Termination Shock

The Pecan Orchard

Laks’s driver, though not much of a conversationalist, had been the living embodiment of professional competence until around dusk, when he swung the wheel hard left, crossed the road’s oncoming lane, smashed through a barbed-wire fence, and let the rig’s momentum carry it some distance into a pecan orchard. There it rested for only a few moments before all its electronics went dead and the engine stopped running: an event that seemed to coincide with a blinding flash of light in the sky off to the right.

This road ran through country that, for sparseness of population, rivaled the Himalayas. The pecan trees now surrounding them were the only vegetation they’d seen all day more than about the height of a man’s knee. So it seemed like they’d crashed with some degree of privacy. The pecan trees were planted in a grid. The driver had aimed down a lane between rows. Their foliage was thick; someone must have put a lot of money into irrigation. When Laks opened the door and climbed out, he saw no lights except for the stars. The only witnesses to the crash of the truck would have been the men they had passed about three seconds before the driver had swerved. They’d been standing next to a van parked on the shoulder of the road. A very old van, like something from the 1960s. One of the men had, in retrospect, been using a flashlight to cue the driver.

Now that van was approaching, following the rut left in the truck’s wake. Its lights were off and so it was sort of feeling its way along at little more than a walking pace. Too slow, apparently, for the taste of one man sitting in the back. He slid the side door open and alighted, then jogged ahead. Ignoring Laks, who had walked back down the length of the rig to investigate, he made a beeline for the back of the shipping container, clambered up onto the rear bumper, and got busy with a keychain. After a few moments Laks heard the heavy clunk of the massive latch bolts moving and hinges moaning as the doors were swung open.

By now the van had parked about ten meters behind. Its driver turned on the parking lights just long enough for the guy with the keys to step up and punch some numbers on a keypad inside the door. This caused a lot of red LEDs to come on. Once the van’s lamps were extinguished, Laks could see up into a volume forty feet long, eight feet wide, and eight feet high, with just enough of that red glow to let people get a sense of where things were—like the combat lighting on the bridge of a warship. Silhouetted were long racks mounted to the ceiling and to the walls, running the full length of the container. Queued up on those were hundreds of skeletal black shapes that he recognized as drones. They were of more than one size and shape. Some were barely larger than the palm of his hand, others as large as a bicycle. It was difficult to sort it out visually because, as he gradually figured out, there were drones mounted on other drones—mother ships carrying several smaller children. The closest analogy from nature would be a cave in which a large number of bats were sleeping all crammed together, wings folded around them. The wings here were rectangular, creased, and folded like fans: deployable panels of photovoltaic cells.

The van rocked on its suspension as the guy who’d been riding shotgun vaulted up onto its roof. He got down on one knee and unslung a rifle from his shoulder. He laid this gently on the roof, then got into a prone position, his face and the barrel of the weapon both aimed back the way they had come. Not that there was anything approaching from the road; but apparently he intended to keep it that way.

The driver of the semi—Laks’s companion of the last few days—got out of the truck’s cab and climbed down to the ground. He had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He walked back, favoring Laks with a quick nod, and climbed into the rear seat of the van.

The guy with the keychain had extracted a laptop from a compartment just inside the container’s door. He let himself down to the ground, then opened it up and used a fingerprint scanner to log on as he was carrying it back toward the van. He got into the passenger seat. The screen illuminated his face: Indian, neatly groomed, lean, mustache. He was gazing alertly out the windshield.

Laks startled as several rotors whirred up to speed. Half a dozen drones—the ones closest to the container doors—took to the air and hummed off into the night.

Revealed behind them was the largest single object in the container. This one was mounted on floor rails and sort of set back into a pocket of space surrounded entirely by the smaller devices.

The driver of the van, and another man who’d been riding in its back, stepped up on the truck’s rear bumper, reached in, and (to judge from sounds) undid some latches. Then they slid the big thing back until it was perched on the container’s threshold. Not a word had been spoken yet but Laks got the gist of what they were trying to do. He helped them lift the thing up, pull it free of the container, and set it down in the stretch of open ground behind the semi and in front of the van. It was awkward but not that heavy. Laks couldn’t make sense of it until the men began swinging parts of it around, unfolding it like a pocketknife. He then understood that the first end of it to emerge from the container had been a sort of hub, and the rest consisted of spokes that had been folded back for storage and shipment. When those were all rotated and snapped into position, the thing was revealed to be a six-rotor drone several meters across. Its central hub appeared to have ample space for batteries and other gear, but the largest part of it was a human-sized vacancy equipped with a seat and a safety harness. Resting on the seat was a beach-ball-sized mass of bubble wrap, strapped down with tape. Once this was unwrapped it proved to be a pair of goggles of a size to cover the whole upper half of his face. One of the guys handed this to Laks and looked at him expectantly. Maybe even a little bit impatiently. Laks, now beginning to struggle with his emotional state, but not wanting to ruin what showed every indication of being an extraordinarily expensive set of plans and preparations, tried to put it on, but had a bit of trouble getting the head strap to fit over his turban.

The other men were all Indians, but none was a Sikh. They were all boring holes through his skull with their eyes. Body language suggested that they were terrifically impatient for him to climb aboard the big drone. The guy with the laptop was just running the palm of his hand up and down over his face, as if windshield-wipering sweat. Challenging as it was for those guys, however, this turban-related delay gave Laks some time to review the events of the last few minutes and to ponder what might await him.

He could refuse. He could claim I didn’t sign up for . . . whatever is about to happen. But by the letter of the law, he actually had. He had, shortly before checking out of the hospital, or whatever it was, in Cyberabad, taken an oath and volunteered for a mission whose exact details were undisclosed. Which was almost always the case in the military, right? Soldiers didn’t know where they were going, what they’d be asked to do. Even the officers probably didn’t know until circumstances unfolded. Still, he had—very naively, as he now saw—kind of assumed it would be more like the fighting at the LAC. More of him deciding where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do next, and less of blindly following unexplained orders.

None of which changed anything about the actual situation. But it gave him a few moments for his mind to catch up. He let the goggles dangle around his neck for now. He finally complied with the furious gesticulations of the men waving him toward the big drone. He sat in the cockpit and immediately felt a rising hum as the rotors began to spin up. While being flown around the Himalayas and the Karakorams in military choppers he’d learned how to buckle a five-point safety harness, so he did that as the drone was lifting off in a cloud of dust. The drone leaned forward. Air began to stream over his face as it picked up speed. He pulled the visor up to protect his eyes from wind blast. Once he’d blinked the tears from his eyes he saw the edge of the pecan orchard disappearing beneath him as he crossed the road. Beyond the barbed-wire fence on the road’s other side, a wild desert landscape stretched to the horizon, lit by a full moon. Some kilometers ahead was a range of mountains. The drone banked left to circumvent them on their moonlit southern flank, which ramped down a long rocky slope for a while and then fell off into the valley of a river.

This wildly beautiful vista was then blotted out by the splash page of a PowerPoint deck.

MISSION BRIEFING

PHASE 1

NET SYSTEM DEMOLITION

U.S. BANK OF RIO GRANDE RIVER

In the upper-right corner were two time readouts, updating once per second. One was labeled MISSION ELAPSED TIME and seemed to show how long it had been since Laks had lifted off from the pecan orchard. The other was TIME TO INSERTION and was counting downward from about fifteen minutes.

He’d assumed NET SYSTEM DEMOLITION was something to do with a computer network. But the next couple of slides showed pictures of literal, physical nets stretched between steel poles that stuck out of the ground on a plateau above a river. Presumably the same river the drone was carrying him toward right now: the Rio Grande. It was explained that his task was to topple the steel poles. He would be using a machine called a plasma cutter, which would be supplied. There followed ten minutes of instruction on how to operate a plasma cutter, which was all old hat as far as Laks was concerned, since he had used to do it for a living: you clamped a ground cable to the object you wanted to destroy, opened a valve on a gas tank, turned the machine on, and pulled a trigger. The goggles would prevent him from going blind as he sliced through the steel poles. Good advice was supplied on where to stand to avoid being crushed when these fell over.

Almost as a footnote, a mere afterthought, there was information on “hostiles.” The whole site was studded with surveillance cameras, which would not be operational, and motion-activated lights, which would not be operational. These were reinforced by camera drones. Those would not be operational. All were connected over a private, secure network, which would not be operational, to a command center some miles to the north. Security personnel at the actual net site usually got around on four-wheeled ATVs, which would not be operational, and communicated over encrypted radio headsets, which would not be operational. All, because, as Laks understood, what had happened to the electronics in the semi had also happened to all the other electronic devices in this whole area. It all had to do with that flash of light in the sky. It was some kind of special bomb that fried electronics but didn’t do a lot of other damage—at least, not when you set it off miles above a godforsaken desert. Even mechanical systems like the engines of trucks and ATVs had electronics in the loop, and so those were all dead.

Of note was the obvious fact that all the gear that had been in the shipping container still worked perfectly. Perhaps the container was shielded from the effects of the detonation? But the stuff they’d planted in Laks’s head to help fix his brain seemed to be working normally too, so maybe they had ways of making chips that were invulnerable to that kind of attack.

And the van they’d been driving. Vintage, almost antique. From the 1960s, probably—before the automakers had put chips in everything. They’d gone to the trouble of sourcing a getaway vehicle that would keep running even after every other car, truck, and ATV in the vicinity was bricked.

Security personnel themselves were presumably feeling just fine, unless they had pacemakers. And their guns, unless they were very special and weird, would presumably shoot bullets just as well as usual. This was a detail that Laks only began to ponder toward the very end of the flight, when the mesa above the Rio Grande was rushing up toward him and the stretched nets—gleaming in the moonlight like pools of fog—were filling most of his visual field. For a moment he feared that one or more of the drone’s six propellers would snag in a net and culminate in a Cuisinart-tangle-blood storm. But whoever, or whatever, was piloting this thing tilted it back hard at the last minute to kill its velocity and then brought it down softly on the ground, only a few steps away from a concrete plinth from which erupted a thick steel tube. TIME TO INSERTION had counted down to zero.

Laks unfastened the safety harness while waiting for the propellers to stop moving. When it seemed safe to do so—“Safe” being a relative term here, of course—he climbed out. No one was nearby. No lights were operational. It seemed a tidy, orderly facility. About a hundred meters away was an ATV that had just been abandoned where it had died. There was a system of dirt roads that looped around all these big nets and connected them to a cluster of office trailers and shipping containers that seemed to be the nerve center. That was a few hundred meters away.

It wasn’t entirely clear what he was supposed to do now. He’d been told that a plasma cutter would be supplied. He did not see any lying around.

The brink of the mesa was not far away and so he ambled over to it and had a look down toward the river, which was maybe a hundred meters below. Some patches gleamed and rippled in the moonlight. Others were stamped with the sharp-edged silhouettes of scrubby vegetation growing on its banks and bars. He could hear the purr of a small engine down there, its tone rising and falling as it revved up and down. His revamped ears were pretty good at direction-finding. He swung his head back and forth until he was able to identify the source: just a gray mote angling up the slope below him, cutting its own switchback up the flank of the mesa in a rooster tail of churned-up dust. So at least one vehicle—it sounded, and moved, like an ATV—had survived the flash. And, allowing for switchbacks, it seemed to be headed in his direction.

“Freeze!” someone shouted. “Hands where I can see ’em, Abdul!”

Laks wasn’t surprised. During the last minute or so he had begun to smell danger, and its odor was now very strong. He extended his hands out away from his sides and turned around slowly to see a man in a sort of military getup, standing about five meters away and aiming a shotgun at him. Approaching from the direction of the compound, he’d crept up on Laks while Laks had been enjoying the vista.

Before either of them could take any further action, a light came on above, creating a pool of illumination around this man. A second and a third light appeared, catching him in an equilateral cross fire with the intensity of the midday sun. Three drones, making practically no sound, that had been stalking this guy through the night.

A fourth drone descended into the pool of light until it had interposed itself between the barrel of the shotgun and Laks. This one had a short tube projecting from an apparatus in its belly. The tube was on gimbals that enabled it to pivot this way and that, and to angle up and down. Initially the tube was aimed right at the man, but once it had got his attention it angled downward. A bolt of fire spat from it and dust erupted from the ground just to one side of the man’s boots. The drone jerked back from recoil as a loud bang reached Laks’s ear. A spent shell casing twinkled as it bounced in the dirt.

“You are surrounded,” said a woman’s voice from the drone. Perfect English with a light Indian accent. Laks thought it might be the same lady who did the recorded announcements at Indira Gandhi International Airport. With the same tone of mild regret that she might have used to inform passengers that their departure gate had been changed, she instructed this man to disarm himself and then march in the direction helpfully pointed out by “the arrow.”

Which raised the same question in Laks’s mind that it probably did in that of this security guard: What the fuck was the arrow? But no sooner had Laks begun to furrow his brow in puzzlement than an arrow appeared on the ground, drawn out by a scanning laser. There was enough dust in the air that Laks could see the laser beam and back-trace it up to its source: yet another drone hovering perhaps twenty meters above them. The arrow, painted on the dirt in brilliant emerald green, began right in front of the security guard’s boots and executed an immediate U-turn, pointing back in the direction of the main compound.

The guard had now recovered his wits to the point where he had put a plan together in his head. Not a great plan, but a plan. He took a couple of steps forward as if following the arrow, but then suddenly pivoted, dropping to one knee, and fired his shotgun at the closest drone—the one with the built-in gun. This shuddered back from the blast and skittered across the ground leaving a trail of shattered parts in its wake.

Immediately the green arrow disappeared. Or rather the cone of grainy green laser light shrank and collapsed inward until it was just scanning back and forth across the man’s eye sockets. “Fuck!” he shouted and bent his face downward. The back of his head was now just an incandescent blob of green laser light. Another gun drone hummed in from a different angle and fired a second round. The shotgun jerked and spun out of the man’s hands and came to rest on the ground out of his reach.

Holstered on the man’s hip was another gun—a semi-automatic pistol. Laks wondered if the drone would try to shoot that as well. But it seemed that such measures were not even necessary. The man raised his hands and laced his fingers together on the top of his head. The blinding blob of green light spread out and reconstituted itself as the arrow telling him where to go. He began to follow it; and it changed its shape in response to his movements and preceded him across the mesa as he walked back toward the compound.

“Abdul’s an Arab name!” Laks shouted after the man. But the man either didn’t hear, or chose to ignore it. En route his arrow met, and merged with, that of a colleague who was being marched along by a different squadron of drones.

The smell of danger abated in Laks’s nostrils, or, to be precise, whatever equipment the medics had inserted between his nostrils and his brain. It was replaced by the scent of smoke. He turned around. The ATV he’d noticed earlier had gained the top of the mesa and parked. Two men were getting out of it. One was smoking a pipe: the source of the smoke. The other, who had been driving, heaved a backpack out of the cargo storage area behind the seats, got one arm through a shoulder strap, and began to lug it along in Major Raju’s wake. For the pipe-smoking man was he.

“Sergeant Singh!” Raju hailed him. For as of a few weeks ago this was Laks’s correct designation within the Indian military. Purely a formality, he’d been assured—a requirement of paperwork and documentation that would only ever become relevant under certain highly improbable circumstances. “A salute is traditional,” Major Raju reminded him.

Laks had seen characters saluting in video games and tried to imitate them as best he could remember. “You see,” Major Raju said, returning the salute, “if we’re seen observing these niceties, it’s easier for you to claim you were only following orders.”

“Wouldn’t that shift responsibility to you?” Laks asked. Then, noting an expectant look on Major Raju’s face, he added “. . . sir.”

“I’ll be on the other side of the river,” Major Raju said. “Shame, really. One feels that a leader should . . . well . . . lead. Command his men from the front. Not be shouting at them from the rear. Alas, I have clear directions to the contrary, from officers of even higher rank, even farther from the action.” He put his pipe in his teeth and spent a few moments taking in the scene. “Oh, see there!” he mumbled. “One’s just coming in now.” He pulled the pipe from his teeth and used its stem to point up into the air.

A ghostly shape, like an albino bat the size of a 737, was gliding in from the other side of the river. A gracefully curved airfoil with shroud lines converging down to a bullet-shaped burden. It passed over one of the nets in perfect silence and dropped the bullet, which plummeted into the net. The airfoil crumpled and drifted into the night on a light breeze.

“A safe re-entry from a brief sojourn to the stratosphere,” Major Raju said. “You know what it was doing up there, Sergeant Singh?”

A second ATV had crested the lip of the mesa and pulled to a stop next to the first one. Two men had climbed out of it. They did not carry guns or any other sort of equipment, save for cameras mounted to the fronts of their helmets. During Laks’s exploits in the Himalayas, he’d gotten used to people like this following him around. They had elbowed Pippa out of the picture very early, which he still regretted. They had a curious style of moving around and looking at things that, as he now understood, was all about trying to find the best angle. And looking directly at them was to be discouraged. So he looked at Major Raju. Who had positioned himself with his back to the moon so that its light would fall on Laks’s face as they conversed.

If you could call this a conversation. Laks began to answer the question. “They were . . .”

“What were?” Major Raju broke in, like a schoolteacher trying to be of assistance to a slightly dull pupil.

“The shells landing in these nets,” Laks said, waving an arm toward them, “have just come back from spewing toxic chemicals into the stratosphere. It’s a layer of the atmosphere that knows no national boundaries—shared by all the peoples of the world. If you want to know why the monsoon was late this year, my brothers and sisters, look no further.”

“Well said. Now let’s do something about it, shall we?”

The guy with the backpack had just been standing there stolidly during all this. At a signal from Major Raju he stepped forward, swinging the pack down from his shoulder in a way that indicated he meant for Laks to take it. As Laks got a better look at this object he found it strangely familiar-looking: it was the rig he’d spent the last ten minutes learning how to operate via the PowerPoint deck. It comprised a tank of compressed air, batteries, and some electrical gear that fed a handheld pistol-grip business end on the end of a thick umbilical.

Laks turned his back and let the guy hold the rig up for him while he shrugged it on. The nearest net stanchion was only a few paces away. He hiked over to it, adjusting the shoulder straps. The valve knob on the air tank was sticking out next to his left ear. He reached across with his right hand and cranked it open, hearing the gas hiss into the system’s plumbing. The power switch was conveniently located down by one hip. Status lights came on. He double-checked the position of his visor, walked up to the plinth, and connected a beefy spring-loaded ground clip to a metal flange, worrying it back and forth so its serrated jaws would gnaw through the paint and make good electrical contact. He stood in what the PowerPoint deck had assured him was a safe location, put the nozzle to the steel, and pulled the trigger. A purplish-blue plasma arc jumped between the nozzle and the pillar. Hotter by a long shot than the surface of the sun, it would have turned his retinas into gravy had his visor not auto-darkened. In the night above the Rio Grande, with all other technology dead, it must have been more than a bit obvious. They could probably see it, not just in Mexico, but in Guatemala. At first he moved the arc too slowly. Then he noticed he was just widening a chasm in steel that had already been obliterated, and began to move it faster. Beyond a certain point, the slot he was cutting began to widen of its own accord as the tension on the net at the top of the pole began to pull it inward. Then he just had to make a quick slice around the other side and watch the thing topple. Still attached to the foundation by a flap of metal he had not got around to cutting through, the pole fell into the middle of the net and bounced gently up and down.

He stepped back and raised his visor. The cut edges of the steel were still glowing red.

In addition to pipe smoke, Major Raju reeked of satisfaction. “That contraption is as amazing as they say!” he remarked. “Imagine what one could do with a suspension bridge. Or a skyscraper. Or—well—anything that conducts electricity and is big and important!” He puffed on his pipe for a moment, staring up into the moonlit sky as visions of collapsing bridges danced in his head. “You could mount one on a drone,” he mused. Then, as if arguing with himself: “But that would leave out the human angle.” This snapped him out of his reverie. “Sergeant Singh! Big Fish! What did you just do?”

“We have just—”

“You. You.”

“I have just struck the first blow in the defense of our Breadbasket against the toxic and aggressive actions of those who would seek to, uh, change the climate in a way that is, uh, deeply toxic and racist.”

“Cut everything after ‘Breadbasket,’” Major Raju muttered to one of the cameramen. “You have work to do, Sergeant Singh! Very good work! Best get on with it!”

“Yes, sir!” Laks started making tracks for the next net stanchion. As he did, he could hear the major giving an order to the subordinate who’d given him the backpack: “If I’m not mistaken, we have some additional materiel that needs to be transferred into Sergeant Singh’s flying chariot for use during Phase 2.”