Termination Shock

“Where Lennert and Johan went?”

“Different complex, different part of town.” Alastair removed his glasses, folded them, tucked them into a case, pocketed that, excused himself, and threw up over the side of the boat. “The heat doesn’t agree with me,” he explained, his chin quivering.

Rufus throttled the motor down. “Jump in the river and cool you off,” he said, somewhere between a suggestion and a command. “I’m a keep an eye on you. You’re the canary.”

Saskia looked at Rufus curiously, and he noticed it. “In the army,” he said, “you leading a platoon somewhere that’s cold, you pick a skinny Southern boy, a brother maybe, and when he’s cold, you stop for a spell and warm up. Some place hot, you pick someone like him—what kinda accent is that, sir?”

“Scottish,” Alastair said and spat bile into the river.

“It ain’t hot where you from.”

Alastair shook his head.

“You are the canary. You start throwing up, we look for ways to chill.” Rufus nodded at Saskia and Fenna. “You two splash a little river water on those garments. Be good for a while.” He nodded at Alastair. “Take a swim, sir.” He appraised Amelia. “Where you from, ma’am?”

“Suriname. It’s hot there.”

Rufus had been surveying Amelia’s face, maybe trying to piece together a racial profile, perhaps taking note of the broken nose and the slightly thickened ear on one side. His eyes strayed downward. Saskia clenched her teeth, thinking he was going to check out Amelia’s boobs. But he was looking at her deltoids.

“Grappler?”

Amelia gave a slight nod. “Judoka.”

“Brazilian?”

“Olympic.”

“Military?”

Amelia nodded. That seemed good enough for Rufus. “Take care of yourself, ma’am. We’ll talk later.”

Conveniently, Alastair wore boxers. Rufus ended up towing him languidly past the immense football stadium on a rope attached to the RHIB’s stern.

In the corner of her eye Saskia could now sense Rufus giving her a look that said, What’s it going to be, Your Majesty? He did not strike her as impatient or restive, just curious and . . . available. It was the first moment since the crash when she’d not simply been reacting to events.

“This is not such a bad situation overall, yes?” she said. She said it in Dutch, which meant that she was only saying it to Amelia and Fenna.

Both of them laughed in her face.

Saskia now perceived the humor but felt a need to patiently explain. “No one died. No one identified us. Lennert and Johan are getting the best care they can. We are here on this boat with this man who seems helpful.”

Amelia thought it over and shrugged. “With Lennert gone, I’m in charge of keeping you safe. This is not what we expected. For the moment, this is no more dangerous than any other random place in America. But we are not supposed to be in a random place in America. We are supposed to be at T.R. McHooligan’s guesthouse in Houston.”

“You should get in the habit of calling him Dr. Schmidt,” Saskia pointed out.

“Yes, mevrouw.”

“Would that really be safer, though?” Saskia asked. “Houston is about to be hit by a hurricane. Then it will flood.”

Amelia considered it and checked the screen of her watch, which was showing a little weather map.

“What do y’all want to do?” Rufus inquired.

“Eventually we have to meet someone in Houston.”

“Y’all’re gonna have to kill two or three days then. Hurricane’s coming. Can’t go in there now.”

“What do you suggest? Where is a good place to ‘kill’ two or three days?”

“You could do worse than Beau Boskey’s pontoon boat.”

 

Of course that was what a man such as Rufus would suggest given that that was what he had access to and was used to. But try as they might, Saskia and Amelia couldn’t find any reason why it was a bad idea.

Above all, they had to sleep. This was a biological reality. They could backtrack up the river, beach the RHIB at the suspension bridge, run across the street, and check in at the Hilton. But Willem was at the hospital at the other end of town with the documents and the cash. There would be a lot of details having to do with passports, payment, and so on that would be sticky given the way they had just entered the country. There would be surveillance cameras. Not that the secret police were, as a general practice, staking out the lobby of the Waco Hilton for stray European royalty. But you could never tell where those things were networked and what humans or AIs might licitly or illicitly have access to their feeds. And from the looks of things she was pretty sure that once they put another kilometer of Brazos behind them, there were not a lot of cameras.

They had entered the country illegally, yes. But there was nothing they could do about that now. Getting all that sorted in Houston—a vast international metropolis—in a couple of days would be just as good as, and maybe better than, doubling back into Waco and trying to track down the relevant officials—assuming there even were any in Waco—to stamp their passports.