Termination Shock

The guard had now recovered his wits to the point where he had put a plan together in his head. Not a great plan, but a plan. He took a couple of steps forward as if following the arrow, but then suddenly pivoted, dropping to one knee, and fired his shotgun at the closest drone—the one with the built-in gun. This shuddered back from the blast and skittered across the ground leaving a trail of shattered parts in its wake.

Immediately the green arrow disappeared. Or rather the cone of grainy green laser light shrank and collapsed inward until it was just scanning back and forth across the man’s eye sockets. “Fuck!” he shouted and bent his face downward. The back of his head was now just an incandescent blob of green laser light. Another gun drone hummed in from a different angle and fired a second round. The shotgun jerked and spun out of the man’s hands and came to rest on the ground out of his reach.

Holstered on the man’s hip was another gun—a semi-automatic pistol. Laks wondered if the drone would try to shoot that as well. But it seemed that such measures were not even necessary. The man raised his hands and laced his fingers together on the top of his head. The blinding blob of green light spread out and reconstituted itself as the arrow telling him where to go. He began to follow it; and it changed its shape in response to his movements and preceded him across the mesa as he walked back toward the compound.

“Abdul’s an Arab name!” Laks shouted after the man. But the man either didn’t hear, or chose to ignore it. En route his arrow met, and merged with, that of a colleague who was being marched along by a different squadron of drones.

 

The smell of danger abated in Laks’s nostrils, or, to be precise, whatever equipment the medics had inserted between his nostrils and his brain. It was replaced by the scent of smoke. He turned around. The ATV he’d noticed earlier had gained the top of the mesa and parked. Two men were getting out of it. One was smoking a pipe: the source of the smoke. The other, who had been driving, heaved a backpack out of the cargo storage area behind the seats, got one arm through a shoulder strap, and began to lug it along in Major Raju’s wake. For the pipe-smoking man was he.

“Sergeant Singh!” Raju hailed him. For as of a few weeks ago this was Laks’s correct designation within the Indian military. Purely a formality, he’d been assured—a requirement of paperwork and documentation that would only ever become relevant under certain highly improbable circumstances. “A salute is traditional,” Major Raju reminded him.

Laks had seen characters saluting in video games and tried to imitate them as best he could remember. “You see,” Major Raju said, returning the salute, “if we’re seen observing these niceties, it’s easier for you to claim you were only following orders.”

“Wouldn’t that shift responsibility to you?” Laks asked. Then, noting an expectant look on Major Raju’s face, he added “. . . sir.”

“I’ll be on the other side of the river,” Major Raju said. “Shame, really. One feels that a leader should . . . well . . . lead. Command his men from the front. Not be shouting at them from the rear. Alas, I have clear directions to the contrary, from officers of even higher rank, even farther from the action.” He put his pipe in his teeth and spent a few moments taking in the scene. “Oh, see there!” he mumbled. “One’s just coming in now.” He pulled the pipe from his teeth and used its stem to point up into the air.

A ghostly shape, like an albino bat the size of a 737, was gliding in from the other side of the river. A gracefully curved airfoil with shroud lines converging down to a bullet-shaped burden. It passed over one of the nets in perfect silence and dropped the bullet, which plummeted into the net. The airfoil crumpled and drifted into the night on a light breeze.

“A safe re-entry from a brief sojourn to the stratosphere,” Major Raju said. “You know what it was doing up there, Sergeant Singh?”

A second ATV had crested the lip of the mesa and pulled to a stop next to the first one. Two men had climbed out of it. They did not carry guns or any other sort of equipment, save for cameras mounted to the fronts of their helmets. During Laks’s exploits in the Himalayas, he’d gotten used to people like this following him around. They had elbowed Pippa out of the picture very early, which he still regretted. They had a curious style of moving around and looking at things that, as he now understood, was all about trying to find the best angle. And looking directly at them was to be discouraged. So he looked at Major Raju. Who had positioned himself with his back to the moon so that its light would fall on Laks’s face as they conversed.

If you could call this a conversation. Laks began to answer the question. “They were . . .”

“What were?” Major Raju broke in, like a schoolteacher trying to be of assistance to a slightly dull pupil.