They conducted the interview in Tatum’s office at the Black Hat ops center, a reinforced concrete structure half buried in the ground near the intersection of the Arc and the main ranch road. It would not have been wrong to describe it as a bunker. But a lot of ranch architecture was massive, half buried, and made of concrete, so the line between bunker and any other kind of structure was a little blurry.
Tatum, like others in his unit, was dressed in an outfit that you could think of as the inner layers of an earthsuit. Hanging on a rack in the corner of his office were other components, plugged in to keep them all charged up and ready to go. Next to that was a long steel box that was obviously a gun safe. The portions of the earthsuit that Tatum was wearing right now just looked like normal, albeit military, clothes for the most part. You could buy this stuff in various styles and patterns. All the people in Tatum’s
unit had, reasonably enough, opted for desert camo. Tatum was no exception. So this scene looked and felt like interviews Rufus had experienced in the service when he’d been deployed to locations in the Middle East.
“You’re not in my chain of command. You and a couple of other consultants report to T.R. But you are in my department and I don’t want you getting shot because of some fuckup, so we are gonna have a talk about how it all works,” Tatum said after he and Rufus had exchanged the briefest of pleasantries.
How it all worked was that they had purchased and installed some kind of high-tech system that used cameras and machine vision to notice human-shaped objects moving around on the property, and then attempted to perform “IFF” on them. Rufus knew from the military that this meant “Identification Friend or Foe.” If the imagery was good enough, facial recognition would do the trick, but lots of times it wasn’t, and in any case people frequently wore earthsuits that got in the way of the optical path. So everyone was encouraged to wear a little device called an “iffy,” which seemed to be a cross between an ID badge and the kind of transponder typically installed on aircraft so that air traffic controllers could tell one blip from another. The iffy, which was about the size of a phone, was apparently complicated and expensive. So you could get along without one if you were just working inside a building that had the usual security barrier at the entrance. But anyone roaming around the property at large needed to have an iffy that was up and running. When the high-tech system noticed a free-ranging humanoid life-form on the property who was not so equipped, drones would head that way with Black Hats in hot pursuit. Naturally all the net runners, sail chasers, et cetera had iffies as a matter of course.
What applied to humans applied to drones as well. Rufus was welcome to fly his drones around but they had to be registered and he would have to install transponders on them. “T.R. has spoken to me with great admiration of your skill with drones,” Tatum said drily.
Rufus nodded. He had to suppress a smile as he imagined what that conversation must have been like.
“He refers to you as . . .”
“The Drone Ranger. I know, sir.”
“Well, that being the case, I’ll leave it to you to interface with your tech staff about making the necessary modifications to your equipment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“T.R. says you are self-sufficient in your trailer. You can park it anywhere you like.”
“You mean Nine or Four or Noon?”
“I mean anywhere you like. Obviously, the places you mentioned have more conveniences.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What kind of weapons you packing?”
“My job until recently has been killing feral swine. To a first approximation, those are similar to humans,” Rufus pointed out.
This phrase “to a first approximation” he had picked up from Alastair, and he liked it.
“So,” Rufus continued, “by and large . . .”
“You are equipped with firearms designed for killing humans. In other words, military. I get it.”
“Yes, sir. Simplifies the decision-making process by a good deal.”
“All right then.”
“But only three pieces. An AK. A bolt-action with infrared scope. And a plain old nine mil Glock.”
“Nothing weird. Nothing full auto.”
“Oh, no sir.”
Tatum nodded. “We’ll set you up with a two-way radio that works on an encrypted channel. But to be honest, phones work almost everywhere on the property and they usually work better.”
Tatum’s sensible attitude around “weird” firearms now emboldened Rufus to bring up a topic that had been somewhat on his mind. The drive from Cotulla to the Flying S Ranch had been long enough that the old mental hobgoblins had been able to get some purchase in Rufus’s brain. He’d called Carlos Nooma, a half-Mexican,