Termination Shock

“Your story about Daddy blowing the carbon out of the cylinders, blasting down some Texas highway in the Cadillac, made it all sound very amusing for the kids in the back and the man behind the wheel. But all you said of your mother was that she hated it. I won’t be her.”

“Point taken,” T.R. said. “You won’t be.”

QUEEN OF THE NETHERWORLD

Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia’s new plane didn’t fly as high as the old one. The stratosphere was out of reach for her now; it was a realm where other people carried out wild schemes to change the climate, but not a place she would go. So the journey from Houston back to the Flying S Ranch took a little longer than doing it in a bizjet. But if she was going to take this Queen of Netherworld thing seriously she couldn’t keep doing things the old way. And it gave her that much more time to get acquainted with Mohinder. She’d met him briefly last year, when she and the other guests had lunched on brisket at his T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center. But they hadn’t really talked, of course. So during the flight now across the endless rangeland of West Texas he was able to acquaint her with some of his people’s traditions around funerals and mourning. And she was able to explain some of the practical challenges to him.

The case on Laks’s back, she explained, turned out to contain a small cylinder of Cobalt-60 dust wrapped around an explosive charge. Just enough to have rendered the Pina2bo gun unusable, if everything had gone according to plan. T.R. would have been forced to fill the hole with concrete. Instead of which, a small area on the surface, near the head frame, had been contaminated and would have to be buried and capped before anyone could go near the place.

Unfortunately Laks’s body was in the middle of it, and there was no way to stop buzzards and other scavengers from getting to it. Out of respect for the dead, and to prevent animals from spreading the contamination, the army had already covered the site in the only material that was near to hand in sufficient quantity: sulfur. Gravel and concrete were en route to finish the job.

By the time they were lining up the approach to the airstrip at the Flying S Ranch, Saskia had sat in the co-pilot’s seat during a dozen landings. Like a lot of modern planes, the thing practically flew itself. Ervin felt comfortable having her at the controls during the landing. He could take over at a moment’s notice. Or just let the thing land itself on Flying S’s long, dry, and swine-free runway.

> Down safe. Go to bed!

> Good luck and good night Mama

> Same to you, Your Majesty

> LOL

Their approach had swung well clear of the big gun. Part of that was just the usual precautions taken by pilots who didn’t want to get punched out of the air by supersonic bullets full of molten sulfur. There were no bullets in the air today, but there were other reasons to stay clear of that area. Still, they’d been able to view it from a distance. A lake of yellow sulfur had begun to form near the head frame, marking the extent of the contamination. Huge khaki-colored machines were moving around on tank treads. Those were the only impressions Saskia was able to take in, glancing out the side window during the preparation for landing.

The end of the airstrip closest to the terminal had become a little military hub. Several army planes and choppers were parked there instead of the usual lineup of bizjets. They’d stretched nets everywhere and set up defensive emplacements that Saskia recognized as being special transmitters that would supposedly knock drones out of the air by shooting out beams that would jam their electronics. And as a last line of defense, there were just a lot of soldiers cradling shotguns. But it was all precautionary; T.R.’s people, who had been feeding them status reports, were saying that no hostile drones had been sighted on the property since about noon yesterday, when the government of India had announced formal cessation of their Climate Peacekeeping action in the lawless, wartorn tribal region of West Texas.

She parked the plane where she was told to and thanked Ervin. He’d now have his hands full trying to figure out how to get a hydrogen truck through the military cordon. But she didn’t plan on going anywhere soon. She deployed the plane’s stairway and looked down the steps to see Amelia waiting for her.

Amelia raised her arms tentatively as if to inquire whether it would be altogether unprofessional for her to hug Her Royal Highness. Saskia came down off the last step and all but body-slammed her, knowing that she could take it. The hug was a long one. And by the time it was over, and they parted, so much had been said in that wordless clinch that Saskia felt no compunction about getting straight to business.

“You’ll remember Mr. Singh, from last year’s luncheon,” Saskia said.

Mohinder had paused at the top of the steps while Saskia and Amelia greeted each other, but now descended to shake hands and exchange pleasantries.