“Aren’t there snakes?”
“Yes, but there is also a paved road that we can walk on, where snakes will have no place to hide. Besides—look!” She stuck out one leg to draw attention to the fact that she was wearing cowboy boots. Scored half an hour ago from Bunkhouse’s self-serve swag kiosk. “I’d like to see the rattlesnake that could punch its fangs through these!”
“I wouldn’t.”
By the time those cowboy boots were striding down said paved road, the sun had set behind the mountains separating Pina2bo from the Rio Grande. Conditions would have been downright pleasant if not for the flash and boom of the gun. Through some peculiarity of how the sound waves propagated, standing near the gun itself—directly in the shell’s wake—wasn’t as bad as being off to the side.
Once or twice as she and Jules strolled along, Saskia turned back and let her gaze follow the serrated ridge of the mountains north and west, until it melted into the dark purple sky.
“What’s to see up there, ma’am?” Jules asked.
“Do you remember Rufus? Red?”
“Oh, of course.”
“Well, somewhere back thataway, unless I’ve got my directions mixed up, is a mountain made of marble. Tunneled into it is an old mine where he’s been living.”
She’d got occasional reports and a few pictures from Thordis and Piet. As far as she could make out, Rufus was gainfully employed there doing work he found interesting, which in a way was
a big part of being happy. She wondered if he was happy, though, and if he thought of her from time to time.
She noticed that she was casting a shadow on the pavement ahead of her. This made no sense. The sun was down. The moon was off to her left, low above the mountainous spur that framed the other side of the valley. In other words, it was in the wrong place, and in any case not bright enough, to cast her shadow there. Someone must be shining a light on them from behind. But she hadn’t heard anyone approaching. A drone, perhaps? Maybe some nervous Black Hat had decided to shadow them and make sure they didn’t wander off into the desert to be eaten by pigs. Somewhat annoyed, she stopped walking and turned around. Jules was already doing likewise. The source of the light was blindingly obvious in a quite literal sense—she couldn’t look right at it. It was moving across the sky, shortening her shadow. Who flew drones with such powerful lights on them?
Because her gaze was averted, she noticed that the entire valley was lit up by this thing. It wasn’t just a narrow spotlight focused on her and Jules, but a floodlight somehow illuminating the mountain walls on both sides as well as the steel frameworks enclosing the gun barrels, the pipes and conduits converging on it, the big yellow sulfur pile nearby.
It really did blind her for an instant, and then all went dark. She was afraid her eyes had been damaged. But over the next minute or so, they adjusted to a world lit only by the moon and by the light lingering in the western sky. Most of the lights in the complex ahead of her had gone out. She turned around and saw that Bunkhouse was completely dark. She took out her phone, thinking to use its flashlight feature. It was dead.
“I’ll be darned” was all Jules could say. “Meteor?”
“It looked like one of those meteors that burns up before it hits the ground,” Saskia said, “but that wouldn’t explain why the power’s out. Why my phone is dead.”
Jules checked his phone and found the same.
Without further discussion, they lengthened their stride toward the big gun. No longer the Biggest Gun in the World, but
still pretty big. T.R. was there. He’d know what was going on. Anyway it was the only thing she could see that still had power. Many of the outlying structures—the low steel building where robots filled and prepped the shells, the cooling tower, the natural gas cracking facility where they made the hydrogen—had gone dark. But the gun itself seemed to have at least some systems up and running. The tips of its six barrels and the muffler-like housings that surrounded them were illuminated from below by light shining up the main bore of the big shaft. The steel framework surrounding all that was speckled with lights focused on stairways, catwalks, and hatches. As Jules and Saskia drew closer she could hear the low hum of machinery: pumps moving cold water down to the combustion chamber two hundred meters below and drawing hot water back up, routing it to the cooling tower, which, though darkened, was still burbling and steaming. The higher-pitched whoosh of fans suggested that essential ventilation was still going on. Valves snicked and clunked, gases hissed in pipes, transformers droned. As they got closer yet, Saskia heard voices, mostly male, mostly Texan. Agitated, alert, but controlled.