She had no idea what had happened. She’d never heard of a meteor blacking out electronics. This had to have been some sort of attack making use of an electromagnetic pulse device—a thing she’d heard mentioned in military and intelligence briefings. It had killed all the electronics in the valley except, apparently, for some systems buried deep underground. The stuff that absolutely had to keep working no matter what. They must have generators down at the bottom of the shaft, shielded by two hundred meters of rock, burning natural gas fed down in pipes and sending back electrical power to key systems topside.
So Pina2bo had been attacked—or maybe was only starting to come under attack. But it was an unusual type of attack and so the security and operations people around the gun were only beginning to realize it. Firearms probably still worked just fine. Saskia didn’t want to stumble into the crosshairs of some jittery Black Hat, so she began making noise as she drew closer. Personnel who’d emerged from darkened buildings around the complex
were gravitating to the only area that still had light, which was the gun. Saskia began to make noise as soon as she was within earshot. “Hello! Hello!” Not very original, but hopefully nonthreatening. “It’s me, Saskia! And my friend Jules!”
“Saskia who?” came a man’s voice back.
“Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia of the Netherlands,” she returned.
“Welcome back, Your Majesty.” That was T.R. talking. She saw him detach from a cluster of men and begin walking toward her.
“Your Royal Highness,” she corrected him.
“Oh, yeah. Forgot. Sorry, long couple of days.”
“So I heard.”
A couple of Black Hats had strode forth to flank T.R. They had broken out the assault rifles and were carrying them with muzzles pointed at the ground. Looking at their tactical pants and vests and gear harnesses, all bedecked with lights and optics and comms gear, Saskia was struck by how little of it was actually going to be functional in the aftermath of the EMP. They could peer over iron sights into the dark and shoot bullets at what little they could see, but that was about it. They could walk around under their own power but any modern vehicle, dependent on hundreds of microchips, would be useless. Horses and bicycles would work, but she didn’t see any.
T.R. stopped a few paces short of her. So this was the moment Fenna had envisioned with such relish: Saskia still more or less impeccable, T.R. a ruin. But it didn’t have quite the same impact. Saskia was directly illuminated by the lights in the gun complex, which she was facing. T.R. was backlit: just a stocky, vaguely cowboy-shaped shadow outlined in a fringe of dusty light. “Who would have imagined,” T.R. said wearily, “that one who has so recently passed a night in Nuuk could pull together such effortless elegance.”
“Your wife has trained you well!”
“Still it’s true.”
“I had help.”
“How is the lovely Fenna?”
“Scared and in the dark, I would guess,” Saskia said, with a glance toward Jules. He had politely stepped to one side and approached a cluster of men—not Black Hats, so probably White Label engineers—who were standing around discussing what had happened.
“We are scared and all lit up, as you can see,” T.R. said. “Please join us.”
“Do you know what we are being scared of? What is going on?”
“Did you see that goddamn thing fall out of the sky?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll not insult your intelligence by saying what it was.”
“I thought EMPs were a kind of nuclear weapon, though?”
T.R. looked back toward his security guys. “I am informed that you can make a small one that ain’t a nuke. Derives its energy from the heat of reentry, which is considerable. Generates the pulse through a thermochemical reaction. Affects a correspondingly smaller footprint on the ground. Surgical. Just the thing for whatever our adversaries have in mind. Whatever that is.”
He turned sideways to listen to a few tense words from a grizzled Black Hat who had strode up behind him. In profile Saskia could see him nodding.
“My fellas,” T.R. said, turning back to face her, “are expressing keen impatience with the easygoing and protracted pace of this conversation. The words ‘sitting duck’ have been used. They would like me—and you, goes without saying—indoors and belowground.”
“I’m happy to do whatever they consider best.” Saskia began closing the distance between them.