In actual practice, though, it wouldn’t make sense to assume that the bad guys—whoever they might be—would be so considerate as to build eagle-friendly equipment. So the second part of Rufus’s work was to construct eagle gauntlets: lightweight, hard-shelled gloves, like those on a suit of medieval armor, that could be slipped over the birds’ feet and lower legs to take the impact from spinning drone rotors. Once those had brought the lightweight blades to a dead stop, the eagles’ talons could close in around the body of the drone, the three front toes raking it back so that the hallux—the huge talon on the bird’s “heel”—could close in, crushing and piercing the drone’s hull just like the rib cage of a hapless bunny.
In the era before 3D printers, inventing eagle gauntlets would have been difficult, but now it was easy. Better yet, it gave him an excuse to purchase a fancier 3D printer that was capable of making
stronger, lighter parts. Rufus was gradually getting clued in to the fact that dudes like T.R. actually liked it when you spent money, provided you did it within reasonable bounds. It proved that you were doing something.
In other words, he dropped, or at least set to one side, the pretense that he was actually patrolling the airspace of the Flying S Ranch with a personal fleet of drones and threw himself full-time into helping Thordis, Carmelita, Tsolmon, and Piet train their eagles. In military parlance, they were the Blue Team, preparing to defend the ranch against possible invaders, and he was the Red Team—a simulated opponent that the Blue Team could train against. And since all of them called him by his nickname of Red, it all seemed to fit. It gave him a story he could tell himself, as he sat down there in the cool recesses of the marble mine repairing drones torn apart by enraged birds of prey, as to why this all made sense. A story he could also relate to T.R., if T.R. ever asked. But he never did.
CYBERABAD
We think you are ready to walk,” said Dr. Banerjee after they’d extracted him from the tank, removed the sphere from his head, disconnected the cables behind his ears, and given him a chance to shower and put some clothes on.
When he’d first regained consciousness, “clothes” had meant hospital gowns, but these days it seemed to be T-shirts, sweatpants, and a simple piece of cloth to cover his head. He never wore the same T-shirt twice. They just showed up. Most were blazoned with the names and logos of kabaddi teams, but there was also some hockey swag. He had only the vaguest sense of what kabaddi and hockey were, but their practitioners seemed quite generous with clothing.
As for the piece of cloth on his head: in the early going he’d been a little unclear on whether this was a medical thing—for they’d been doing a lot of things to his skull—or a form of attire. Some of the people who came to visit him—including most of the ones who claimed to be his friends and family—wore such coverings on their heads. Typically, they were a lot more elaborate than the thing he had. Large portions of his head had been shaved for medical reasons, but they’d left his hair long on top and in front. He could twist it into a sort of bun above his forehead and wrap that up in the cloth. Also, there was a metal band that he wore on his wrist.
Right now he was seated in a wheelchair in the living room of his suite, looking across a coffee table at Dr. Banerjee, a small woman in her forties. She was flanked by a couple of the usual crowd of—well, it was hard to tell who and what they were. Younger people who seemed smart and efficient and pleased.
“I’ve been walking for weeks,” he said.
“I mean, without the rack,” she clarified. She referred to a cube-shaped
frame on wheels that until now had always surrounded him when he walked; it prevented him from injuring himself when he lost his balance. “Today’s results were more than encouraging. Your proprioception has been improving steadily during the last few weeks, but recently it has just gone shooting off the charts. We have finally got those darned gyros dialed in. The neural interfaces are ‘taking.’ Combining those two advances, we can now say that your sense of balance is better than what we have measured in controlled experiments on Olympic gymnasts!”
“Well, screw it then,” he said. In one motion he unbuckled the lap belt holding him into his chair and stood up. The backs of his legs impacted the chair and sent it rolling backward until it clattered against a wall. Dr. Banerjee was horrified. She needn’t have been. He knew exactly where he was in space.
“No, too soon, Laks!” she exclaimed.
Laks. Yet another of his names.