building on a shock wave. But Sister Catherine seemed to think it was in God’s hands. So it turned into a game of chicken, which Willem was not about to lose to a five-foot-tall nun.

For their parts, Willem and Amelia had shunted into that mode of carrying all their luggage with them at all times. With equal ease they could hole up here, go to the airport, or try to get back to Uncle Ed’s in one piece.

Someone finally just propped the conference room doors open. Various aides to T.R. and Sister Catherine began to dart in and out without ceremony. Senior ones claimed table space and unfolded laptops. Amelia found a comfy chair in a corner and dozed.

It was still dark, but only a little before dawn, when it came to Willem’s attention that he was surrounded by heavily armed Chinese men who had not been there a few moments earlier. He had gone up to the roof to get some air. It was as cool as it ever got in Tuaba. Not what you’d call peaceful though. The gunfire and the booms had abated somewhat, but their aftermath kept rolling up to the emergency department on the ground floor. In a pool of light down there, bloody people were being dragged out of cars, triaged in the parking lot, laid out dead or dying in the grass if it was too late, hooked to IVs if not critical, hustled inside if they were somewhere in between. These were decidedly not the kinds of patients apt to be brought in on helicopters and so the roof was pretty quiet: just a few employees up here on cigarette breaks and a couple of guys with rifles.

Which just made it all the more startling to be suddenly in the company of young Chinese men. Had he gone to sleep on his feet and slumbered through something? There had been an outbreak of raucous hissing noises in the last minute or so, which he’d guessed might be steam venting from a boiler.

A flat silvery-gray object—a Frisbee-shaped disk the size of a compact car, but apparently not as heavy—clattered down onto the roof in a burst of dust and pea gravel. A second one landed right on top of it, neatly stacking.

He heard another of those intense hissing sounds and realized it was right out in front of him, above the hospital courtyard where they’d dumped the chopper yesterday. Enough light was radiating outward from the windows of the building to make the source clearly visible: another of those silvery disks. When he caught sight of it, the thing was still falling. For it had simply dropped out of the sky. Plumes of white fog were screaming out of nozzles spaced around its perimeter—just like rocket exhaust, but cold, with no fire.

And people were falling from it. Four people.

Not exactly falling, though. They were being dropped on thin cables. At first glance it looked like a quadruple suicide. But the disk stopped falling almost violently under the influence of those cold thrusters. It slowed to a momentary halt and then sprang back up. The four humans—who, just a moment ago, had been plunging toward the ground at what looked like fatal velocity—fell slower and slower the closer they got to terra firma. Those cables were being paid out in a programmed way, killing their velocity. It all unfolded in maybe two seconds of elapsed time from the moment the thing had begun hissing to the point where those men were safely on the ground. The object that had dropped them, having just shed probably five hundred kilograms of human baggage, sprang into the air just as those thrusters petered out.

At that point Willem’s attention was captured by another hiss, this one above the helipad. He couldn’t see the source, but the helipad was well lit and so a second later he saw four men plummeting toward it—again, at a speed that seemed sure to prove fatal. But again they were being slowed down the whole way. The cables released when they were mere centimeters above the pad, and then they were just standing there. It was a squad consisting of three men with rifles and one carrying a larger automatic weapon. In unison they reached up to their faces and pulled off what looked like oxygen masks.

He’d seen similar mechanisms depicted on NASA animations when they landed rovers on Mars. Sky Cranes. Once they had let their payloads down to the Martian surface they usually just flew away and crashed somewhere. But these things apparently had enough smarts and enough battery power to manage a controlled landing nearby. And, when possible, they politely stacked themselves.

Most of the groups being landed were squads like the one that had just touched down on the helipad. Others looked like snipers or comms specialists. None of them showed much interest in Willem, so he wandered over to examine a sky crane that had landed nearby a few moments ago. It had a spherical bulge in the middle, like a classic depiction of a flying saucer. Probably the vessel where the compressed gas was stored under some heinous pressure.

He couldn’t understand why these things were basically white—which didn’t seem very stealthy—until he got close. Then he saw that the whole thing was jacketed in a thick layer of frost. Humidity had condensed out of Tuaba’s air and frozen on contact. It must have been dropped from the stratosphere—from an airplane flying so high it couldn’t be seen. It had fallen for miles through air at nearly cryogenic temperatures and become ice cold. That explained the oxygen masks that these guys all wore.

Those hisses seemed to be coming from all over the place. They died down, but then they started up again. Waves of planes, flying dark, invisible in the stratosphere, deploying these things by the rack.

A man less tired, more on the ball than Willem would have counted the hisses and multiplied by four to estimate the total number of troops the Chinese had dropped. But it was too late, he had long since lost track. There were at least a hundred just on the grounds of St. Patrick’s. Presumably more at other key points—the bridges, the airport, the barge port on the river. And now, as the sky grew brighter, he began seeing parachutes as well: big triple chutes dropping cargo pallets at the airport and on the floodplain, and paragliders carrying individual men, spiraling down into areas that the skyhook guys had already secured.

A chopper came in. It descended vertically from a great height, maybe to avoid small-arms fire. If so, an unnecessary precaution, for the city had grown quiet, except for a few localized bursts of intense fighting. Willem was expecting this thing to have Chinese military markings. But it was a Brazos RoDuSh helicopter, probably just flown down from the mine.

T.R. emerged from the elevator. In tow were a couple of his senior staff and Amelia. She was pulling her wheeled bag with one hand and Willem’s with the other. Willem strode over to join them. T.R. saw him coming. “We got word,” T.R. explained. “Wheels up in fifteen. After that the airport’s gonna get real busy.”

Once they were all in that helicopter, it took all of sixty seconds to reach the airport. They set down near a business jet parked at the south end of the runway, lights on, engines running, pilots and flight attendant waiting for them at the foot of the fold-down stairs.

There was a minute’s delay while the bags were taken by the pilot, one at a time, and stowed in the jet’s luggage compartment. Willem had positioned himself at the end of the short queue of passengers so that he could snap a selfie to send to Remi. For Remi would be getting ready for bed in Leiden, worrying about the latest reports from Tuaba, and he’d sleep better if he had a picture of his husband about to board a plane that would take him to a more stable part of the world. Or to Texas at any rate.

He saw an opportunity to frame the shot more perfectly by walking a short distance away from the plane and positioning himself with the plane behind him and a spectacular Pina2bo dawn behind that.

“May I?” someone offered. One of the Chinese guys who was hanging around. A senior military officer who had broken away from his claque of aides, just to come help Willem with his selfie.

“Thank you,” Willem said, handing him the phone.

“Is this for Remigio?” Bo asked, maneuvering around and trying to figure out how the zoom feature worked.

“The uniform suits you,” Willem said. “Much better than the tank top.”

“I had it tailored in Hong Kong,” Bo explained. “The standard issue are rubbish.” He was tapping the shutter button over and over. “Off to Texas?”

“No,” Willem decided.

“No!?”

“I’m going to stay. Keep an eye on you guys.”

He realized Amelia had come over to collect him. She’d heard.

“It has been great working with you,” Willem said and held out his hand.

Recovering her poise quickly, Amelia reached out and shook it. “Back to Uncle Ed’s for you?”

“Too gritty for a prolonged stay. I can’t see Remigio coming to visit me there. No, I’m going to check into one of the hotels Bo hasn’t blown up yet.”

“Terrorists did that,” Bo demurred. “Believe me, the Sam Houston was no great loss. Black mold and bedbugs everywhere. I recommend the Mandarin.”

“T.R. likes you,” Willem said to Amelia. “Maybe he’ll offer you a gig.”

Amelia’s face reflected skepticism. “Ehh, I’ll bet there’s openings in Netherworld.” She was turning to leave.

“Defense minister. I’ll put in a word for you.”

She looked back over her shoulder. “You going to visit?”

“This place is going to need a foreign policy now that it has been . . . liberated.” Willem nodded into the southern sky above the end of the runway. Lined up on approach, still miles out, were the lights of an approaching airplane. Behind that, another. Behind that, yet another. Like a train in the sky.

“We have to leave now!” shouted T.R.’s pilot through cupped hands. Amelia took off at a run. They didn’t bother stowing her bag, she just heaved it up above her head and pounded up the stairs. The cabin door closed right behind her. The jet was already rolling. It made a turn to get lined up on the runway. Framed in one of its big oval windows was the head of T.R. Schmidt. He tossed Willem a salute as the jet’s engines whined up to a shriek and it sprang forward.

It had barely got its landing gear retracted when the first of the heavy Chinese military transports touched down in its wake.

“Well,” Willem said to Bo, “I’m sure you have a lot to do.”

“On the contrary, my work here is essentially finished,” Bo said, “but I would imagine you are about to become quite busy.”