by the shape of them they’d been optimized to a fare-thee-well. They reminded him of the rotor blades on the most advanced stealth choppers he’d seen in the service, the ones used by JSOC squads for insertions into crazy places. But why go to all that trouble to optimize the rotors on a quad-copter drone? To eke out a little more range? To make them quieter? Or just to flex?
Most circuit boards had markings silkscreened onto them: a part number, a company logo, labels for the I/O connectors. Not these. Just chips. And even the chips were unmarked. Who the fuck made their own chips? More to the point, why bother?
Ribbon cables ran from the edges of the board to various subsystems. But there was also a pair of plain old wires, red and black, that ran to a plain old switch mounted on the outside of the chassis. He flicked it on and was rewarded with a green LED coming on. Normally it would be hidden beneath the black carapace. For this thing had been made to run dark.
Pippa meanwhile had gone into another round of clicking on things. “Look, India’s not going to mount a twentieth-century-style military operation against West Texas. No matter how bad it gets.”
“Let me guess,” Rufus said. “They’ve been getting shit done in the Himalayas without firing a single bullet by using the new tactics of, what did you call it—”
“Performative war, Red.” In the Kiwi accent it came out as “Rid.”
“Pina2bo’s more of a threat—which means, more of a target—than a bunch of kung fu fighters freezing their asses on the top of the world,” Rufus said. “But old-school war ain’t an option. So what they gonna do? Performative war. And who’s the best they got?”
“Big Fish,” Pippa said. “I’ll see you in a day, Rid.”
Rufus was getting ready to explain to Pippa why this was not a good idea when he was distracted by joyous, excited whooping from the top of the peak. Thordis and Carmelita were up there, taking the evening air. “Shooting star!” were the only words he could make out. He looked up at them and saw them pointing excitedly into the northern sky. He turned his head that way and saw
a line of brilliant white being drawn across the navy blue heaven. It did indeed look like a meteorite. But after a certain point it seemed to stop moving. It just kept getting brighter.
Rufus hadn’t played that much baseball, but he’d caught enough fly balls during his day to know that if you are staring at the ball, and it doesn’t seem to be moving, you’re in the right place to catch it.
“Don’t look at it!” he shouted. “Don’t look at it!”
“Don’t look at what?” Pippa was saying. “What’s going on, Rid?” But he was moving away from his laptop. He’d turned his back on it, and on the shooting star, and was looking up at Thordis and Carmelita, trying to get their attention.
He needn’t have bothered. The shooting star had grown so bright and so close that it was illuminating the whole north-facing side of the peak, casting stark shadows. No one could look at it. Thordis and Carmelita had both turned their backs to it.
Then there was a momentary flash that was even brighter, and then darkness.
Absolute darkness. The screen of Rufus’s laptop had gone black. The lights in the windows of the trailers had gone out. The generators had stopped running. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and tried to turn on its flashlight app. It was bricked. In his other pocket he had a little LED flashlight. It didn’t work either.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, though, and now they picked up one mote of green light. He stepped toward it. It was on the table next to his dead laptop.
It was the power LED on the drone’s main circuit board. That was still working just fine, apparently.
FLYING S
As first world problems went, it was hard to top this one: being limited to relatively short-hop flights because of the unusual fuel required by the brand-new, state-of-the-art private jet that had been given to you as a personal gift. And yet by the time the airstrip at the Flying S Ranch finally rolled into view over the jagged horizon of West Texas, Saskia did feel she had some legitimate grounds for complaint. She and her new best friend Ervin, an ex–U.S. Air Force pilot from Baldwin Hills, California, had flown from the Line back to Vadan, where a hydrogen tanker still awaited them, and thence to Schiphol for an overnight stop and a quick check-in with the new Queen of the Netherlands. Fenna and Jules had hitched a ride from Vadan to Schiphol and then talked their way aboard for the remainder of the journey, cramming into the two passenger seats in the back of the jet’s tiny cabin as they tacked back and forth across the great circle route. From Schiphol they had flown to Aberdeen, then Reykjavik, then someplace called Nuuk in Greenland, where they’d been stuck for a day awaiting hydrogen. Then Gander, Newfoundland. Then Ottawa, Chicago, Denver, and finally the Flying S Ranch. They were low on fuel by the time they landed, but they’d solve that problem later. Or to be precise, Jules would. Managing hydrogen deliveries over a sketchy voice connection had turned out to be this young man’s unheralded superpower. There was, Saskia supposed, a kind of logic to it: divers had to know all about compressed and liquefied gases or else they would die. Hydrogen was only a small stretch once you knew everything about compressed air, oxygen, helium, and other staples of the diver’s trade. But a professional background in that area was only part of his qualifications. More valuable, as far as she could determine from overhearing his half of conversations with ground personnel, was his manner of talking.