Laks startled as several rotors whirred up to speed. Half a dozen drones—the ones closest to the container doors—took to the air and hummed off into the night.
Revealed behind them was the largest single object in the container. This one was mounted on floor rails and sort of set back into a pocket of space surrounded entirely by the smaller devices.
The driver of the van, and another man who’d been riding in its back, stepped up on the truck’s rear bumper, reached in, and （to judge from sounds） undid some latches. Then they slid the big thing back until it was perched on the container’s threshold. Not a word had been spoken yet but Laks got the gist of what they were trying to do. He helped them lift the thing up, pull it free of the container, and set it down in the stretch of open ground behind the semi and in front of the van. It was awkward but not that heavy. Laks couldn’t make sense of it until the men began swinging parts of it around, unfolding it like a pocketknife. He then understood that the first end of it to emerge from the container had been a sort of hub, and the rest consisted of spokes that had been folded back for storage and shipment. When those were all rotated and snapped into position, the thing was revealed to be a six-rotor drone several meters across. Its central hub appeared to have ample space for batteries and other gear, but the largest part of it was a human-sized vacancy equipped with a seat and a safety harness. Resting on the seat was a beach-ball-sized mass of bubble wrap, strapped down with tape. Once this was unwrapped it proved to be a pair of goggles of a size to cover the whole upper half of his face. One of the guys handed this to Laks and looked at him expectantly. Maybe even a little bit impatiently. Laks, now beginning to struggle with his emotional state, but not wanting to ruin what showed every indication of being an extraordinarily expensive set of plans and preparations, tried to put it on, but had a bit of trouble getting the head strap to fit over his turban.
The other men were all Indians, but none was a Sikh. They were all boring holes through his skull with their eyes. Body language suggested that they were terrifically impatient for him to climb aboard the big drone. The guy with the laptop was just running the palm of his hand up and down over his face, as if windshield-wipering sweat. Challenging as it was for those guys, however, this turban-related delay gave Laks some time to review the events of the last few minutes and to ponder what might await him.
He could refuse. He could claim I didn’t sign up for . . . whatever is about to happen. But by the letter of the law, he actually had. He had, shortly before checking out of the hospital, or whatever it was, in Cyberabad, taken an oath and volunteered for a mission whose exact details were undisclosed. Which was almost always the case in the military, right? Soldiers didn’t know where they were going, what they’d be asked to do. Even the officers probably didn’t know until circumstances unfolded. Still, he had—very naively, as he now saw—kind of assumed it would be more like the fighting at the LAC. More of him deciding where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do next, and less of blindly following unexplained orders.
None of which changed anything about the actual situation. But it gave him a few moments for his mind to catch up. He let the goggles dangle around his neck for now. He finally complied with the furious gesticulations of the men waving him toward the big drone. He sat in the cockpit and immediately felt a rising hum as the rotors began to spin up. While being flown around the Himalayas and the Karakorams in military choppers he’d learned how to buckle a five-point safety harness, so he did that as the drone was lifting off in a cloud of dust. The drone leaned forward. Air began to stream over his face as it picked up speed. He pulled the visor up to protect his eyes from wind blast. Once he’d blinked the tears from his eyes he saw the edge of the pecan orchard disappearing beneath him as he crossed the road. Beyond the barbed-wire fence on the road’s other side, a wild desert landscape stretched to the horizon, lit by a full moon. Some kilometers ahead was a range of mountains. The drone banked left to circumvent them on their
moonlit southern flank, which ramped down a long rocky slope for a while and then fell off into the valley of a river.
This wildly beautiful vista was then blotted out by the splash page of a PowerPoint deck.
MISSION BRIEFING
PHASE 1
NET SYSTEM DEMOLITION
U.S. BANK OF RIO GRANDE RIVER
In the upper-right corner were two time readouts, updating once per second. One was labeled MISSION ELAPSED TIME and seemed to show how long it had been since Laks had lifted off from the pecan orchard. The other was TIME TO INSERTION and was counting downward from about fifteen minutes.