Termination Shock

“I’ve seen it before. And again at Vadan. Loud bullet-shooting things are not my area of interest!” She threw a wry look at Jules. He had the military man’s ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, and was taking advantage of it in the corner, sprawled out on a pile of luggage. “He’ll be thrilled though. As for me, I have a date with Amelia! We are going to get beers and burritos from the vending machines.”

“Sounds like a good time. Raise a glass for me.”

“Can is more like it. Do they have a golf cart or something to take you to the gun?”

“No, Jules and I are going to walk.”

“Walk!?”

“Yes. I haven’t walked more than a few strides in days and days, as you know.”

“You should have told me, the wind will—”

“There is very little wind, I checked. It will be windy tomorrow. But not now.”

“Maybe you should ride a horse! That would be so cool to see.”

“They don’t take them near the gun. It would be cruel. And anyway the last thing they need is horse shit all over.”

“It can’t be that pleasant for you either.”

“Every evening, during the shift change, the gun goes silent for an hour. It’s a chance for the system to do some kind of maintenance and recalibration or some such. The engineers inspect things. I don’t know all the details. Anyway, T.R. is going to be there for that and he said it was all right for me to ‘tag along,’ whatever that means.” Saskia checked her watch. “I need to get going. Jules! Let’s go!”

The young man could wake up as quickly as he could fall asleep. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, rolling up to his feet.

“Aren’t there snakes?”

“Yes, but there is also a paved road that we can walk on, where snakes will have no place to hide. Besides—look!” She stuck out one leg to draw attention to the fact that she was wearing cowboy boots. Scored half an hour ago from Bunkhouse’s self-serve swag kiosk. “I’d like to see the rattlesnake that could punch its fangs through these!”

“I wouldn’t.”

 

By the time those cowboy boots were striding down said paved road, the sun had set behind the mountains separating Pina2bo from the Rio Grande. Conditions would have been downright pleasant if not for the flash and boom of the gun. Through some peculiarity of how the sound waves propagated, standing near the gun itself—directly in the shell’s wake—wasn’t as bad as being off to the side.

Once or twice as she and Jules strolled along, Saskia turned back and let her gaze follow the serrated ridge of the mountains north and west, until it melted into the dark purple sky.

“What’s to see up there, ma’am?” Jules asked.

“Do you remember Rufus? Red?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Well, somewhere back thataway, unless I’ve got my directions mixed up, is a mountain made of marble. Tunneled into it is an old mine where he’s been living.”

She’d got occasional reports and a few pictures from Thordis and Piet. As far as she could make out, Rufus was gainfully employed there doing work he found interesting, which in a way was a big part of being happy. She wondered if he was happy, though, and if he thought of her from time to time.

She noticed that she was casting a shadow on the pavement ahead of her. This made no sense. The sun was down. The moon was off to her left, low above the mountainous spur that framed the other side of the valley. In other words, it was in the wrong place, and in any case not bright enough, to cast her shadow there. Someone must be shining a light on them from behind. But she hadn’t heard anyone approaching. A drone, perhaps? Maybe some nervous Black Hat had decided to shadow them and make sure they didn’t wander off into the desert to be eaten by pigs. Somewhat annoyed, she stopped walking and turned around. Jules was already doing likewise. The source of the light was blindingly obvious in a quite literal sense—she couldn’t look right at it. It was moving across the sky, shortening her shadow. Who flew drones with such powerful lights on them?

Because her gaze was averted, she noticed that the entire valley was lit up by this thing. It wasn’t just a narrow spotlight focused on her and Jules, but a floodlight somehow illuminating the mountain walls on both sides as well as the steel frameworks enclosing the gun barrels, the pipes and conduits converging on it, the big yellow sulfur pile nearby.

It really did blind her for an instant, and then all went dark. She was afraid her eyes had been damaged. But over the next minute or so, they adjusted to a world lit only by the moon and by the light lingering in the western sky. Most of the lights in the complex ahead of her had gone out. She turned around and saw that Bunkhouse was completely dark. She took out her phone, thinking to use its flashlight feature. It was dead.

“I’ll be darned” was all Jules could say. “Meteor?”

“It looked like one of those meteors that burns up before it hits the ground,” Saskia said, “but that wouldn’t explain why the power’s out. Why my phone is dead.”

Jules checked his phone and found the same.