“What’s going on up there?” Jules finally asked.
Saskia realized he hadn’t seen the drones or heard the voice. “It sounded to me,” she explained, “as if drones were being used to somehow round people up and march them off.”
“Off to where?” Jules asked. It was, come to think of it, a perfectly obvious and sensible question.
Saskia threw up her hands. “Not here.”
Jules was stricken, obviously thinking that he should have stayed behind with Fenna. “What’s wrong with here?”
“This may become a question of some relevance to us,” T.R. remarked.
The image stabilization system in his fancy binoculars was on the fritz. To get a steady view of what was happening down on the mesa, Rufus had to go full Stone Age, holding them down on an outcropping of rock near the summit of the peak. The distance was so great that the binoculars weren’t a huge improvement on the naked eye. Every few minutes a purplish star would ignite at the base of a net stanchion and burn for a couple of minutes. Then that pole would fall inward. One by one the nets were hitting the ground.
Pina2bo had stopped firing shells around the time of the flash—which as near as he could tell had detonated in the sky right above it. But there would still be dozens of shells in the air, spiraling down out of the stratosphere beneath their parasails. Under normal circumstances, they’d be talking to systems on the ground that would tell them which net to aim for. Rufus didn’t know what happened in the case when a shell couldn’t phone home. It was maybe kind of an interesting question but not the thing to be focusing on right now.
Pools of light were gliding around the mesa in an orderly way, sometimes preceded by—unless his eyes deceived him—huge glowing green arrows. He could not make out what it was they were illuminating, but a reasonable guess would be people. They converged on one location in the facility’s parking lot: a ring of green laser light surrounding a lit-up circle. People were being herded and penned, he guessed.
Up here at the marble mine they didn’t have lights at all, other than a few candles. All their flashlights were LED-based. Instead of simple on-off switches, they had buttons you could press multiple
times to get different brightness levels or check the batteries or what have you. There must be a little microprocessor inside the unit counting the button presses and deciding what action to take. Those were fried. So the lights didn’t work. Fortunately the moon was full. It was what they used to call a Comanche moon on the Texas frontier, for the warriors of that people had taken advantage of its light to mount nocturnal raids. Rufus was thereby able to hike down from the peak and find his way back to the campfire without turning an ankle. He’d had an idea that he could hot-wire some flashlights by opening them up and soldering wires directly between the battery terminals and the LEDs.
Or, of course, they could all just go to bed and wait for the sun to come up. But after that it would soon become so hot that they would have to lie low until it went down again. The ability to move around and get things done during the hours of darkness was going to be important.
Besides, he had nothing else to do.
His trailer had some twelve-volt circuits that ran off battery power, and these still worked. So he was able to go in and grab his soldering iron. But it required 120 volts AC. Normally this would be supplied by the generator. But the generators were all dead because they were controlled by systems that had microchips in them. For that matter, so did the soldering iron; it had a built-in thermocouple and some logic that varied the power to keep it at a set temperature, turned it off when not in use, and so on.
So Rufus’s first project was to hot-wire his own soldering iron by holding its tip into the glowing coals of the campfire until it was hot enough. He was able to bypass its power supply and hook it directly to a car battery. This gave him the ability to hot-wire flashlights. This in turn gave him a well-illuminated workspace on one of the plastic tables.
He did not, of course, fully know what was going on, other than that the ranch was under some sort of attack. His conversation with Pippa pointed to some kind of performative war project starring Big Fish. Such a thing could not possibly have worked if it was Big Fish single-handedly taking on Black Hat. But Black Hat
without electronic devices was just a few guys running around in the dark with guns, strewn across a vast stretch of desert. Desert where it was nearly impossible to move because of climate and terrain. They’d have no way to communicate save mirror flashes and smoke signals.