Termination Shock

The driver of the semi—Laks’s companion of the last few days—got out of the truck’s cab and climbed down to the ground. He had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He walked back, favoring Laks with a quick nod, and climbed into the rear seat of the van.

The guy with the keychain had extracted a laptop from a compartment just inside the container’s door. He let himself down to the ground, then opened it up and used a fingerprint scanner to log on as he was carrying it back toward the van. He got into the passenger seat. The screen illuminated his face: Indian, neatly groomed, lean, mustache. He was gazing alertly out the windshield.

Laks startled as several rotors whirred up to speed. Half a dozen drones—the ones closest to the container doors—took to the air and hummed off into the night.

Revealed behind them was the largest single object in the container. This one was mounted on floor rails and sort of set back into a pocket of space surrounded entirely by the smaller devices.

The driver of the van, and another man who’d been riding in its back, stepped up on the truck’s rear bumper, reached in, and (to judge from sounds) undid some latches. Then they slid the big thing back until it was perched on the container’s threshold. Not a word had been spoken yet but Laks got the gist of what they were trying to do. He helped them lift the thing up, pull it free of the container, and set it down in the stretch of open ground behind the semi and in front of the van. It was awkward but not that heavy. Laks couldn’t make sense of it until the men began swinging parts of it around, unfolding it like a pocketknife. He then understood that the first end of it to emerge from the container had been a sort of hub, and the rest consisted of spokes that had been folded back for storage and shipment. When those were all rotated and snapped into position, the thing was revealed to be a six-rotor drone several meters across. Its central hub appeared to have ample space for batteries and other gear, but the largest part of it was a human-sized vacancy equipped with a seat and a safety harness. Resting on the seat was a beach-ball-sized mass of bubble wrap, strapped down with tape. Once this was unwrapped it proved to be a pair of goggles of a size to cover the whole upper half of his face. One of the guys handed this to Laks and looked at him expectantly. Maybe even a little bit impatiently. Laks, now beginning to struggle with his emotional state, but not wanting to ruin what showed every indication of being an extraordinarily expensive set of plans and preparations, tried to put it on, but had a bit of trouble getting the head strap to fit over his turban.

The other men were all Indians, but none was a Sikh. They were all boring holes through his skull with their eyes. Body language suggested that they were terrifically impatient for him to climb aboard the big drone. The guy with the laptop was just running the palm of his hand up and down over his face, as if windshield-wipering sweat. Challenging as it was for those guys, however, this turban-related delay gave Laks some time to review the events of the last few minutes and to ponder what might await him.

He could refuse. He could claim I didn’t sign up for . . . whatever is about to happen. But by the letter of the law, he actually had. He had, shortly before checking out of the hospital, or whatever it was, in Cyberabad, taken an oath and volunteered for a mission whose exact details were undisclosed. Which was almost always the case in the military, right? Soldiers didn’t know where they were going, what they’d be asked to do. Even the officers probably didn’t know until circumstances unfolded. Still, he had—very naively, as he now saw—kind of assumed it would be more like the fighting at the LAC. More of him deciding where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do next, and less of blindly following unexplained orders.