Termination Shock

Flying S

As first world problems went, it was hard to top this one: being limited to relatively short-hop flights because of the unusual fuel required by the brand-new, state-of-the-art private jet that had been given to you as a personal gift. And yet by the time the airstrip at the Flying S Ranch finally rolled into view over the jagged horizon of West Texas, Saskia did feel she had some legitimate grounds for complaint. She and her new best friend Ervin, an ex–U.S. Air Force pilot from Baldwin Hills, California, had flown from the Line back to Vadan, where a hydrogen tanker still awaited them, and thence to Schiphol for an overnight stop and a quick check-in with the new Queen of the Netherlands. Fenna and Jules had hitched a ride from Vadan to Schiphol and then talked their way aboard for the remainder of the journey, cramming into the two passenger seats in the back of the jet’s tiny cabin as they tacked back and forth across the great circle route. From Schiphol they had flown to Aberdeen, then Reykjavik, then someplace called Nuuk in Greenland, where they’d been stuck for a day awaiting hydrogen. Then Gander, Newfoundland. Then Ottawa, Chicago, Denver, and finally the Flying S Ranch. They were low on fuel by the time they landed, but they’d solve that problem later. Or to be precise, Jules would. Managing hydrogen deliveries over a sketchy voice connection had turned out to be this young man’s unheralded superpower. There was, Saskia supposed, a kind of logic to it: divers had to know all about compressed and liquefied gases or else they would die. Hydrogen was only a small stretch once you knew everything about compressed air, oxygen, helium, and other staples of the diver’s trade. But a professional background in that area was only part of his qualifications. More valuable, as far as she could determine from overhearing his half of conversations with ground personnel, was his manner of talking. The reputation of America and Americans might be in tatters in elite cultural and diplomatic circles, but on the nuts-and-bolts level of the petroleum and mining industries, they still seemed to get a lot done in the world. The easygoing southern drawl, stiffened with traces of calm cool military discipline and implied know-how (“Yes, sir!” “No, ma’am.” “Copy that!”) seemed to open doors, or at least prevent random strangers worldwide from immediately slamming down the phone when Jules cold-called them out of nowhere with his outlandish requests.

Not that anyone actually slammed down the phone nowadays. Those things were delicate and expensive. But the point remained that Jules was good at this, to the point where Saskia wondered, during endless hours of flying across the North Atlantic and the Canadian Shield, what would happen if she were to task Jules with sourcing a plutonium bomb core. She was a little afraid that after a few hours of polite, laconic phone work, he might succeed.

“No, sweetheart, I can’t have you doing this! You are no longer my employee but a beloved friend.”

“A beloved friend who knows what you need,” Fenna said. “Shut up and look at the ceiling!”

Saskia obeyed, and saw corrugated steel, obstructed from time to time by the briskly moving hand of Fenna, who was up to something involving the increasingly complicated zone between the ex-queen’s lower eyelid and her cheekbone. “It’s not like I have anything else to do here!”

They were in the tiny settlement called Bunkhouse, in a shipping container that had been converted to a barracks and then buried in sandbags to muffle the sonic booms. Still, one could feel the thuds every few minutes, transmitted through the ground.

“We’ll figure out a way to get you and Jules to New Orleans,” Saskia assured her.

“Don’t worry about it. Jules wants to visit the gun. See how it works.”

“Then his best bet would be to just come with me now. I could ask T.R. to arrange a tour tomorrow, but he’s a little distracted.”

“Not as distracted as he’s about to be,” Fenna predicted, with a degree of confidence that Saskia had not felt about anything in decades. “You are going to look fantastic while he will be ruined from the endless flight from China or whatever.”

“Papua, dear.” Though if things kept going the way they had been, it would soon enough be Chinese.

“Whatever. Point is still the same.”

Not for the first time, Saskia wished that Fenna’s conception of reality—according to which people with the best styling inevitably prevailed—actually made sense. But it didn’t hurt to pretend that it did.

“Would you care to join us?” Saskia asked.

Fenna wrinkled her nose in some combination of disbelief and horror. “Visiting the gun?!”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen it before. And again at Vadan. Loud bullet-shooting things are not my area of interest!” She threw a wry look at Jules. He had the military man’s ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, and was taking advantage of it in the corner, sprawled out on a pile of luggage. “He’ll be thrilled though. As for me, I have a date with Amelia! We are going to get beers and burritos from the vending machines.”

“Sounds like a good time. Raise a glass for me.”

“Can is more like it. Do they have a golf cart or something to take you to the gun?”

“No, Jules and I are going to walk.”

“Walk!?”

“Yes. I haven’t walked more than a few strides in days and days, as you know.”

“You should have told me, the wind will—”

“There is very little wind, I checked. It will be windy tomorrow. But not now.”

“Maybe you should ride a horse! That would be so cool to see.”

“They don’t take them near the gun. It would be cruel. And anyway the last thing they need is horse shit all over.”

“It can’t be that pleasant for you either.”

“Every evening, during the shift change, the gun goes silent for an hour. It’s a chance for the system to do some kind of maintenance and recalibration or some such. The engineers inspect things. I don’t know all the details. Anyway, T.R. is going to be there for that and he said it was all right for me to ‘tag along,’ whatever that means.” Saskia checked her watch. “I need to get going. Jules! Let’s go!”

The young man could wake up as quickly as he could fall asleep. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, rolling up to his feet.

“Aren’t there snakes?”

“Yes, but there is also a paved road that we can walk on, where snakes will have no place to hide. Besides—look!” She stuck out one leg to draw attention to the fact that she was wearing cowboy boots. Scored half an hour ago from Bunkhouse’s self-serve swag kiosk. “I’d like to see the rattlesnake that could punch its fangs through these!”

“I wouldn’t.”

By the time those cowboy boots were striding down said paved road, the sun had set behind the mountains separating Pina2bo from the Rio Grande. Conditions would have been downright pleasant if not for the flash and boom of the gun. Through some peculiarity of how the sound waves propagated, standing near the gun itself—directly in the shell’s wake—wasn’t as bad as being off to the side.

Once or twice as she and Jules strolled along, Saskia turned back and let her gaze follow the serrated ridge of the mountains north and west, until it melted into the dark purple sky.

“What’s to see up there, ma’am?” Jules asked.

“Do you remember Rufus? Red?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Well, somewhere back thataway, unless I’ve got my directions mixed up, is a mountain made of marble. Tunneled into it is an old mine where he’s been living.”

She’d got occasional reports and a few pictures from Thordis and Piet. As far as she could make out, Rufus was gainfully employed there doing work he found interesting, which in a way was a big part of being happy. She wondered if he was happy, though, and if he thought of her from time to time.

She noticed that she was casting a shadow on the pavement ahead of her. This made no sense. The sun was down. The moon was off to her left, low above the mountainous spur that framed the other side of the valley. In other words, it was in the wrong place, and in any case not bright enough, to cast her shadow there. Someone must be shining a light on them from behind. But she hadn’t heard anyone approaching. A drone, perhaps? Maybe some nervous Black Hat had decided to shadow them and make sure they didn’t wander off into the desert to be eaten by pigs. Somewhat annoyed, she stopped walking and turned around. Jules was already doing likewise. The source of the light was blindingly obvious in a quite literal sense—she couldn’t look right at it. It was moving across the sky, shortening her shadow. Who flew drones with such powerful lights on them?

Because her gaze was averted, she noticed that the entire valley was lit up by this thing. It wasn’t just a narrow spotlight focused on her and Jules, but a floodlight somehow illuminating the mountain walls on both sides as well as the steel frameworks enclosing the gun barrels, the pipes and conduits converging on it, the big yellow sulfur pile nearby.

It really did blind her for an instant, and then all went dark. She was afraid her eyes had been damaged. But over the next minute or so, they adjusted to a world lit only by the moon and by the light lingering in the western sky. Most of the lights in the complex ahead of her had gone out. She turned around and saw that Bunkhouse was completely dark. She took out her phone, thinking to use its flashlight feature. It was dead.

“I’ll be darned” was all Jules could say. “Meteor?”

“It looked like one of those meteors that burns up before it hits the ground,” Saskia said, “but that wouldn’t explain why the power’s out. Why my phone is dead.”

Jules checked his phone and found the same.

Without further discussion, they lengthened their stride toward the big gun. No longer the Biggest Gun in the World, but still pretty big. T.R. was there. He’d know what was going on. Anyway it was the only thing she could see that still had power. Many of the outlying structures—the low steel building where robots filled and prepped the shells, the cooling tower, the natural gas cracking facility where they made the hydrogen—had gone dark. But the gun itself seemed to have at least some systems up and running. The tips of its six barrels and the muffler-like housings that surrounded them were illuminated from below by light shining up the main bore of the big shaft. The steel framework surrounding all that was speckled with lights focused on stairways, catwalks, and hatches. As Jules and Saskia drew closer she could hear the low hum of machinery: pumps moving cold water down to the combustion chamber two hundred meters below and drawing hot water back up, routing it to the cooling tower, which, though darkened, was still burbling and steaming. The higher-pitched whoosh of fans suggested that essential ventilation was still going on. Valves snicked and clunked, gases hissed in pipes, transformers droned. As they got closer yet, Saskia heard voices, mostly male, mostly Texan. Agitated, alert, but controlled.

She had no idea what had happened. She’d never heard of a meteor blacking out electronics. This had to have been some sort of attack making use of an electromagnetic pulse device—a thing she’d heard mentioned in military and intelligence briefings. It had killed all the electronics in the valley except, apparently, for some systems buried deep underground. The stuff that absolutely had to keep working no matter what. They must have generators down at the bottom of the shaft, shielded by two hundred meters of rock, burning natural gas fed down in pipes and sending back electrical power to key systems topside.

So Pina2bo had been attacked—or maybe was only starting to come under attack. But it was an unusual type of attack and so the security and operations people around the gun were only beginning to realize it. Firearms probably still worked just fine. Saskia didn’t want to stumble into the crosshairs of some jittery Black Hat, so she began making noise as she drew closer. Personnel who’d emerged from darkened buildings around the complex were gravitating to the only area that still had light, which was the gun. Saskia began to make noise as soon as she was within earshot. “Hello! Hello!” Not very original, but hopefully nonthreatening. “It’s me, Saskia! And my friend Jules!”

“Saskia who?” came a man’s voice back.

“Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia of the Netherlands,” she returned.

“Welcome back, Your Majesty.” That was T.R. talking. She saw him detach from a cluster of men and begin walking toward her.

“Your Royal Highness,” she corrected him.

“Oh, yeah. Forgot. Sorry, long couple of days.”

“So I heard.”

A couple of Black Hats had strode forth to flank T.R. They had broken out the assault rifles and were carrying them with muzzles pointed at the ground. Looking at their tactical pants and vests and gear harnesses, all bedecked with lights and optics and comms gear, Saskia was struck by how little of it was actually going to be functional in the aftermath of the EMP. They could peer over iron sights into the dark and shoot bullets at what little they could see, but that was about it. They could walk around under their own power but any modern vehicle, dependent on hundreds of microchips, would be useless. Horses and bicycles would work, but she didn’t see any.

T.R. stopped a few paces short of her. So this was the moment Fenna had envisioned with such relish: Saskia still more or less impeccable, T.R. a ruin. But it didn’t have quite the same impact. Saskia was directly illuminated by the lights in the gun complex, which she was facing. T.R. was backlit: just a stocky, vaguely cowboy-shaped shadow outlined in a fringe of dusty light. “Who would have imagined,” T.R. said wearily, “that one who has so recently passed a night in Nuuk could pull together such effortless elegance.”

“Your wife has trained you well!”

“Still it’s true.”

“I had help.”

“How is the lovely Fenna?”

“Scared and in the dark, I would guess,” Saskia said, with a glance toward Jules. He had politely stepped to one side and approached a cluster of men—not Black Hats, so probably White Label engineers—who were standing around discussing what had happened.

“We are scared and all lit up, as you can see,” T.R. said. “Please join us.”

“Do you know what we are being scared of? What is going on?”

“Did you see that goddamn thing fall out of the sky?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll not insult your intelligence by saying what it was.”

“I thought EMPs were a kind of nuclear weapon, though?”

T.R. looked back toward his security guys. “I am informed that you can make a small one that ain’t a nuke. Derives its energy from the heat of reentry, which is considerable. Generates the pulse through a thermochemical reaction. Affects a correspondingly smaller footprint on the ground. Surgical. Just the thing for whatever our adversaries have in mind. Whatever that is.”

He turned sideways to listen to a few tense words from a grizzled Black Hat who had strode up behind him. In profile Saskia could see him nodding.

“My fellas,” T.R. said, turning back to face her, “are expressing keen impatience with the easygoing and protracted pace of this conversation. The words ‘sitting duck’ have been used. They would like me—and you, goes without saying—indoors and belowground.”

“I’m happy to do whatever they consider best.” Saskia began closing the distance between them.

“If it weren’t for that damn EMP we would have our pick of hidey-holes. Things being what they are, there is only one reasonable choice. The elevator still has power. It can take us down to places you have seen before, where nothing short of a nuke would trouble us. And let’s face it, if they just wanted to nuke us, they’d have done it. The power is on down there and will remain so. It’s a no-brainer.”

“Lead and I shall follow,” Saskia said.