to drown standing up? The glass dome couldn’t shed water fast enough and it seemed to pile up into a sludding mound, centimeters thick. This at least deadened the noise, which had drowned out everything. Only the subsonic shocks of thunder could penetrate it.
She actually enjoyed the perfect isolation for as long as it lasted, which was no more than thirty seconds. Then over the course of a minute or two the storm abated, and the sun came on full blast. The vacant field had become a rectangular lake spotted all over with wads of crushed vegetation. This being Texas, it was not planted with any crop, as would have been the case in the Netherlands. And this being Houston, it bore zero similarity to nearby parcels, which hosted activities as disparate as schools, strip malls, office blocks, residential subdivisions, and oil refineries. The drone’s arms swung back out, the props spun up, and it rose into the air along with the rest of the swarm. “We have the Johnson Space Center to thank for that,” T.R. said. “It’s just a little old parcel of vacant land they’re not using for anything just now. Probably never will, since it’s only a couple of meters Above.”
Saskia had now spent enough time around him to know that when he said “Above” or “Below” in that portentous and knowing tone of voice he meant “above sea level” or “below sea level.” In it was a kind of droll sarcasm at the very idea that there was such a thing as sea level in any useful sense. He saw it all stochastically and wouldn’t be caught dead speaking of sea level with a straight face.
Parking lots and office buildings were in view to the east. Beyond those was an industrial port zone that put her in mind of Rotterdam, with open water beyond that. She spied a familiar logo on several of the nearer buildings and realized it was all NASA property. The Houston of “Houston, we have a problem.” A little more altitude gave her the perspective to delineate a border fence, guarded by gates where it was pierced by roads, as well as other kinds of defenses that had been heaped up to protect vulnerable parts of the complex from floodwater. But the swarm didn’t go in that direction. Instead it followed an adjacent road to a commercial development that was as close to the Johnson Space Center as
it could get without encroaching on government property. Logos on some of the buildings, and signs planted near street entrances, were suggestive of aerospace.
One of these buildings sported a five-story parking ramp with a flat roof. That was where the drones all came to rest, landing one at a time, each folding up and rolling out of the way to make room for the next. There were more big umbrellas and choreographed movements that conducted Saskia and the others into one of the adjoining office buildings. They were ushered through the doors and past a range of security checkpoints into the offices of White Label Industries LLC, whose logo was a featureless white rectangle.
In the course of her official duties, Saskia had endured hundreds of tech company tours. White Label Industries was the same as all the others: people sitting in chairs and typing. Some had made the switch to augmented-reality glasses, others—generally older—hewed to the ancient practice of walling themselves in with flat-panel monitors. They were all writing code or working on CAD models, not of anything spectacular but of bolts and brackets. Usually the queen had to feign interest, but T.R. seemed to know full well how boring this was. “I just wanted you to see that this exists. Everything you’ll see in West Texas was designed out of here. We needed a lot of aerospace guys. This is where it’s easiest to poach ’em. They’re happy working on shit that’s actually getting built, even if it ain’t going to Mars with some fucking billionaire. We gotta terraform Earth before we get distracted by Mars is my philosophy.”
Saskia saw nothing during her sweep through the place to contradict that. These guys did look happy. A little older, whiter, maler, and squarer than techies in Sunnyvale or Amsterdam. Calmly, even serenely focused on what they were doing.
A small bus, like an airport shuttle, was awaiting them in a loading dock that was otherwise crammed with cargo pallets bearing machine parts. None of those had the lightweight gracile look she associated with aerospace tech. Most of it was steel, and little of that was stainless.
Once they had taken seats, the roll-up door was opened and they pulled out onto a road that, over the course of the next few
minutes, took them generally east, toward Trinity Bay—the lobe of the Gulf that served as Houston’s port. They passed a NASA gate but did not turn into it. The various buildings of the Johnson Space Center glided by them and Saskia realized with mild, childlike disappointment that they weren’t going there to ooh and aah at big old rockets. It simply wasn’t T.R.’s way. Instead they cut across a belt of subdivisions, variously hunkered down behind dikes or jacked up on stilts or abandoned and rotting. Boat-borne squatters seemed to have colonized some of the latter.