“That makes sense,” Saskia said.
Rufus looked at Amelia. “Past that—as a military veteran, like you said—don’t look at the barbed-wire fence and say it’s nothing. Look at where it is. This is defense in depth. Maybe when we get where we’re going, they’ll let us go out in some ranch vehicles, some ATVs or four-wheel drives. That desert might look open and flat from out the window, but if you leave yonder road and try driving across it, you’ll learn real soon it is a barrier. Even walking is hard—every footstep requires you formulate a plan.”
Eshma nodded. “I’ve gone hiking in such terrain. It’s exhausting. Mentally exhausting,” she hastened to add. “The cognitive load of having to think about each step.” Eshma tapped her forehead.
Rufus processed that and nodded with the distracted air of a man who was soon going to look up “cognitive load” on the Internet and spend an hour clicking on links. “That’s why people who
knew this land used horses. The horse handles the cognitive load. You just tell it where to go and how fast.”
In case anyone had missed the entry to ranch property, event staff were now passing through the saloon handing out baseball caps, bandannas, and steel water bottles bearing the same winged S symbol they had seen on the gateposts. Only for a moment had Saskia assumed that this was the ancient name of the ranch. T.R. had rebranded the place. Literally rebranded, since the Flying S logo was a mark designed to be burned into the hide of a cow. The S was obviously Sulfur.
Eshma happily pulled on her baseball cap, first drawing her ponytail through the little opening in the back. The Cinderella of last night had reverted to the studious and efficient nerd girl. She was just socially awkward enough that she had walked up to their table a few minutes ago and sat down without so much as a “by your leave” and a complete absence of any of that “Your Majesty” nonsense. Saskia was pleased that she’d done so and made a mental note to ask her, later, about those computational climate models that seemed to be her stock-in-trade. She had gotten the impression from Alastair that risk analysts in the financial world were basically unable to do their jobs until they got numbers from people like Eshma. They viewed the Eshmas of the world as a cross between all-knowing supergeniuses and borderline charlatans reading the future from sheep guts. In any case, the respect with which he and Mark Furlong treated Eshma was conspicuous.
Amelia’s gaze was fixed on her new baseball cap, but she wasn’t really seeing it. She was still processing Rufus’s defense-in-depth argument. “You could snip the wires and drive through anywhere—” she began.
“At three miles an hour,” Rufus said, completing her sentence. “Might as well get out and walk. At least get you some exercise.”
“Some vehicles could go faster.”
“Tracked vehicles,” Rufus nodded. “Even they would break down. Fixing them used to be my job. But I don’t think ol’ T.R. is planning to stop an armored brigade. If it comes to that, it means his strategy failed on a whole other level.” He looked to Saskia as
he said that. One of those moments, which she wished she never had to put up with, when she abruptly stopped being an ordinary participant in the conversation and was reminded that she was a queen.
The train had dropped to a deliberate speed, perhaps fifty kilometers an hour, as it felt its way across the unbelievably vast ranch—one-quarter the size of the Netherlands—on tracks that had not been built to a modern standard. If Saskia was any judge of such things, the rails themselves were in good repair—T.R. had upgraded them—but the line itself had been laid out long ago with sharp turns and steep grades. Most of the grades were uphill. Her ears popped more than once. She already knew that their destination was more than a kilometer, but less than a mile, above sea level. Not high enough that you’d really notice the thin air, but enough to buy some small advantage for the project.
They passed an airstrip. Parked there were two bizjets, three single-engine prop planes, and a helicopter. Willem had already told her that a Dutch jet would be landing there later to take them home tomorrow. So that helped her fix her location on the map. They were going southwest, directly toward the Rio Grande. The range of mountains where T.R. had built his facility was the last watershed one would cross before descending into that river’s valley and reaching the U.S./Mexico border. The Flying S Ranch ran all the way to the river’s bank.
“That off to the right, in the distance, is the Sierra Diablo,” T.R. announced, apparently referring to some craggy mountains north of them that somehow managed to look even more forbidding than T.R.’s property. “Site of the last armed conflict between Texas Rangers and Apaches in 1881.”