Sabot catchers and cone hunters were two other categories of employee. Their jobs were similar in some ways, different in others. The sabot enclosed the base of the shell during its passage up the gun barrel and fell off immediately afterward. It was made of some foamy ceramic, heat-resistant but lightweight and reasonably hardy. Most of them tumbled to the ground within a couple of hundred meters of the gun. Much of that area was under suspended nets with ribbons of fabric woven through them, which performed multiple roles: casting shade, providing some privacy, stopping any unwelcome low-flying drones. And, of course, catching sabots. As such, much of the sabot catchers’ work had to do with those nets. If wind was steady, the sabots all fell in the same general area. As a rule the sabot catchers never ranged as much as half a mile from the gun.
The nose cones were jettisoned at much higher altitude. Depending on wind, they could land practically anywhere on the ranch. Many were simply lost. Supposedly they were biodegradable, though in the Chihuahuan Desert there wasn’t a whole lot of bio to do the degrading. They sent out radio pings until the batteries died. Their bright orange color made it easy to see them from drones, and some of the propellerheads at White Label had ginned up a machine-learning program that could scan through aerial images and identify possible strays. That information was piped through to HUDs in the cone hunters’ earthsuits, to make their work more efficient.
On the nominal firing cadence of one shell every seven and a half minutes, Pina2bo launched 192 shells a day, and so that was the number of nose cones that, on average, fell to earth every twenty-four hours. Most of the cone hunters were Mexican American and many had worked in agricultural settings where they would be paid by the number of apples picked or heads of cauliflower harvested. Gunning ATVs across the desert “harvesting” strewn nose cones was in some ways similar, though both more fun and more dangerous. The best of them, working in two-person teams, recovered twenty cones a day, though that number was slowly trending upward as they learned the tricks of this new trade.
Rufus—who spent his first week on the ranch simply driving around and observing all this—had it in mind to sit down and spreadsheet it and figure out the size of the operation. At the mesa above the Rio Grande, typically they had two pairs of net runners, leapfrogging from net to net depending on where the next shell was coming in, and three pairs of sail chasers. One or two truck drivers seemed to be on call to ferry the loaded trailers and bring back empties. The sabot-catching could be handled by one person. Maybe eight pairs of cone hunters worked during the daylight hours. He had no idea how many chute packers worked in Juarez.
At Pina2bo proper there were the kinds of jobs typical of the oil business and of the chemical industry downstream of it. Unloading bulk sulfur from hopper cars and melting it was child’s play, mostly automated. Natural gas came in via pipeline from wells elsewhere on the ranch and was either shunted directly to the guns, or diverted to the cracking facility, where hydrogen gas—along with a concomitant amount of carbon black—was produced. This was a significant piece of infrastructure, but being a new facility it too was mostly automated, and controlled by engineers from the same bunker where they operated the gun. Likewise, the process of prepping the shells and slapping on the nose cone and sabot, mating it with the pre-packed parasail, running pre-launch checks on the electronics, filling it with hot sulfur, and putting it on the shell hoist—that was all done by robots. So one of the surprises for Rufus during these early days of wandering around and getting to know the operation was just how lightly staffed the actual gun complex was.
That—plus a few mission control types keeping an eye on things in Houston—was the operational side of Pina2bo. Everything else was classed as support. The ranch was so remote and the conditions so inhospitable that it might as well have been on Mars. So “support” had to include things like: Where could employees get food? How could they put gasoline or diesel in the tanks of their vehicles? What would they do if they had a medical problem? In that way it was different from an urban company where the city would just supply all that. It was, though, perfectly familiar to the oil business, where it was common for workers to live on offshore rigs or other remote installations for months at a time. So that stuff was all subbed out to companies that simply did that kind of thing. Roughly speaking, Rufus guessed that there was one support worker for every one on the operational side. With the exception, that is, of security, which was technically under Support but for various good reasons was a whole department unto itself.