Termination Shock

The Bonking Heads retreated in disarray. The Fellowship advanced, reclaiming about a hundred meters of territory for India, but stopped and held their ground when other Chinese volunteer units began to converge. It might have gone badly for them then, but Indian crews, who’d seen this all happen from a distance, rushed forward to camp out along the new position of the Line of Actual Control.

PINA2BO

Rufus dug the silence of it. Oh, the sonic booms still crackled over the mountains every eight minutes. You had to get used to that. But the recovery was as peaceful as you could imagine. Suspended from their paragliders, the shells came gliding in over the Rio Grande. They didn’t cross the river until they were just a few hundred feet above the ground. By that point each was aiming for a specific net. There were four nets operational when Rufus first arrived, with four more getting their finishing touches. They were spaced up and down the length of a new road running along the top of a mesa that rose a few hundred feet above the river.

Each net was square, about half the size of a football field. It was suspended at each of its four corners from a steel pole that projected to a height of maybe fifty feet from a concrete footing in the ground. The setup couldn’t have been much simpler: At the top of each pole was a pulley with a steel cable running over it. One end of that cable was carabinered to a corner of the net. The other end ran down the pole to ground level where it disappeared into a winch. When all four cables were winched tight, the net stretched overhead like a roof, sagging a bit in the middle, but nowhere less than about thirty feet above the ground.

The empty shells coasted in from their sojourn in Mexican airspace, each vectored to a particular net. If the wind wasn’t blowing and you listened carefully, you might just be able to hear a faint flutter in the parasail, or singing in the shroud lines. When the shell sensed it was over the middle of the net it would actuate a mechanism that detached it from the parasail with a faintly audible mechanical snick, and it would drop, bounce once or twice, and come to rest at the bottom of a mesh funnel, so close to the ground you could almost touch it. The parasail would crumple and glide away on the wind like a puff of smoke. There was a team called sail chasers who would follow it across the mesa on ATVs until it came to earth, then wrestle it into a stuff sack. Meanwhile another team called net runners would unreel one or two of the winch lines, lowering the net. When the shell was on the ground, they would simply walk out, pushing a four-wheeled dolly, and pick it up. At this point in its duty cycle, after it had jettisoned its sabot, nose cone, and parasail, and burned its load of sulfur, the shell was light enough that a crew of two could lift it off the ground and deposit it on the dolly.

It took hours for these things to spiral down from the stratosphere. During that time the shell had cooled off and purged any lingering fumes of SO₂. The net runners would push the dolly over to a waiting trailer and hoist it into a cradle. Then they’d use the winches to reinstate the net. Downtime for a given net was rarely more than a few minutes. When a trailer got full of spent shells, a truck would drive up, hitch on, and tow it north to one of the installations that had been built along the arc road around Pina2bo. There each shell would be inspected and refurbished and sent empty to Pina2bo itself, where it would sit in the queue awaiting its next flight. Only at the last minute was the hot liquid sulfur piped into its tank.

Meanwhile a steady flow of parasail stuff sacks was accumulating in another trailer. When full, these were driven off the ranch and down the interstate to El Paso and across the bridge to Juarez, where they were unloaded in an air-conditioned maquiladora. Rufus hadn’t visited that place, but they’d showed him videos. Employees in white coveralls pulled out the crumpled parasails, spread them across huge clean tables, inspected them for scorpions, plucked out cactus spines, mended rips, and then carefully re-packed them so that they would deploy correctly the next time they were used. In due course they were trucked back to Flying S and installed in refurbished shells.