Termination Shock

Pina2bo

The touch screen that was supposed to serve as the elevator’s UI was dead like everything else that had been reached by the electromagnetic pulse. But the system still had power from below. Someone had to rip the control panel off the wall and then figure out how to hot-wire it. This was far from being the most difficult technical challenge tackled by White Label Industries engineers during their years-long quest to alter world climate, but it still took some doing. For example, it was decided that they needed someone to climb the ladder all the way down to the bottom of the shaft to flip a switch and poke at some wires. Jules volunteered and scampered down the shaft. Several minutes later his voice could be heard echoing up from below. He began to follow instructions hollered down to him by Conor, the engineer who’d taken the initiative with the crowbar and was now standing in the elevator, hands in pockets, evaluating a tangle of wiring harnesses and connectors.

During that procedure T.R. and Saskia—whose only role, here, was to be protected by all the other people—had nothing to do but pace around and drink water. It had been years since she’d been completely disconnected from all electronics, and she found herself wishing she’d brought one of the many unread books piled up on end tables and nightstands in various residences.

About forty-five minutes after the EMP they saw lights gliding through the air down around Bunkhouse. It was obvious from the way they moved that they were drones and that they were swarming in a coordinated fashion. Saskia’s first assumption was that the Black Hat people around High Noon had deployed a fleet of these things that had somehow survived the EMP and were setting up an air patrol over Pina2bo. The first wave of them only came up as far as Bunkhouse. A second wave, however, soon began to advance toward the gun complex.

Gunfire sounded from Bunkhouse. The boss of the Black Hats, one Tatum, ordered his men to begin dispersing into positions where they could find cover. Saskia and T.R. he herded into the elevator. “Close this door,” he said to Conor, the engineer who had been messing with the wires, “and get them to the bottom. Even if it means y’all gotta climb down the ladder.”

Closing the door was a thing that Conor had figured out how to do pretty early, and so that was the last they saw of Tatum or of anyone or anything else on the surface. Saskia and T.R. were now sealed up inside a rather small box with this Conor. He was a short, stocky white guy, probably in his mid-thirties, who had given up trying to cope with the complexities of male pattern baldness and just gone over to stubble. His burly physique took up more than its share of space in the elevator but Saskia would not begrudge him that if he could get the thing to move.

“I was trying to figure out how to do this the nice way,” he remarked. “The terrible way is easy.” He evaluated his fellow passengers, seeming to assess their overall health and state of mind, in a way that suggested he really wasn’t kidding.

“What’s the terrible way?” T.R. asked.

“Just turning the motor on and off.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“You might want to sit down on the floor. No, on second thought, let’s keep your tailbones out of it. More of a squatting posture might be good.” Conor demonstrated by backing into a corner of the elevator within reach of the gutted control panel, then sliding down until he was sitting on his haunches.

Saskia was with T.R. in thinking it didn’t sound so bad, until the first time Conor touched two wires together and the motor came on. Then the bottom seemed to fall out of the lift and they dropped what seemed like a hundred meters in a fraction of a second. Then they stopped so hard she thought they must have smashed into something. To her embarrassment she let out a scream.

T.R. broke the silence that followed by saying, “Gotcha.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s like popping the clutch in a truck. Full power all at once.”

“Good analogy, sir.”

“How far did we drop?”

“I have no idea.” Conor, displaying admirably good knees and leg muscles, stood straight up and looked through the mesh wall of the lift, through which it was possible to see the shell hoist and much more routed-systems clutter choking the mine shaft. This was dimly, unevenly lit by emergency lights. He craned his neck and put his face close to the mesh so that he could peer upward. “Not that far,” he said.

But this could have been guessed anyway from the sound of gunfire echoing down the shaft. It sounded close. Saskia’s impression that they had dropped a hundred meters was totally wrong. Ten was more like it.

The gunfire wasn’t heavy. This was not a full-blown firefight. This was selective and it seemed to come from several directions.

“Shotguns,” T.R. pronounced them. “Our boys trying to take out drones.” He listened a little more. “That there was a pistol round.” He looked down at the others. “Much as it shames me to run from a fight, I do believe we should descend farther. You okay, Saskia?”

“Perfectly fine, thank you.”

“So why don’t let’s get comfy and you pop the clutch again and—”

“Sir?”

Conor had slid back down into his squat and was poised to touch two stripped wires together, which Saskia knew would lead to another drop. But he was looking at T.R. who had held up a hand to signal wait just a sec. T.R. had turned his face upward and opened his mouth. He was listening. So they all listened. Gunshots were still popping off here and there. But something very weird could now also be heard. It was a woman’s voice, electronically amplified, speaking calmly: “Place your weapons on the ground and lace your fingers together on top of your head. Proceed in the direction indicated by the green arrow.” Though they had to listen for a while to completely decipher it, the same announcement seemed to be emanating from multiple drones in different places at different times.

“Sounds like a fucking airport,” T.R. remarked. His eyes rotated down toward Saskia. “Would you call that an Indian accent? As in, from India?”

They all listened to a few more repetitions of the message.

“Definitely,” Saskia said.

“I concur, Your Royal Highness.” He looked at Conor. “Hit it.”

Conor had to “hit it” at least a dozen times before they got to the bottom. Toward the end he was just tapping the wires together for the briefest instant possible, producing a series of jolts that dropped them only a meter at a time. But he didn’t have to explain that this was preferable to slamming full-tilt into the bottom of the mine shaft. When they got to within about a meter of the Level Zero lift stop, all aboard wordlessly agreed that this was close enough, and that clambering down the rest of the way was preferable to the sickening lurch-drop-jolt of “popping the clutch.”

Conor did the thing that caused the door to open. They looked out into the side chamber at Level Zero, which Saskia had last seen the better part of a year ago, on the day the gun had first been fired. It looked the same, just a bit more lived-in. Conor climbed down to the floor and helped T.R. out. Both men then made a show of trying to help Saskia until she pointed out that they were merely getting in her way. Waiting for them was Jules.

Though partly obstructed by all manner of plumbing and mechanical equipment, the whole length of the shaft from here up to the surface was basically open. Air and light could filter up and down it, and sounds echoed down from above. At this distance they would no longer hear the Indian lady delivering her calm but firm instructions. Gunfire was audible, though. As before, that was sporadic. The shots seemed to come fewer and farther between as time went on.

“What’s going on up there?” Jules finally asked.

Saskia realized he hadn’t seen the drones or heard the voice. “It sounded to me,” she explained, “as if drones were being used to somehow round people up and march them off.”

“Off to where?” Jules asked. It was, come to think of it, a perfectly obvious and sensible question.

Saskia threw up her hands. “Not here.”

Jules was stricken, obviously thinking that he should have stayed behind with Fenna. “What’s wrong with here?”

“This may become a question of some relevance to us,” T.R. remarked.

The image stabilization system in his fancy binoculars was on the fritz. To get a steady view of what was happening down on the mesa, Rufus had to go full Stone Age, holding them down on an outcropping of rock near the summit of the peak. The distance was so great that the binoculars weren’t a huge improvement on the naked eye. Every few minutes a purplish star would ignite at the base of a net stanchion and burn for a couple of minutes. Then that pole would fall inward. One by one the nets were hitting the ground.

Pina2bo had stopped firing shells around the time of the flash—which as near as he could tell had detonated in the sky right above it. But there would still be dozens of shells in the air, spiraling down out of the stratosphere beneath their parasails. Under normal circumstances, they’d be talking to systems on the ground that would tell them which net to aim for. Rufus didn’t know what happened in the case when a shell couldn’t phone home. It was maybe kind of an interesting question but not the thing to be focusing on right now.

Pools of light were gliding around the mesa in an orderly way, sometimes preceded by—unless his eyes deceived him—huge glowing green arrows. He could not make out what it was they were illuminating, but a reasonable guess would be people. They converged on one location in the facility’s parking lot: a ring of green laser light surrounding a lit-up circle. People were being herded and penned, he guessed.

Up here at the marble mine they didn’t have lights at all, other than a few candles. All their flashlights were LED-based. Instead of simple on-off switches, they had buttons you could press multiple times to get different brightness levels or check the batteries or what have you. There must be a little microprocessor inside the unit counting the button presses and deciding what action to take. Those were fried. So the lights didn’t work. Fortunately the moon was full. It was what they used to call a Comanche moon on the Texas frontier, for the warriors of that people had taken advantage of its light to mount nocturnal raids. Rufus was thereby able to hike down from the peak and find his way back to the campfire without turning an ankle. He’d had an idea that he could hot-wire some flashlights by opening them up and soldering wires directly between the battery terminals and the LEDs.

Or, of course, they could all just go to bed and wait for the sun to come up. But after that it would soon become so hot that they would have to lie low until it went down again. The ability to move around and get things done during the hours of darkness was going to be important.

Besides, he had nothing else to do.

His trailer had some twelve-volt circuits that ran off battery power, and these still worked. So he was able to go in and grab his soldering iron. But it required 120 volts AC. Normally this would be supplied by the generator. But the generators were all dead because they were controlled by systems that had microchips in them. For that matter, so did the soldering iron; it had a built-in thermocouple and some logic that varied the power to keep it at a set temperature, turned it off when not in use, and so on.

So Rufus’s first project was to hot-wire his own soldering iron by holding its tip into the glowing coals of the campfire until it was hot enough. He was able to bypass its power supply and hook it directly to a car battery. This gave him the ability to hot-wire flashlights. This in turn gave him a well-illuminated workspace on one of the plastic tables.

He did not, of course, fully know what was going on, other than that the ranch was under some sort of attack. His conversation with Pippa pointed to some kind of performative war project starring Big Fish. Such a thing could not possibly have worked if it was Big Fish single-handedly taking on Black Hat. But Black Hat without electronic devices was just a few guys running around in the dark with guns, strewn across a vast stretch of desert. Desert where it was nearly impossible to move because of climate and terrain. They’d have no way to communicate save mirror flashes and smoke signals.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. Big Fish must be down on that mesa, performatively bringing the nets down. Why attack the nets? Because they were a great big obvious symbol and it would look good. Maybe they could get some video of spent shells crashing ignominiously into the ground.

Pina2bo, on the other hand, was all underground. Nonetheless, he’d have to go there eventually. He’d have to do it soon, before reinforcements could be sent in. Personnel there were probably being rounded up and herded and kettled just like the ones down on the mesa. The next move—the big payoff—would probably happen tomorrow, in daylight where it would look better on the videos.

To do anything about it, Rufus would have to cover ten miles of rough ground. He was going to be out in the open. He was going to need his earthsuit.

The earthsuit was a whole basket of technologies, some of which belonged to the realm of materials science, such as fabric, or of mechanical engineering, such as pumps and fans. But the key thing for his survival tomorrow was going to be the refrigeration system.

The fancy suits issued to Black Hat personnel did not show up on the loading dock as suits, but as rolling footlockers crammed with modular parts, so the user could configure them for different conditions. The module that was responsible for the user’s not perishing of heat stroke was branded as the Me-Frigerator. More than one type of Me-Frigerator was in the kit. One of them was optimized for conditions where direct intense sunlight was the primary threat. Which was decidedly the case in the Chihuahuan Desert on an August afternoon. It was built around a technology that had been invented and patented a hundred years ago by none other than Albert Einstein, teaming up with a future A-bomb physicist named Leo Szilard. It didn’t have moving parts, other than some valves. It was just a particular configuration of plumbing containing certain fluids. One part of it just happened to get cold when another part of it was exposed to heat. You didn’t need a motor to drive a compressor or any of that. It just worked, provided you could open the valves and make one part of it hot. And that last was pretty easy in the desert sun, especially when there were new blacker-than-black light-absorbing materials and certain other innovations that Einstein hadn’t known about. During the first century of its existence, Einstein’s invention had not seen very much practical use because it was less efficient than other ways of making things cold. But more recently, researchers had been spiffing it up with an eye to using it in developing countries where heat, in the form of sun and fire, was easier to get than reliable electricity. The manufacturers of the fancy earthsuits favored by Black Hat had piggybacked off such innovations to make these Me-Frigerator systems. Rufus dug into one of them as soon as he had good light and a functional soldering iron.

That implement—the soldering iron—was an example of the same kind of problem he was facing with this Me-Frigerator. The part of the soldering iron that really mattered was just a dumb coil of wire that got hot when electrical current ran through it. Everything else was electronic brains that added features. When the brain got fried, it just had to be bypassed. The added features went away, leaving a soldering iron that was a throwback compared to the one with the brain. But it did most of what the brainy version could—especially if the person wielding it had some brains of his own.

Likewise, the maze of plumbing and sealed containers of special fluids in the Me-Frigerator were simple enough that they would do their basic job without a brain. That had to be the case, because ol’ Albert had patented the thing before thinking machines existed. The trick was to work a bypass, just as Rufus had with the soldering iron. He might have to turn it on and off by hand. But since he was a pretty acute judge of when he was and wasn’t hot, that should be easy.

“What the hell are you doing? Everyone wants to know.” This was Carmelita, whose role in this strange little community was to be the Rufus whisperer. Thordis talked to horses. Everyone except Rufus talked to eagles. Rufus talked to drones. Carmelita talked to Rufus. She had acquired the skill early in their relationship, when they hadn’t liked each other. As such it had been easy for her to speak to him bluntly. Now they’d come to like each other fine. The habit had stuck, though.

“Before you settle in to bothering me could you throw a couple more logs on the fire?” Rufus asked, without looking up. “Gonna need a heat source to see if this thing works.” Carmelita did so, then sat down across from him. “Seriously, Red. What the fuck?”

“We are at war,” Rufus said. “Gonna ride to the sound of the guns. Leaving before daybreak, I reckon.”

“The guns aren’t making any sound!” Carmelita objected.

Rufus sighed. “It is a Civil War joke. Not so funny apparently. It means I need to go to where the action is gonna be. Pina2bo.”

“And you think you’re gonna get that suit working.”

“Gonna try.”

“Then what, Red?”

“Head out before sunrise, like I said.” He heard footsteps and looked up to see Thordis approaching. Trailing behind her were Piet and then Tsolmon.

“On Bildad?” Carmelita asked.

“Pegleg. I’m too big for poor ol’ Bildad. Pegleg’s more my size.” Also, though Rufus was embarrassed to admit it, he’d held an irrational grudge against Bildad ever since the gelding had made his preference for Thordis clear.

“Pegleg does not have a Me-Frigerator.”

“By the time the sun is high enough to be a problem for Pegleg, we’ll have reached a waller I noticed, a couple of miles from the big gun.”

“Waller?”

“Low spot in the ground where there’s some water. Pegleg can rest easy there until the cool of the evening. Then he’ll find his way back.”

“While you cover those last couple of miles on foot.”

“Yep.”

“Here, let me hold that for you.” Carmelita picked up a flashlight that Rufus had balanced on a rock and angled it into the control unit of the earthsuit to give him a better view. He had a big magnifying glass that he used to work on tiny components and was putting it to good use now.

“What are you going to do about the drones, Red?” That was Thordis talking. She and the others had now formed a little circle around the table. Piet came up behind him, stood a little too close, and peered over his shoulder. He was meticulous, on the spectrum, one of those guys who’d figured out by trial and error that he got along better with critters than with people. “Guess you might as well take notes, Piet,” Rufus suggested. “Maybe we can come out of this with a procedure. Or at least a list of what not to do.”

Piet didn’t say anything, but Rufus could hear the click of a ballpoint pen and the rustle of pages in the little graph paper notebook he always carried in a certain pocket.

“You didn’t answer Thordis’s question,” Carmelita pointed out.

“We’ve been up there watching,” Thordis said. “Whoever those people are—”

“India,” Rufus put in.

“They must have hundreds of drones. And I don’t know how many people.”

“Very few, would be my guess,” Rufus said.

“Anyway, the drones have guns on them. And who knows what else.”

“I figured the same, Thordis.”

“There’s no cover out in that desert. The drones will see you coming a mile away.”

“Well, I can and will go alone,” Rufus said. “Someone got to be Hector in this Iliad.”

“Hector?”

“The opposition. Someone gotta play defense. Staff at Pina2bo gonna be neutralized, rounded up, just like those ones down on the mesa. But they probably don’t know about me, coming down the back way from the old marble mine. That won’t be in their plan.”

“You’ll go alone if you have to. Is that what you’re saying, Red?” Carmelita asked. “And those drones will fuck you up. But if we’ve got your back—”

“How do the eagles fare in the heat of the day?” Rufus asked.

“They ride the air to where it is cold,” Tsolmon said. Her first and quite likely her final contribution to this conversation.

“Thing is,” Rufus said, “whatever these guys are gonna do, they got to get it done quick. Electronics might be on the fritz here at the ranch. Giving them the upper hand. But—”

“There must be some safe radius outside of which everything will still be working,” Piet said.

“Yeah. And so the cavalry will be on its way tomorrow. Bad guys know this. Maybe they can use hostages to delay the inevitable. But they gotta do something tomorrow, something big to justify all this. I do mean to be there. You want to bring the eagles and join the party, be my guest. We got all night to get the meefs fixed,” he concluded, using the inevitable slang term for “Me-Frigerator.”

He got to his feet and lifted the meef from the table. During the last few minutes he’d identified what he believed to be its on/off switch: a pair of valves, electromechanically actuated, that controlled the circulation of fluids through the plumbing circuits. He had teased the wires free and hooked them up to new leads in a simple circuit consisting of a battery, a switch, and a resistor. When he flicked the switch he could hear the valves moving. He was pretty sure he had just turned the unit on. There was an easy way to find out. He carried it over to the campfire, which had developed a nice bed of coals. He turned the unit’s hot plate—just a flat expanse of bottomless black—toward it, using his hand to verify that it was getting warm. A watched pot never boils, so he waited for a minute. “Y’all are the custodians of those beautiful birds,” he said. “Y’all can decide.”

“The drones they’re using might be big ones,” Thordis pointed out.

“Go for the little ones first,” Carmelita suggested. “The video drones. Peck out their eyes.”

Thordis didn’t seem mollified. “The real question is, why are we doing it? Why go to war for T.R.?”

“We’re going to war for Red,” Tsolmon answered.

“Why are you doing it then, Red?”

“You mean, other than the fact that T.R. has been paying me to look after his property?” Rufus asked, looking Thordis in the eye. But he already knew that an argument of that type wasn’t going to cut much ice with her. How impossibly old and out of date he was, making decisions based on some frontier notion of honor. And she was right, in a way. All their vehicles and comms were down. They could all just stay put right here and wait for the cavalry and T.R. wouldn’t think less of them.

Rufus was debating whether he should just come out and tell them the real reason: Saskia was down at Pina2bo. He’d heard the news over the Black Hat comms network before everything had gone down yesterday afternoon. She was probably being menaced by those drones. And a certain atavistic logic dictated that he must, therefore, ride to her rescue. But he wasn’t sure how that was going to play with this crowd.

“Why take those kinds of risks,” Thordis said, “to protect this crazy plan to mess with the climate?”

Rufus considered it. “It’s already been messed with,” he said. “It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the wheel. T.R. ain’t the perfect man to grab it, but I don’t think his whole plan is just to fuck up the Punjab and starve India. He’s trying to get a global system up and running. Criticize it if you want. But I don’t mind helping when an opportunity presents itself.”

He reached into the meef. His hand encountered something that had, over the last couple of minutes, grown very cold. But his eyes were fixed on the campfire: dry mesquite popping and crackling. “That’s my fancy explanation,” he said. “But the real answer is in the words of the Bible. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. I been holed up in this place long enough.”

By the time Laks climbed back into his six-rotor flying chariot, it had become a five-rotor flying chariot.

Major Raju had long since taken his leave and gone back across the river into Mexico. For at least an hour, it was just Laks walking around the site chopping down net stanchions, trailed by the videographers. From the way those guys went about their work, and the nature of some comments he overheard in Hindi, they were not livestreaming. They were going to edit this footage and release a cut later. Which made total sense, considering. Since he had come back to his senses and got most of his memories back, Laks had familiarized himself with the amazingly vast corpus of Big Fish–related content that had gone up on the Internet during his rise to fame and sudden fall from glory. It made much of his supposedly humble blue-collar origins as a fisherman and a welder. At one point his handlers had even gone to the trouble of renting out a welding shop for a day and shooting footage of him grinding metal and operating a cutting torch: two operations beloved of filmmakers because they generated lots of sparks. The images of him cutting down stanchions on the mesa would fit perfectly with that story.

Anyway, it all went pretty much according to plan (or so Laks assumed; it wasn’t like anyone had talked to him about what the plan actually was) except for an element of randomness introduced by those spent shells gliding down out of the sky every seven and a half minutes. These were the very definition of an accident waiting to happen. Laks didn’t know how they worked, but it was easy enough to see that they were supposed to home in on the nets. And maybe they had enough built-in smarts to find their way back to this general vicinity on their own, and perhaps line up a final glide path aimed roughly toward the mesa. But maybe there was some kind of robotic air traffic control system that was supposed to take over at that point and guide them in on final approach. If so, it was on the blink. Sometimes the shells happened to hit the nets, like the first one that he and Major Raju had watched, but sometimes they didn’t. And even when they were on target, they were dropping into nets that Laks was here to cut down.

Half an hour into the operation, he stood and watched as a shell plummeted directly onto hard ground that was covered with a completely flattened net. The thing belly-flopped in a cloud of rocks and dust and tumbled end over end for something like a hundred meters before coming to rest in a big tangle of shroud lines and silky fabric. For the mechanisms that were supposed to disengage the shells from the parasails were sometimes failing and so the tumbling shell was getting wrapped in its shroud lines as it careered across the mesa.

It made for great video but the potential hazard was obvious and so for the remainder of the mission the videographers were torn between fascination and terror as they waited for these ghostly visitations to glide out of the sky along slightly random vectors and crash somewhere nearby. Laks requested that they please inform him if any were headed directly for him, then adjusted his visor and went about his work.

Because he did not hear any such warnings from them, he was surprised but not especially worried when they suddenly began to cry out in dismay. He was in the middle of cutting down a stanchion. He could hear the distant sound effects he’d learned to associate with a shell crash-landing. It was far away and it wasn’t getting closer. So he ignored it until he was finished dropping this pole. It took longer than usual—he had the sense that the plasma cutter’s batteries were dying, and there was no question that the air tank was nearly empty.

He switched off the machine, pulled his visor down onto his chest, and looked around to see what all the fuss was about. He had been abandoned by his videographers, who were trotting across the mesa’s treacherous surface as best they could in the dim moonlight, headed back toward where the drone was parked. Laks ditched the backpack and followed them.

The drone had not taken a direct hit, at least. It was somewhat difficult to reconstruct what had happened because the drone’s six arms and eighteen rotor blades had become all involved with the shroud lines of the shell that had caused the problem. Consequently shell and drone had been dragged and tumbled, with multiple small impacts, a visual record of which was inscribed across a dozen meters of ground. Laks had a folding knife, which was fortunate since otherwise they’d have been untangling the mess until the sun was up. As it was, it took a quarter of an hour to cut it free to the point where they could assess damage.

One of the six arms was damaged beyond repair. It was a hollow tube of carbon fiber composite that buckled and creased but didn’t completely give way. About halfway along it just lost all structural integrity and dangled askew.

One of the other arms had a damaged propeller, but this seemed like it would probably still work. The videographers had found a new role for themselves, sending pictures of the damage back to experts in India.

The central hub, comprising the cockpit and some storage compartments, looked worse than it was. At first Laks was afraid to inspect it, because at a glance it looked disastrous. But when he did take a close look he understood that while most of it was quite sturdy, the hatches that closed over the storage bins were as flimsy as they could be. Those had taken quite a beating. One was just dangling by a few strands of carbon fiber. But this damage was basically cosmetic. The only possible consequence was that stuff might fall out during flight.

Inevitably, the tool chest in the remaining ATV contained a roll of duct tape. One of the videographers brought this back at a run, holding it out in front of him like Gollum with the One Ring. Laks—carefully filmed at every step—used it to patch up the damaged hatches. Along the way he got a look at their contents, which until now had been unknown to him. The biggest compartment with the most seriously damaged hatch contained what was obviously an earthsuit in a desert camo pattern. Others contained food and water. One contained a briefcase that was shockingly heavy. A sharp voice in his earbuds told him not to mess with that, but to make sure it was well secured.

The drone booted up with an array of warning lights and system errors that made it look like a portable disco. Following instructions from India, Laks used a folding camp saw from the tool box to amputate the damaged arm. Then he taped off the cut ends of the wires that dangled from its stump. The drone, he was assured, was perfectly capable of flying with one rotor out. The damaged rotor on the other arm was a concern, but a brief flight test indicated it could still move enough air to get the drone off the ground. A few more minutes were then devoted to silencing alarms, clearing error messages, and overriding safety interlocks just to get the operating system calmed down to the point where it was willing to consider taking Laks on the next leg of the mission.

And then he was in the air, headed deeper into Texas. He hadn’t finished taking the last two nets down, but no one seemed to care about those. The good video had been shot, he guessed, and uploaded to a server in India. The cameramen were headed back down Mexico way. The overall tone of the last hour’s discourse had been that he was well behind schedule and it was a now-or-never kind of situation.

During Laks’s convalescence, after he’d come out of the coma but before they’d restored his sense of balance, they had pushed him around Cyberabad in a wheelchair. And needless to say, not being able to walk had been miserable for him. But added to it had been this other, less obvious source of annoyance, which was that he had no control over where he was going. The person pushing the wheelchair decided that. But at least in those days he’d been able to talk to that person. To ask where he was being taken, to make requests.

This felt like that. He was not actually flying the drone. He couldn’t have flown it if he’d tried, because it had no controls. As soon as he climbed in, some pilot who might be on the other side of the world—in a military compound outside of Delhi, say—made the thing take off and go wherever they wanted him next. But he couldn’t talk to that person the way he could to a wheelchair pusher.

So it was actually with some sense of relief that he watched the drone run out of juice during the flight north and make what was obviously an unscheduled emergency landing in the mountains around one o’clock in the morning.

At least the drone had what Uncle Dharmender referred to as idiot lights. That’s what they were called on the dashboard of a car. They told the driver when to check the oil or whatever. As such, they were a pillar of the family’s business; a large portion of the clan’s overall cash flow was traceable to motorists noticing idiot lights.

On this thing, they were idiot icons scattered around on a screen. But they served the same purpose. The most important of which was to prevent the occupant/pilot from being high aloft at the moment the batteries died. They had been yellow when Laks took off from the mesa, they turned orange shortly afterward, and they turned red as the drone was gaining altitude in an attempt to get over the summit of a mountain ridge. No one was bothering to tell Laks anything, but it could be inferred that said ridge stood between him and wherever it was they wanted him to be. Somewhere in the bowels of India’s military-industrial complex, people were probably getting demoted, fired, maybe even arrested right now for having failed to predict the mishap with the shell, for having miscalculated the battery charge necessary to get him over those mountains.

Anyway, the drone broke off from its laser-straight trajectory and came under what showed every sign of being manual control. After hunting and seeking around the mountainside for a few moments it settled down on an angled patch of gray scree. The red idiot light had taken to flashing on and off and counting down the seconds. It landed with six seconds of flight time remaining. Some small reserve of juice was then spent unfolding an array of photovoltaic cells. When the sun came up, this thing would begin to recharge.

It must be a huge fail for the planners of this mission but it was fine for Laks. He unbuckled himself, climbed free of the Sky Wheelchair, and strolled up-slope to a ridgeline clearly visible in moonlight a few hundred meters away. Like so many other ridgelines this did not afford him a clear vista once he had reached it, just a view to some more possible vantage points farther away. But he did get a sense that if he kept going in that direction the ground would soon break downhill and take him into lower terrain beyond. That would probably be the valley that contained the Pina2bo gun and its support complex.

As he was hiking back down to the drone, a new PowerPoint flashed up in the visor, blocking his view of the treacherous rocks ahead and nearly causing him to sprain an ankle. Laks ripped the visor off over his turban, stood still for a few moments to recover his night vision, and kept going. He’d seen just enough to read the deck’s title page:

MISSION BRIEFING

PHASE 2 (REVISED)

PERMANENT DECOMMISSIONING OF PINA2BO CLIMATE WEAPON

FLYING S RANCH, TEXAS

The moon was casting long shadows that made finding his way a bit tricky. For a few moments it crossed his mind that he might actually have gotten lost! But soon he came in view of a red light: one of the idiot icons on the drone’s screen. A troubling connection had been made in his head now between idiot lights; Uncle Dharmender, who had taught him that term, and who had implied, during their last conversation, that Laks was being kind of an idiot; and Laks himself, now using an idiot light as a guide star to find his way through the night.

Piet was a rucker, meaning a practitioner of a sport that consisted of putting on a backpack loaded with weights and then covering ground on foot in open country. When he’d first explained this shortly after his arrival in West Texas, Rufus had suspected the Dutchman was pulling his leg. It sounded to him like army boot camp stuff. As if peeling potatoes or scrubbing toilets had been made into an extreme sport. Why would a forty-year-old man like Piet do this voluntarily? Why would he consider it fun? But he had to admit it went well with Piet’s personality type. And it explained why the man had said yes to this gig out in the middle of nowhere. During the winter months, when daytime conditions here could be downright pleasant, he’d even talked Thordis and later Tsolmon into going on some of these jaunts with him. They’d always come back looking pleased with themselves. So maybe it was an easier way for a guy like Piet to relate to other humans than, say, going to a party and dancing. His rucking regimen had tapered off a bit during the summer months; he’d shifted to early mornings and it looked like his body fat percentage had skyrocketed from maybe 1 percent to 1.5 percent. But he was totally game for what had to happen next.

Piet’s ruck on tonight’s trek consisted of an earthsuit and a few liters of water. He departed after a briefing with the other falconers about the idiosyncrasies of Skippy. Skippy was chilling out in her box unaware of these goings-on, but when she awoke she’d find herself being handled by humans to whom she was not as accustomed as she was to Piet. Overhearing this conversation Rufus could tell it was mostly about Piet working through his misgivings and perhaps grief wasn’t too strong of a word re being separated from Skippy for a few hours. Duly reassured by the other falconers, he chugged a liter of water, shouldered his pack, and jogged off down the road. Rufus had equipped him with a revolver, not for humans but for feral swine. As soon as he broke free from the confines of the canyon’s nearly vertical walls, about a mile down the road, he would cut up into the lower slopes of the arc of mountains that embraced Pina2bo and traverse that until he came in view of the gun complex, probably around sunrise. He would scout things out, try to get a sense of what was happening, and try to link up with the others—in person if that was possible, using mirror flashes otherwise.

Hot-wiring the earthsuits went fast once Rufus worked out the procedure. He had the notion he’d make everything ready during the wee hours, then catch a couple of hours of shut-eye, setting his alarm for a four a.m. departure. Then he realized he had no way of setting an alarm. All his timepieces were electronic. He had never owned a mechanical clock or watch in his life. If he had a star chart, he’d be able to estimate the time from the elevations of astronomical bodies, but you couldn’t do that while you were asleep. And the only way he knew to obtain a star chart was to download it from the Internet.

So he just stayed awake. Which, to be honest, he probably would have done anyway. The more he thought this thing through, the more obvious it was that Big Fish was going to have to do whatever he was going to do sooner rather than later. Might have done it already. Because it just wasn’t going to take that long for some kind of reaction from Black Hat, or from the cops. And when it came to that, the only way for India to hold them at bay was going to involve hostages. Such as Saskia.

“We should just leave,” he announced. “As soon as we’re ready.” He stood up from his soldering table, having finished with the last of the earthsuits. His eyes were still adjusting to the dark. With great care he walked, planting one foot at a time, toward the place a hundred feet away where Thordis, Carmelita, and Tsolmon had been working with Bildad, Pegleg, and the mules Trucker and Patch. And what he saw there was testimony to the power of something that Rufus had never really got the hang of: working in a coordinated fashion with other human beings. In his personal experience, this had always been pure foolishness, because you had to get them to do what you wanted them to do. And getting other people to do what you wanted them to do had, for Rufus, always been a sort of black art. Not worth the trouble of learning. In the army, they had people for that. Whole echelons of people.

But these three women might as well have been of a different species. Working quietly and assiduously while he’d been busy with his soldering iron, they had simply got it all done. The boxes containing Nimrod, Skippy, and Genghis were perched on the horses’ and mules’ croups. Looked like a bumpy ride to Rufus, but what did he know about eagles and their ways? If home for you was a tangle of sticks in the top of a tree on the edge of a cliff in the mountains, why, maybe riding on a mule’s ass was a Sealy Posturepedic.

And they’d packed all the other stuff too, looked like. Rufus was about to ask them if they had plenty of water but thought better of it since it would border on insulting.

Carmelita came out to meet him as he approached. “We decided we have to do it,” she announced.

“Why?” Rufus responded. “If I may ask.”

“For the profession.”

“The profession of falconry?”

“Yeah. If an opportunity to do something was presented to us like this and we just said ‘Naah’—”

“How could you look other falconers in the eye after that?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone have any idea what time it is?”

“One fifty-six,” said Carmelita, checking a mechanical watch on her wrist.

“Let’s saddle up.”

“We’re ready. Are you?” Carmelita looked him up and down. “I was expecting you to be more strapped.”

Rufus had heard the term in old rap music. “You are referring to guns,” he said.

“Yeah. You don’t have any.”

“I’ll go and see to that now,” he said. “Shouldn’t take long. Y’all drink some water.”

PERMANENT DECOMMISSIONING OF PINA2BO CLIMATE WEAPON

Laks did not have the ability to page back to the first slide of the PowerPoint. These things only played in one direction. They were monitoring the movements of his eyeballs or something; they could sense when he was finished reading a slide. Then they’d turn the page and electronically shred the previous one. Still, he could remember seeing those words during the few moments before he pulled the visor off his head. What did they actually mean?

He had to wait a little while to find out. When he got back to the downed drone, he was instructed to eat food, drink water, and get some shut-eye if possible. Somewhat amazingly under the circumstances, he actually was able to get to sleep for a bit. He wondered if they’d wired a switch into his head that would knock him out from the other side of the world and wake him up again when his services were needed.

It seemed that during this little breather the powers that be had been figuring out whether it was faster to wait for the sun to come up and recharge the drone, thus enabling him to fly straight to “the objective,” or for him to simply walk. Laks could have told them that walking would be faster, but he sensed a large bureaucracy at work. Anyway, they got back to him at around three in the morning with a revised mission briefing that was all about walking. Stashed in one of the drone’s luggage compartments were a few sticks of black plastic and bits of black webbing that, as it turned out, could be snapped together into a sturdy backpack frame that weighed essentially nothing. Immediately, though, it began to weigh rather a lot as the first thing he was told to load onto it was the shockingly heavy briefcase he’d been told not to touch a few hours earlier. Getting that firmly attached consumed most of the available straps, bungee cords, and duct tape. With what remained he loaded on a few key earthsuit parts and several bags of water. Then he heaved the thing up onto his back, adjusted the straps, and started walking.

A few minutes later he was at the ridgeline he’d checked out earlier. He paused there to make a few adjustments. Something caught his eye. He swung his head around and looked back toward the big drone. It was engulfed in flames.

He turned his back on it and continued walking across the crest of the mountains. The night was silent except for the faint whirr of drones, shadowing him all around in some kind of intricate formation he could feel but not see.

The next sound Laks heard, other than his own footfalls, and the little avalanches they sometimes touched off as he descended toward the valley, was a human voice. A cheerful one. Surprisingly close by.

“Splendid morning for a ruck, isn’t it?”

Until that moment he had been in a reverie. At its beginning, it had been dark and he had been striding across level, bare ground at the top of the ridge. Now the sun was not exactly up, but the sky was bright enough that it might as well have been. He was picking his way down steep and extraordinarily treacherous terrain covered with viciously spiny vegetation, headed for the Pina2bo “climate weapon,” which was in plain sight a couple of miles ahead of him. To the extent his mind was up and running at all, it was entirely focused on deciding where to plant his feet so that he could absorb the massive burden of the weight on his back without turning an ankle, blowing up a knee, toppling forward, or impaling himself on a plant. He kept thinking he was almost to the bottom and that the going would soon get easier. It did not.

So the last thing he’d been expecting was to bump into another pedestrian at random. What were the odds? Slim enough for it to seem suspicious. And why had all those fucking drones not noticed this guy and given him some warning?

Out of batteries, probably. They hadn’t planned on Laks walking through the hours of darkness. Pretty soon, though, they’d all be able to recharge, and then they’d catch up with him.

The stranger was tall and lean, with thinning blond hair and a creased face. He seemed to understand that some explanation might be warranted for his startling appearance directly in Laks’s path. “I saw you up there half an hour ago,” he said, “silhouetted against the skyline, and it looked like the way down was tricky, so I decided to take a little break and just make sure you got down all right.” He spoke with a crisp accent Laks couldn’t quite place.

“Thanks.” Laks had been thinking of taking a little break anyway, so he unbuckled the pack’s waist belt and swung it down onto the ground. Then he stood up straight, rolled his shoulders back, and stretched.

“Communications are down, you know, and so if someone has an emergency, we all have to rely on each other.”

Something about this guy’s nervous insistence on explaining himself was setting off alarm bells in Laks’s head. “That’s very considerate of you,” he said.

But he was interrupted by the voice of the lady from the airport. “Halt! Move your hands away from your sides and keep them in plain view. Refrain from sudden movements, as a defensive response may be initiated under algorithmic control. Serious injuries may result.”

Both men looked around to see several drones silhouetted against the sky, which, because of stratospheric sulfur that had been hurled into it by that big gun right over there, was bright. Anyway, the drones were obvious now. They must have been hanging back, lurking, conserving power. But now they were out in force. Expending their reserves.

“Goodness! This is unexpected!” said the man, not very convincingly. He was complying exactly with the instructions, with the gratifying side effect that the announcement was not repeated. He squinted at one of the nearby drones. “Does that thing have a gun on it!?”

“Yes.”

“How very Texas.”

“They are not from around here, actually,” Laks said. “I don’t think it’s going to shoot you if you follow the arrow.”

“Arrow?”

Laks looked around. The man followed his gaze. The laser arrow was harder to see in the daytime, but it was there. He shrugged. “Just do what it says. I think you’ll end up with the other . . .” Hostages? Detainees? Prisoners? “. . . people.”

The flash caught Rufus’s eye about an hour after the sun rose above Pina2bo. He was alone, riding Pegleg across flat open terrain along the base of the ridge. He was still in the shadow of the mountains, but the complex was awash in the amber light of early morning. Closer to him, about a mile away, was Bunkhouse. Farther in the distance was the gun complex, mostly concealed under stretched camo netting, but easily seen because of the head frame and the exposed muzzles of the six barrels with their bulky flash suppressors. The flash that had caught his eye, though, had not come from the big guns. It originated from open territory between the base of the ridge and the Bunkhouse.

His first thought was that there’d been an explosion. An old instinct left over from working in places where IEDs were a problem made him tense up, awaiting the crack of the shock wave. But then he understood that someone out there was signaling him with a mirror. And he had a pretty good idea of who that would be.

The others had been shadowing him along a parallel course, higher up the slope. They were on rougher terrain and trying to be less obvious than Rufus, so they made slower progress. Rufus dismounted, giving them a chance to catch up, and took his rifle from the soft fabric case he’d strapped alongside the saddle. This was not the Kalashnikov but the long bolt-action number with the scope, the one he’d built for drilling big boars from long range.

Another flash caught his eye. Turning around and looking up, he could see a hot spot of bluish light scribbling all over the mountainside as Piet wiggled the mirror around. He must know it was hopeless to hit Rufus, or any other fixed target, with anything more than the odd lucky flash. There’d be no Morse code transmissions on this channel. But a lucky flash carried a lot of information. Rufus found a patch of ground where he could lie flat on his belly without collecting hundreds of barbed spines in his flesh. He stacked a rock on another rock and used that to steady the barrel of his rifle, then pulled the dust covers off the ends of the scope. He peered through it, sweeping it this way and that across the area where he thought he had seen the flash. This took several minutes. But finally he saw a human figure walking alone across the alluvial flat, headed down off the mountain. As best as he could tell at this range, he was not headed toward the gun, but rather toward Bunkhouse. Which fit with Rufus’s general picture of how this was going to go: personnel herded into a pen, and forced to remain there, by drones. At this range he could not see drones in the objective lens of the scope, but he knew they must be shadowing Piet. Piet must have slipped the mirror out of his pocket and used it while he was taking a piss break or something.

Rufus wished he had a way to communicate with Thordis, Carmelita, and Tsolmon up above him, but he didn’t. They too might have been hit by the strafing beam of light from the mirror. They might have seen Rufus peering through his scope. In case they’d missed all that, he stood up, tapped the telescopic sight, and then used two fingers to pantomime looking down the valley. They had the binoculars with them. If they saw and understood the gesture, they might use those to see what he’d seen.

The sun had hove up over the ridge during all this and felt warm and welcome on his skin for about ten seconds before turning unpleasantly hot. As long as he was stopped anyway, Rufus opened up the saddlebag where he had stashed his earthsuit and changed into its under-layer, which as far as he could tell was a glorified spandex bodysuit. It was khaki, so it wouldn’t stand out too bad in the desert, but it would be going too far to call it camouflage. He put on a white broad-brimmed hat to protect his head and then got “strapped,” to use Carmelita’s terminology: a semi-automatic pistol on his hip and a pump shotgun slung over his shoulder on a strap pendulous and gleaming with extra shells. He had the idea that such a weapon might be capable of taking down drones. If it worked on clay pigeons . . .

Fussing with these things was one of those deals where the longer it took, the longer it took. Between that and the slowness with which the three falconers were obliged to travel, Rufus began to feel that they were terribly behind schedule and that they had wasted the cool part of the day. He couldn’t believe, in retrospect, that he had contemplated grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep last night.

Finally he climbed back up into the saddle and began to ride Pegleg toward the Biggest Gun in the World.

By the time he was, at long last, able to lengthen his stride down into the flat between him and the big gun, Laks was in a quite ambivalent frame of mind about the whole drone thing. On the one hand, this whole operation would have been unthinkable without them. On the other hand, batteries. The big drone had been forced to land well short of its objective because it was low on batteries, and this had led to knock-on effects as the smaller drones escorting him had run low on juice in the dark. Several of the ones that still worked had then been spent on the weird blond hiker, leaving Laks bereft of air cover. So he’d been ordered to sit on his ass for a while as a couple of mothership drones spread their photovoltaic wings in the sun and recharged their broods.

On the other, other hand, he’d made an honest effort to read some military history, since it seemed he was bound for a military career, and found it to be a whole lot of repetitive accounts of armies running out of things. Usually energy. Whether that meant food for troops, grass for horses, or fuel for trucks. Electrons for batteries was just the modern equivalent of that. Hitler’s invasion of Russia had stalled in the dead of winter, in a place from which the Germans could actually see Moscow. Now, in the dead of the Texas summer, India’s invasion of the Flying S Ranch was stalled at a place where Laks could see the huge flash suppressors on the gun’s six barrels, protruding from a lake of camouflage netting. Choppers and planes were beginning to cross high overhead as word apparently got out that something bad was happening here.

To the extent Laks understood the plan, anyone who looked down from those planes and choppers would see a congregation of ranch personnel all together in the residential part of the valley, and it would be understood that—for their own protection, of course—they were being temporarily detained there while the Indian military conducted a “climate peacekeeping” mission—the smallest and deftest of surgical strikes—at the gun complex. Which was Laks’s job. In his mind’s eye he reviewed the instructions from the most recent PowerPoint. He was to hike to the “head frame,” which was easy to find; he could see that already. At ground level there would be a door to a lift. The lift ran down a deep shaft into the ground, where the guts of the gun were protected beneath hundreds of meters of rock. His job was to get the heavy briefcase down to the bottom of that shaft. If the lift was operating, he could just walk into it and hit the “down” button. However, this was deemed the unlikeliest of scenarios. The shaft, according to their intelligence, was a chimney, open at the top. It was cluttered with equipment, but not so cluttered he couldn’t simply drop the briefcase down it and let gravity handle the rest.

That done, he was supposed to just travel upwind as fast as he could manage.

Laks would have to have been an exceptionally dense and slow-witted fellow not to have asked himself the obvious question: Am I carrying a nuclear weapon on my back? He wasn’t sure how small you could actually make such things. He’d heard of backpack nukes and suitcase nukes. This thing was smaller yet. A briefcase. And it felt like most of it consisted of lead. Not much spare room on the inside, then.

His mind circled around it, considering various possibilities, as he just sat there on the ground waiting for batteries to charge. It was a beautiful place, in its way. Pretty quiet, since not much was alive. Lizards began to come out and dart around. Far away on an opposite slope he could see a brown dog. No, of course that would be a coyote. There were a few birds hopping and flitting about. A screech high overhead drew his gaze up into the sky. An eagle, or at least, some kind of big raptor, soaring on a thermal high above the flats beyond Bunkhouse. Laks leaned back and propped himself up on his elbows, to enjoy a better view. The eagle banked round once, twice, then folded its wings and went into a power dive. Before it reached its prey it disappeared from view behind a rise. Must be a bad morning for some poor gopher or whatever it was eagles feasted on in these parts.

It was only a few minutes later that the peace of the morning was disturbed by a familiar humming sound as an echelon of drones passed over him: small camera drones first, at higher altitude, followed by the bigger ones that had guns and lasers and such. They conducted a crisscross grid search over the area that Laks would pass through next, if he simply stood up and walked in a straight line toward the gun complex. It all seemed a bit silly until he heard Airport Lady’s voice issuing a now familiar set of commands. A few hundred meters away—a place he’d have walked through only minutes from now—a man had just climbed to his feet. He looked like a rag doll. He was wearing one of those camouflage suits—Laks couldn’t remember the name—that was a mess of fabric strips, flopping loose all round, to blur a man’s outline and make him nearly undetectable by the human eye. He was holding his hands out to his sides, making him look even more like a scarecrow.

That guy had just been waiting for Laks. Hunting him like an animal. Laks would have walked right past him. Laks was still just gaping at the man, being amazed by this fact, when the man did exactly what you weren’t supposed to: made a sudden move. Laks saw a pistol in his hand, silhouetted against the bright sun shining on the valley floor in the distance. He jerked this way and that, as if doing some kind of weird dance. As he was collapsing to the ground the reports of three gunshots reached Laks’s ears.

During the hours after Saskia took refuge with T.R., Conor, and Jules at Level Zero, gunshots continued to echo down the shaft from time to time, but less and less frequently. And it seemed to Saskia that they were becoming more distant, though this was difficult to judge. One thing that certainly did not happen was any communication of any sort from above. The picture she conjured up in her head was that the drone swarm had basically succeeded in forcing the people on the surface to disarm themselves and march away and was now sweeping the area around the gun to ferret out any die-hard Black Hats who had concealed themselves. Every so often, they found one.

Meanwhile they took stock of what was down here. Plenty of water. A cache of snacks. A toilet of the type seen on RVs and boats. Few weapons. Though it appeared weapons were pretty useless against the drone swarm topside, and so T.R.’s sidearm, a semi-automatic pistol with two spare magazines, would be more than enough, assuming it had any value at all. Levels Zero and Minus One, since they served as a sort of control room, were furnished with rolling office chairs, a couple of tables, whiteboards, and flat-panel screens. But everything was run off laptops now, so there was little in the way of control panels as such. Life safety equipment was ubiquitous and clearly marked. This mostly took the form of full-face respirators with compressed air tanks, to be donned in the event the complex had to be flooded with argon as a last-ditch anti-explosion tactic.

Below Minus One, there wasn’t much to see until you got to the bottom. Those levels were really just there to provide access during inspections and maintenance. Boxes of tools and other gear were stacked here and there. Some of it looked to be left over from the early phases of the project. In one of them Jules found a cache of climbing gear: long, neatly coiled ropes of the kind used by mountaineers, a couple of climbing harnesses, and a device called a descender that could be used to ratchet one’s way up a rope or, on a different setting, to slide smoothly down it. He took the initiative to sling this stuff over his back and climb the ladder partway up the shaft above Level Zero in the hopes he might be able to see or hear something. He anchored a rope up there so that he could use the descender to come back down rapidly if he had to. But after going to all that effort he came back down with nothing to report. It was quiet up there and he daren’t climb too high lest he be detected.

Jules and the others just wanted to feel that they were doing something. There was, however, nothing to do except wait for the situation to be resolved. Painful for them, but business as usual for Saskia, who’d made a living standing around in situations like the foam disaster at Scheveningen waiting for others to do their jobs.

This would have to get resolved soon. The attackers had bought themselves some time by knocking out all electronic devices within a certain range, and it sounded like they had parlayed that into some leverage by rounding up hostages. But this couldn’t possibly last more than a few hours, or at most a day. The cavalry must be inbound; it was just that they had to travel a long way. So all they could do was wait.

Accordingly she climbed down to Minus Five, made herself as comfortable as she could, and went to sleep.

As a young man Rufus had disappointed some of his white army friends who had wanted him to be a whole lot more authentic, according to their version of what that was. But this had been back in the days before Rufus had developed his theory—the theory he’d explained on the train to Saskia—that Comancheness was a viral thing that could hop from brain to brain, regardless of skin color, and that—using the early Texas Rangers as a vector of infection—it had completely taken over America a long time ago. Old-school Christian values and straight-out racism had held it at bay through the world wars and the fifties, but then the barriers had fallen one by one and before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and-blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian–style bison headdress. And just like Comanches with their raids, those people didn’t stick around and try to plant their yellow rattlesnake flags on the Capitol dome. They just wandered off, having counted coup on democracy and taken a few cop scalps, and melted back into their nomadic trailer park encampments. Point being, Rufus hadn’t worked all that out in his head back when he’d been a buck private; he had not had the mental equipment to explain to his white brothers in arms that the Comanches had won the long war. The war between men’s ears.

Which went some way toward explaining why at this moment they, the Americans, were getting their asses handed to them by a meticulously planned invasion originating on the other side of the world. Because that seemed to be the timeless doom of fierce independent-minded tribespeople. The world just didn’t fucking like them. And if you were too disorderly for too long, and it started to cause problems for people, then order was going to be imposed. White people had done it to Indians by slaughtering all the bison. Indians from India were doing it to Americans now by wiping out their electronic devices.

All this passed through his head as he was riding up the valley trying to make sense of what was going on with the eagles. Back in the day, his Indian ancestors hadn’t had walkie-talkies or GPS or drones. They’d been forced to figure things out by watching the world around them, which was mostly a natural world. They’d had to make surmises about what was going on. Like the guys up in the crow’s nests on the Pequod, interpreting far-off whale spouts, sensing the direction of the wind and the waves.

He was a far cry from any of those dudes but some things were clear even to a guy like him: the falconers up on the ridge had released Skippy. Maybe they’d seen Piet through the binoculars or maybe it was just a lucky hunch. Then they’d let Nimrod out too. Skippy had taken to the air and recognized Piet. Which seemed damned near impossible at such a distance. But if Rufus had picked up one thing about eagles it was that “eagle eye” actually meant something, their powers of vision were simply unreal. So of course Skippy had picked out the lone human figure walking toward the Bunkhouse, which Rufus had needed a telescope to see. And if she didn’t recognize Piet instantly, she did so pretty damn soon. She flew toward Piet. She saw drones flying around Piet. And apparently fucked them up though it was difficult for Rufus to make out details. Nimrod came along a minute later and went after some other targets—extra drones, maybe, that were trying to reinforce the first batch?

Piet then changed course and began moving in the direction from which he knew Rufus and the others would be approaching. When the drones had been escorting him, he had been moving as slowly as he could get away with. But now he came on fast. He’d found a dirt road along the valley floor, a terrible road by any standard, but for him a racetrack compared to what he’d been picking his way across for the last few hours. Rufus could track his progress by watching Skippy, who was running combat air patrol above him. Nimrod was headed back toward her girl Carmelita, somewhere up above the road.

“I talked to him!” Piet shouted when he guessed he was in range.

“Big Fish?”

Piet nodded. He talked in bursts, hands on knees, breathing fast but controlled. “Unless there is more than one turban-wearing Hercules in these mountains.”

“Headed for . . . ?”

“The gun.”

“Sure.”

“Red. Listen.”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Shoot.”

“He’s carrying something on his back. Strapped to a frame. Quite heavy.”

“How do you know?”

“The way it moved. When he swung it down off his back.”

“Okay. Any markings or . . .”

Piet shook his head. “Of course not. Red, I think it’s bad. Very bad.”

Rufus exhaled and gazed off into the distance. There were more questions he could have asked. But there was no need. He just knew without hesitation, without doubt, that Piet was right. Because that one detail made everything else about this make sense. How else were they expecting to put the gun out of commission? They couldn’t bomb it from the air. It was all underground. They had to physically insert some kind of team to get down to the bottom of the shaft and damage the fancy shit. But that would be open war. But if they could just send in one guy . . .

“Well then!” Rufus exclaimed. “I am gonna just ride down there and put a stop to this. I suggest you go up and find the others and tell them what you told me and get you gone. Get the mountains between you and Pina2bo, head upwind, keep moving. Upwind being the important part.”

Piet shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said. “Big Fish must be there already.”

Pegleg startled as a trickle of rocks and sand came down a nearby slope. It was a tiny avalanche touched off from somewhere above. Rufus looked up to see the rest of their party descending. Thordis, Carmelita, and Tsolmon were all dismounted, loosely holding the reins of Bildad, Trucker, and Patch, who were sure-footedly picking their way down through the stones and the cactus. They’d be here in a few minutes and then they’d be looking at a pretty direct gallop along the road in one direction or another. Into the fight, or away from it.

“I got no time to debate the matter,” Rufus said. “Y’all decide amongst yourselves which way y’all want to go. Pick you a direction. Ride fast, either way. I got no choice.”

The look on Piet’s face said that he had no idea what Rufus was talking about. Rufus had never sat down with him and explained matters. Never told the story about Snout and Adele. About how his big Ahab moment had been spoiled by Saskia’s airplane coming out of the sky and doing most of the job for him. And how that had somehow gotten him into this. He was feeling now like time had stopped when that jet airplane had hit Snout on the runway. Like hitting the pause button on a video. He’d enjoyed the night he’d spent with Saskia, the sojourn at the marble mine. But now the video was running full speed again. Rufus drew gently on the rein that aimed him toward the Biggest Gun in the World and got Pegleg moving down the road at a walk. But before he’d covered too much distance he turned around in the saddle and said, “I ain’t gonna lie. Thordis and Piet, I know you have a special relationship with Saskia.”

“Are you referring to Princess Frederika!? The former Queen of the Netherlands!?” Piet exclaimed. It was just like that guy to get hung up on the protocol.

“Yeah. She’s down there. Might need our help.”

Thordis and Piet turned their heads and stared at each other.

“Well, fuck!” Thordis said and mounted up on Bildad.

Rufus turned to face the enemy and let Pegleg know it was time to cut loose.

It seemed that she was waking up every five minutes, which gave Saskia the idea that very little time was passing. But when she came awake for good, and threw off the emergency blanket she’d been using to keep the light from her eyes, and gazed up through the multiple layers of gridded catwalks above her, she saw more light—a lot more—filtering down the mine shaft. So convinced was she that it was still the middle of the night that she imagined, at first, that they were being attacked or rescued. But when she ascended the ladder to Level Zero and looked at the wall clock, she saw that it was morning. The light coming down the shaft was that of the sun.

Conor and Jules had bunked down on opposite sides of Level Zero. Jules was curled up under a table, Conor had simply leaned back in an office chair and propped his feet up on a desk. On her way up the ladder, she’d passed a human-sized bundle of blankets on Minus One that must have been T.R. They all woke up over the course of about fifteen minutes and took turns using the toilet. They then had what in other circumstances would be called a stand-up meeting, drinking bottles of water and eating energy bars and wishing someone had bothered to install a coffee maker. Above, it seemed perfectly quiet. They decided it would make sense for Jules to ascend nearer to the surface. If he had to come back down in a hurry, he could slide down the ropes. He’d found three of them, each 60 meters long. From Level Zero to the surface was 215 meters. The ropes would cover 180 meters of that, leaving a gap of 35. The idea then was for Jules to climb about 95 meters up from Level Zero, anchor a rope there, and let it dangle. Then he’d climb up another 60 meters and anchor a second rope, hanging to the level where he’d anchored the first. Beyond that, another 60-meter ascent would bring him near the surface, where he could anchor the top rope. He’d keep his harness clipped to that and do some reconnoitering. At the first sign of trouble he could trust his fate to the rope and drop 60 meters below the ground in a few seconds. By transferring to the other ropes he could then get down to a point 35 meters above Level Zero almost as quickly. By that point, hopefully, he’d have enough of a head start on anyone or anything pursuing him that he’d be able to scamper down the ladder before it caught up with him.

Which raised the question: What then? If bad guys with guns were chasing him, then there wasn’t much they could do. But there didn’t seem to be any of those. Only drones. Where might they take shelter from a drone attack?

The answer was obvious: the steel cylinder that occupied the entire five-meter diameter of the shaft below Level Zero, all the way down to Minus Six. There were two access hatches, massive as bank vault doors, cut into the side of it. Saskia had stepped through both of them during her tour last September.

The one at the very bottom, Minus Six, provided access to the part of the cylinder below the piston, known as the combustion chamber, where a natural gas/air mix was ignited to drive the piston upward on a column of fire. The hatch at Minus Four was above the piston, at least when the gun wasn’t operating. It provided access to the so-called pump chamber, normally full of hydrogen, that got pressurized by the piston when it shot upward.

During normal operation, both combustion and pump chambers were hell on earth. But the gun hadn’t fired for almost twelve hours. Cooling water had been circulating that whole time through a jacket surrounding both chambers. They were now down to ambient temperature. They had been purged with plain old atmospheric air to remove all traces of anything flammable or toxic.

They could, in other words, simply open those hatches and step into the combustion chamber or the pump chamber and just hang out there in comfort and safety. If they stayed for too long the air would get stale, but they could always simply open a hatch and let in fresh air. And as a backup plan they had a supply of respirators, each with an air tank.

So after a lot of discussion and talking through of scenarios, they agreed that Jules would go up for a look-see. But as a precaution T.R. and Saskia would station themselves at Minus Six, next to the open hatch. They had pre-stocked the combustion chamber with water, snacks, lights, respirators, and a bucket to pee in. Above, on Minus Four, similar preparations had been made in the pump chamber. Conor would hang out up there. When Jules went topside, he’d be carrying a plastic water bottle. If he saw anything bad, he’d simply drop it down the shaft. A few seconds later it would slam into something near Level Zero and burst open, a signal they could not fail to notice. T.R. and Saskia would immediately take refuge in the combustion chamber. Conor would wait a bit to give Jules a chance to come down the rope, whereupon they’d seal themselves up in the pump chamber.

So after seemingly hours of dithering and preparation, that is how they set it all up.

And after all that it seemed almost anticlimactic when, ten or so minutes after Jules had begun his ascent, the water bottle hurtled down and exploded.

The road got better, but still not good, as it drew closer to Bunkhouse. That place seemed sure to be one big humming swarm of drones and so Rufus gave it a wide berth and then swung round to angle across the open stretch that separated it from the gun complex. This was the area where the Flying S Ranch Model Rocketry Club had held its launch months ago, just before T.R.’s big gun had gone into action for the first time. Since then much of the open ground had filled up with shipping containers, heavy equipment, and cargo pallets. These had been arranged in a grid of lanes wide enough that trucks and forklifts could maneuver among them. Nets had been stretched over some of the area to catch sabots and to cast shade. The area immediately next to Bunkhouse, where they had set up the bleachers and launched the little rockets last year, had been kept as open space. This was a considerate gesture for those hobbyists but a problem for Rufus. He’d been thinking about those drones and how to get from where he was now to the gun complex without getting surrounded by those things and picked off. And it was clear to him based on his own experience flying drones that they were going to be at a disadvantage in the cluttered environment of the depot. But to reach that he had to cross this few hundred meters of open ground where they could come at him from all directions. There was nothing for it but to take it at a dead gallop, so he pointed Pegleg’s head at the closest corner of the depot and spurred him on.

He might have just imagined it, but he thought he heard whooping and cheering from Bunkhouse. Which was real nice and everything, but if the hostages penned there could see him, so could the drones. He unslung the shotgun from his shoulder, thumbed the safety off, and pumped the forearm to chamber a round. Didn’t need it just yet, so he yanked a shell from the strap and shoved it into the magazine to replace the one he’d just chambered. These shells were birdshot, like you’d use for going after pheasant or small game. He’d fitted the weapon with a choke to improve its range. He heard the screech of an eagle above and off to his right and turned his head back to see Genghis pounce on a drone and smash it to the ground. The birds all looked the same to him, but he could tell them apart by their gauntlets, which he’d printed up using different colors of plastic.

Some more eagle-related action happened on his left but on the galloping horse he couldn’t track everything. He had to focus on what he could deal with himself and leave the eagles to their work. If there were drones behind him, there might be drones ahead of him. He raised the shotgun and sighted along the top of its barrel. No point seeing anything he couldn’t shoot. The damned things were so small. A whirring mote swam into his vision and he pulled the trigger, pumped the forearm to load another shell, swung the barrel toward another veering, humming phantom, fired again. A shell casing tumbled from the target, gleaming in the sun, as his blast struck it and turned it into a cloud of carbon fiber. The thing had taken a shot at him! He pumped and swung the barrel the other way and almost committed a friendly-fire mistake: it was Nimrod grabbing another gun drone in one of her talons.

He was halfway to the nearest shipping containers. Saw no bogeys around him. Seemed like they came in waves. He loaded shells to replace the ones he’d fired.

A problem with the eagles had been getting them to drop drones they’d struck—that wasn’t their instinct. Skippy, who’d been part of the Schiphol Airport program, was better than the others, but Genghis and Nimrod were working on it.

Another wave of gun drones—Rufus guessed three of them—dropped into place around him when he was still fifty yards shy of the depot. Half a football field. One was just dead in his sights. He blew it out of the air, pumped. Sounds behind him and on his left made him think that Skippy was tending to a drone on that side. He turned to his right, saw a drone gliding along behind, bringing its gun around to bear on him. It put him in mind of an eagle diving on prey: wings and such all over the place, but gaze steady on the target. The angle was awkward. He had to take his left hand off the gun’s forearm, aim behind him with his right, and fire one-handed. The recoil snapped the barrel up and almost whipped the gun out of his hand. A shell casing spun out of the drone’s belly as it fired back. He threw his left hand across his torso, pumped the shotgun, fired again, apparently missed, saw another shell casing eject from it. An eagle punched it out of the air just as his view of it was being blocked by the corner of a shipping container. Pegleg let out a sound that came unsettlingly close to a human scream and pulled up short beneath the shade of a camo net. His gait was all awry and he looked to be going down. Rufus pulled his right boot from the stirrup, swung his leg back over Pegleg’s croup, and spun away as the horse settled to his knees. Rufus’s left boot was still in the stirrup as he slammed full-length into the ground, but this was groomed earth, no rocks or cacti. Landing on it didn’t feel good but it didn’t cause any damage that couldn’t wait until later.

Fortunately Pegleg didn’t roll onto his left side, which would have pinned Rufus’s leg. He seemed content to just stay on his belly. Rufus yanked his foot out of the stirrup, raised the shotgun, and looked back the way he’d come. A trail of downed drones and furious eagles was spread across the track Pegleg had taken, but there were no drones aiming guns at him now. He reloaded the shotgun’s magazine before doing anything else, then stood up, bent over Pegleg, and drew the rifle from the padded case alongside his saddle. Blood was running down Pegleg’s right flank from an entry wound to the right of his tail. Deep into the muscle. Enough to bring the animal down but probably not enough to kill him. Rufus felt that some kind words, some expression of gratitude, was now in order, but there was no time to lose, so he just stroked the horse’s nose as he took his leave and told him what a fine fella he was.

Then he ran down to the far end of the shipping container and ducked around a corner. He could hear a drone overhead, above the net, but it probably couldn’t see him. He aimed straight up through the net and blasted it, then pivoted and ran for a gap between two more containers.

A freight train was parked on the railway that ran along one side of the depot and continued directly to the gun complex. It consisted entirely of hopper cars loaded with sulfur. At the opposite end of the train from where Rufus was, a pile of sulfur—a smaller version of the one on the Houston waterfront—sat on the ground like a huge yellow traffic pylon. Near it, he knew, was a shallow pit under the railway where the hopper cars, one by one, discharged their loads. Empties then coasted under gravity power onto a siding where they could be reassembled into trains that would deadhead back to Houston.

From that pit under the tracks, an angled conveyor carried sulfur up from the pit to the apex of the pile; and from the far side of the pile, other conveyors took the stuff into a building where it was melted and poured into shells. Anyway, the pile was a conspicuous landmark that Rufus could aim for. From there it was a couple of hundred yards to the head frame.

Rufus had the idea that by running alongside the parked freight train he’d be able to cover some more ground while enjoying at least partial cover. In the open, the drones could come at him from all sides. If he was next to a hopper car, that gave him cover on one side. Better than none at all.

Movement through the depot was a mixed blessing as the nets made trouble for the drones but also kept the eagles out of the action. He just had to keep moving and not let the drones zero in on him. Whenever he ventured into an open space there was a few moments’ grace period before a drone was able to swing around and aim its gun at him, and he could take advantage of that by moving to cover, or just blasting it. The shotgun had been the right choice. But he had to be conservative with ammunition and so finding cover was better. Moving in a somewhat random path—partly out of necessity, partly by design—he was able to approach the railway siding within a few minutes, spending half a dozen shells in the process and twice getting shot at without result. If the drones were being aimed by humans, the latency of their network connection had to be a factor. As long as he kept moving he could use that to his advantage. Standing still and staring a drone down, High Noon style, was not his move.

When he reached the strip of open ground along the railway siding, he found that all three eagles had taken down drones that had apparently been lying in wait for him there. Rufus ran across it, thumbing shells into his magazine, and crouched to duck under the closest hopper car just as a round pinged off a steel wheel. On one knee he pivoted toward the sound of the shot and punched the offending drone out of the air with a shotgun blast, then got up to the other side of the train and ran along it for a car length before ducking under to avoid a drone and coming out the other side. He ran another half car length and then ducked and rolled across the tracks again. Any drone chasing him down the left side of the train would be out of luck when he dodged over to the right, and vice versa. After a few repetitions of that, one of them got the idea and tried to follow him by crossing over the top of a hopper car just as he was diving under it. Which might have actually worked—except that the downwash of its rotors kicked up a cloud of loose powdered sulfur as it skimmed over the top. Rufus rolled over on his back and looked straight up to see the thing hovering, blind in a sunlit yellow cloud. He shot it out of the air, kept rolling, pulled a shell from the strap, reloaded. Down to half a dozen shells now. An eagle came out of nowhere twenty feet ahead of him and crunched its talons into a drone he hadn’t even seen.

He was measuring his progress in hopper cars. Three more to go before he reached the pile. Two more. He’d been running on adrenaline since he started his gallop. His ticker was going like crazy and tiredness was beginning to take hold of him. Diving and rolling across railroad tracks was brutally unpleasant even for a man half his age. He knew he was covered with bruises and abrasions. He could sense himself beginning to flinch from the impact of shoulder on gravel, beginning to slow down.

A human figure caught his eye, crossing the open ground between the depot and the head frame. Carrying a heavy pack and dragging one leg. But still making better time than Rufus with all this foolishness about the drones. This man kept turning his head to look toward the sounds of the gunshots. He was a couple of hundred yards away. Hard to see details, but obviously Big Fish. Piet was wrong; Rufus wasn’t too late; Big Fish had been delayed, hadn’t reached the objective yet.

Rufus lost sight of him, though, during a nearly fatal clusterfuck that took shape at the head of the train—the last hopper car, poised over the unloading pit. Multiple drones were waiting for him there and it turned into an utterly confused mess of plunging, screaming eagles, shotgun blasts, clouds of airborne sulfur, and Rufus rolling to and fro. Inevitably gravity had its way and he fell off the side of the track—which, here, turned into a little trestle on steel I-beams—and into the pit below. But the floor of the pit was no more than eight feet below the track, and it was half full of sulfur, so he didn’t fall far and he landed on something with a little bit of give. A cloud of yellow powder went up and got into his lungs. He coughed, gagged, and pulled the earthsuit’s spandex neck gaiter up over his mouth and nose. During those moments a drone came into view and lined up to take a shot at him. He rolled and drew his legs up, instinctively going into a fetal position, felt an ice-cold knitting needle pass through one calf and graze the other. He’d let go of the shotgun during all this; it was half buried in sulfur an arm’s length away. He scooped up a handful of the stuff and flung it at the drone. Then he pushed himself up on one knee, banged his head on the underside of the railroad tracks above him, got his pistol out of its holster, and just blasted away at the thing until it splintered.

Vaulting out of this pit wasn’t an option with his leg messed up. The obvious escape route was the conveyor. This was not moving. It consisted of a broad band of flexible rubbery stuff, maybe six feet wide, running over rollers that folded it into a U-shaped cross section to contain the powder. From his point of view right now it was just a ruler-straight yellow brick road to the sky. He had only one decent option, which was to go up the thing until the pile was beneath him, providing a surface—soft and yielding, he hoped—that would cushion his fall. Breaking very much out into the open, he began climbing the conveyor, taking long strides with his one semi-good leg and then toppling into the flume of sulfur in the belt as his other knee came down. No drones came after him. Either they were running low on those, or his move onto the conveyor had surprised them and they needed to re-vector the ones they had.

He just kept gaining altitude as best he could. As he did he gained a better view. Finally the end of the conveyor approached. From it sulfur simply fell off onto the apex of the pile and avalanched down its slopes. The drop was maybe ten feet. Rufus just dove right off and plunged belly first into the top of the cone. He was half buried in the stuff now. He kicked his legs free while elbow-crawling forward. The more he moved, the more he sank into the powder. Some of that was good if the stuff could slow bullets. Too much could be very bad. He pulled his rifle free, upended it to dump sulfur out of the barrel, then popped the dust caps off the scope and shouldered it. He blew sulfur away from the bolt and chambered a round. A drone was headed up the slope toward him, manifesting as a yellow whirlwind. No time to switch weapons. He obliterated it with a rifle shot, then worked the bolt and chambered another round. An eagle screamed overhead. He hoped the birds would look after him while he ended this. He centered the crosshairs on the elevator doors, then swung the sight picture down and back until Big Fish was centered in his view, moving pretty badly now as it seemed the one leg was completely disabled. And the pack on his back wasn’t helping. Piet hadn’t been wrong. It was heavy. Big Fish was maybe fifty feet from the elevator doors, partly in profile but showing his back to Rufus. Rufus made a small adjustment to his sight, centered his crosshairs on the briefcase strapped to Big Fish’s backpack, had it all lined up for a second, then lost it. At any point he could have hit Big Fish, hurt him at least, maybe killed him. But he had really hoped to get through the day without murdering someone. That briefcase was the real target. But it was strapped to Big Fish, who was moving. Not in a steady way but lurching on a bad leg across broken ground.

But then all of a sudden he just stopped. Big Fish straightened up and just stood there stock-still.

Rufus put his crosshairs on the target and pulled the trigger.

Halfway to the head frame, Laks had an insight about how over-reliance on technology could lull you into a dangerous complacency. Sadly, what triggered this realization was his looking down to see that a diamondback rattlesnake had plunged its fangs into his right leg just above the knee.

They did not have such things on the coast of British Columbia, which enjoyed an Ireland-like immunity from venomous serpents. He had heard of them inland, where Uncle Dharmender lived, but had never seen one. Having spent some time in India he was not an absolute stranger to poisonous snakes. But the sheer size of this creature was appalling. Three meters if it was an inch, and meaty. You could feed a family with this thing.

As soon as he understood the nature of what was going on, he kicked it away. The weight of the pack pulled him off balance and sent him tumbling. The snake coiled up and rattled its tail as Laks scooted away on his butt. When he had got well clear, he climbed to his feet and put a little more distance between him and the snake, now scanning the ground more carefully in case there were others.

He sat down, took out his knife, and slit the leg of his earthsuit just above the right knee, where the fangs had gone in. It didn’t look like much: two neat little punctures, the skin around them getting red and beginning to swell. He had a vague recollection that you were supposed to suck out the poison. Which might have been possible if it were lower on his leg, but only a contortionist could have got his lips onto this wound. He tried squeezing the area around the bite and got some blood to leak out of the holes but he hadn’t a clue whether that was going to help him.

The only thing for it now was to keep going. The head frame was all of a thousand meters away. There was nothing between him and it but flat, albeit rough, terrain. On the far side of it was a freight train, its cars laden with yellow powder, feeding a big pile of the same, which was not too far from his destination. He’d got close enough now, and was low enough, that he had a view beneath all those stretched nets that covered the complex. He glimpsed steel buildings, systems of pipes and conveyors, parked forklifts.

When he got back to his feet he knew right away that walking to Mexico wasn’t going to happen. After he completed the mission, he was going to have to come out with his hands up and surrender. Hopefully there’d be someone to surrender to; right now the complex seemed deserted. The only thing that kept it from being a total ghost town was some kind of activity along that row of train cars, involving sporadic gunfire and screaming birds.

The sooner he got this done, the sooner he could surrender and request medical attention. People around these parts would have snakebite kits and antivenom. They’d know what to do. Unless this thing on his back was a bomb, in which case he’d be dead anyway.

Limping along, just forcing himself to keep going, he bent his neck and looked up, trying not to be blinded by the sun, which had become brutal, like a sun on some godforsaken science fiction planet. He was looking for drones. It was no longer about the protection they afforded him. It was about Pippa. The stuff Pippa thought about. How the story was captured, how the tale was told. More important in the big scheme of things than what actually happened. He wished it was her flying those things, cutting the footage together, telling his story her way. He wished she had stuck around. He would have liked to be with her. Maybe after all this was done he could look her up. Los Angeles couldn’t be too far away. He would go to the City of Angels and find her and tell her the true story.

He was so close to the Climate Weapon that he could have thrown a rock and hit it. The whole place was eerily quiet. All he had to do was drag himself another few yards. Then he could throw this monstrous weight down the shaft and be done with it. He was close enough now that he could see into the steel framework that enclosed the gun barrels and the elevator shaft and all the rest. He was looking for the right place to drop the briefcase down the hole.

But then he saw movement. Someone was moving in the middle of the structure. Climbing up from below on a ladder. He emerged into full view and stood there in plain sight on the top of the elevator enclosure. He looked around and immediately focused on Laks. A young man with long reddish-yellow hair. He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. Laks thought it must be a gun until light gleamed through it and he saw it was nothing more than a plastic water bottle. The man leaned back and dropped it. Then, after a last look back toward Laks, he turned away and dropped out of sight.

The man had gone back down the shaft.

There were people down there. At least one. Maybe more.

Whatever this device on Laks’s back was, he was about to drop it down a hole where people were taking shelter.

He stopped. This wasn’t part of the plan. Or was it? People weren’t supposed to be down there.

Something jerked him around, shifting his weight to his bad leg, causing him to spin down onto his ass. A moment later he heard the report of a rifle. Someone had shot him! No, not him. The bullet had struck his backpack. It had scored a hit on the briefcase.

He couldn’t get up as long as the weight of the pack was strapped to his back. He loosened the shoulder straps and shrugged free, undid the waist belt, got on all fours, then used his arms and his good leg to stand up.

Immediately the pack spun away from him and he heard a second shot. Then a third. The pack got a little farther away from him each time. The briefcase was getting more and more mangled. It was leaking some kind of silvery powder onto the ground.

The heat was terrific. He felt sunburned all over.

No, not all over. On his front. The side facing the mangled briefcase and the trail of silver dust it was leaking across the ground.

The horizon swung round and a rock smashed into his shoulder. He knew what this was. He’d just fallen down. Used to happen all the time after his inner ear had got messed up, before they’d fixed it. Something must have gone wrong with the equipment in his head.

He couldn’t get up now. He didn’t know what up was. He just lay there on his side, feeling the pressure of the world on his body. His right arm was extended on the ground in front of him, exposed skin turning red with sunburn, the steel bracelet—not a speck of rust on it—cool and pure against the blistered skin. A reminder that he should always use his strong right hand to do the right thing. He was pretty sure he had.