Termination Shock

Combustion Chamber

“Coke,” T.R. said, drawing his finger along the wall of the combustion chamber. It came away black. For the wall, indeed all the interior surfaces of the place, were as black as black could be. And not shiny black. This had a coarse, matte texture that swallowed all light.

“I was going to guess carbon,” Saskia said. When she’d last seen the place, everything had been gleaming new polished steel.

“Same diff,” T.R. said. “Coke is just one of those weird old English words. An old-timer word. When you take coal and bake it, drive off all the random volatile shit left over from the dead dinosaurs, eventually you end up with basically pure carbon. A very high-quality fuel.”

“What’s it doing all over the walls of your combustion chamber?”

“When a hydrocarbon fuel burns, some of the carbon gets deposited as a residue,” T.R. said. “Builds up over time. My daddy used to take his Cadillac out on a long stretch of highway and put the pedal to the metal for a spell. Claimed he was blowing the carbon out of the cylinders. A routine maintenance procedure. Not sure if it really did anything but hoo-ee! It was a thrill to us kids in the back seat. Mom hated it. Anyway, an engineer would say this thing is getting coked up.”

Saskia didn’t want to get “coked up,” so she spread an emergency blanket on the floor of the combustion chamber. This was bowl-shaped, no part of it really vertical or horizontal, and so when she sat on the blanket she had to pick a position somewhere between sitting up and lying down. The bottom of the bowl was occupied by a little heap of supplies, including the battery-powered flashlight that was their sole illumination. Somewhere in there was a box of emergency candles and some matches, for when the battery ran out.

Above they heard footsteps—two pairs of them, she judged—and then the profound thump of the Minus Four hatch being closed. A few moments after that, two crisp taps reverberated through the piston that served as their ceiling and the pump chamber’s floor. A signal that both Conor and Jules had taken refuge up there.

“I wonder what Jules saw that made him drop the bottle,” Saskia said.

“If only I could remember my Morse code from Boy Scouts, we could find out,” T.R. said. He sat down on the opposite side of the bowl and looked across at Saskia. The beam of the light went straight up and basically disappeared, swallowed by the coke. T.R.’s face was a barely discernible oval on the other side of it.

“At this point,” he said, “you gotta be asking yourself why the hell you came back to the Flying S Ranch.”

Saskia eased herself down the slope of the bowl until she was squatting on her haunches next to the pile of supplies. She groped around and found the box of candles, then opened the lid. Next to it was a box of safety matches. She sparked one off and let it flare, then got a candle going.

“Thank you for conducting that free stress test of our gas management system,” T.R. said. “If there’d been methane or hydrogen in here—”

“I know why I came back,” Saskia said. She lit a second candle from the first one, then melted some wax to make a puddle on the floor and stuck a candle into it.

“And why’s that?” T.R. asked, staring into the flame. Saskia was looking at it too; like all fire it drew the eye and hypnotized. Which in a way was how the world had got into this mess in the first place. She handed him the second candle.

“Someone I met wanted to send you a message. Presumably the Mossad.”

“Oh? What’s the ol’ Mossad wanting to share with me?”

So much had happened that Saskia could barely remember it. While she was thinking about it she lit another candle and planted it on the floor. “It sounded to me as though they had picked up some chatter to the effect that China was planning something.”

T.R. chuckled.

“Something in response specifically to your geoengineering activities,” Saskia continued.

“They were right,” T.R. said.

“That’s why I asked Willem to pay you a visit.”

“Much obliged.”

“I have no idea whether India was also on their radar. But it was a very general sort of warning, so who knows?” She lit another candle.

“What would you say was the overall gist of this warning, then?” T.R. asked, watching—a bit nervously—as Saskia lit yet another candle.

“Tunnel vision,” Saskia said. She couldn’t resist tilting her head back to gaze straight up toward the coked ceiling. She knew it was up there, but no amount of candlelight was going to make it visible. “Perhaps mine shaft would have been more apt than tunnel.”

“I stood right here a couple years ago, after this shaft was dug, but before we’d put anything in,” T.R. said. “It was the middle of the night, totally dark. Way up above me I could see a tiny disk of sky, with a star in it. One star, all by itself. I thought to myself, ‘Well, there it is! Heard about it all my life! Now I’m looking right at it!’”

“Which star was it?” Saskia asked. She was lighting another candle.

“Hell if I know. It was a lone star, is the point.”

Saskia looked at him quizzically over the candle flame.

“This is the Lone Star State,” T.R. explained.

“Ah, I see, so you took it as an omen.”

“You know, Your Royal Highness, it’s a funny thing about candles. They’re real purty and all, especially when you get a lot of ’em going at once—”

“But they produce carbon dioxide.”

“Yup.”

“They are raising the CO₂ level of the atmosphere we depend on,” Saskia said.

“Yup, I knew you’d make the connection.”

“And yet, what’s the harm in lighting one more candle? It’s only a tiny contribution to the problem.”

“You do it anyway,” T.R. said, “because you can tell yourself a story about how this is going to end.”

“Oh?”

“Either terrorists are gonna come down here and blow us up, or we’re gonna be rescued by the good guys. Either way you can probably light all the candles you want, Saskia. We probably won’t run out of ’em and find ourselves in the dark. We probably won’t asphyxiate on CO₂. ’Cause something bad or good’s gonna happen before we get to that point. Someone out there is gonna take some kind of action, while we sit on our butts and wait and have learned conversations about how bad these candles are. And I just hate being that guy.”

“You want to be the guy up there, taking action.”

“Someone’s gotta.”

“But then China, India, the Saudis . . . when powers like that get involved, you’re helpless.”

“They’re gonna do what’s in their national interest. Always have, always will. You think China didn’t have its eye on that copper mine before I started building a gun there? The gun was a pretext, that’s all. Does that mean I oughta do nothing? When I got the means to do something?”

“All that stuff you told us about raising the value of Houston real estate was just bullshit,” Saskia said.

“Not exactly. That was me making sure it penciled out. But was it my only reason? ’Course not.”

“We’re stuck down here because India is pissed off at you,” Saskia said. “I’ve talked to people with connections in the Punjab. I’ve seen climate models suggesting that this thing”—she slapped the combustion chamber wall, and her palm came away black with carbon—“this thing right here could reduce crop yields there! Is it any wonder they’ve sent people to blow it up? Perfectly reasonable, if you ask me.”

“If they’d bothered to ask,” T.R. said, “I’d have showed them Vadan. Sneeuwberg. Showed ’em the simulations my boys put together of how we can make it all work. Punjab’s gonna be fine.”

“But you have to tell them that.”

“They have to give a shit. They don’t. They just want to pull off a PR stunt, get votes in the next election.”

“I understand how democracies work,” Saskia said. “Believe me, I do. But their PR stunt might kill us. Isn’t that an indication that you might have made a mistake?”

“I don’t deny things have gotten a little out of hand,” T.R. admitted.

Saskia laughed out loud.

“But you gotta start somewhere. Sometimes you drill a well and you get a gusher. Makes quite a mess. But you just gotta deal with it. Get it under control, cap it off.”

Saskia just shook her head. They sat there in silence for a minute. Not perfect silence; it might have been her imagination, but through her back, which was leaning against the hard floor of the dome, she thought she could feel faint thumps. Footsteps, maybe.

“That’s why I need you,” T.R. said.

Saskia sighed.

“Sorry,” T.R. added. He seemed puzzled by her reaction.

“Oh, not at all,” Saskia said. “It’s just that there’s a lot of that kind of thing going around. I’m the Queen of Netherworld, did you hear?”

“I was so informed.”

“A prince gave me a jet.”

T.R. shrugged. “You crash a jet, someone gives you a jet, things even out over time.”

“You can’t just admit you need me and pretend that makes a difference,” Saskia said. “You have to listen.”

A blinding bright crescent appeared on the wall of the combustion chamber. Someone had opened the latch a crack. Silhouetted was the head of a person wearing some kind of getup that completely covered their head. They were breathing through a respirator. Visible just behind this person was a wall of plastic sheeting that had apparently been taped into place to create a barrier between the area surrounding the hatch and the rest of the mine shaft. They tossed a pair of bundles in and then closed the door.

Saskia was closest. She pushed herself up to her feet and carried a candle over to investigate. Each of the bundles was sealed in clear plastic: a coverall, neatly folded up, and a respirator.

Taped to one of them was a sheet of printer paper on which someone had written with a marker: RADIATION HAZARD! PUT THESE ON, THEN KNOCK.

“The cavalry, I guess,” T.R. remarked.

“There must be some kind of contamination up there,” Saskia said. One of the suits was a medium, the other a large. She tossed the large to T.R.

“I refuse to be the mom in the Cadillac,” she said, and ripped the packet open.

“Beg pardon?”

“Your story about Daddy blowing the carbon out of the cylinders, blasting down some Texas highway in the Cadillac, made it all sound very amusing for the kids in the back and the man behind the wheel. But all you said of your mother was that she hated it. I won’t be her.”

“Point taken,” T.R. said. “You won’t be.”