Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

Rufus therefore came around to the view that his employment on the ranch was likely to be terminated at any moment without warning or explanation, but that while he was waiting for the axe to fall he might as well try to make himself useful to the falconers, who seemed to have momentum within what might optimistically be called the organization of T.R. This meant dropping the pretense that he could actually do anything useful, security-wise, with drones, over and above what Black Hat was already doing. Thenceforth he put all his drone-related know-how to work in the service of the Special Project that accounted for Skippy, Nimrod, and Genghis being here: the idea—pioneered years ago by Piet, developed further by Thordis, and still getting a bit of side-eye from Carmelita and Tsolmon—that trained eagles could be used to defend against hostile drones. The Schiphol project had been shitcanned partly because of protests from animal rights activists. Such people were, to put it mildly, neither common nor welcome on the Flying S, or any other West Texas, ranch.

First, though, Rufus had to settle some misgivings that had been rumbling in the back of his mind since the moment on top of the mountain when Nimrod’s hood had been removed and he had realized that she was a golden, as opposed to a bald, eagle. At that instant this whole thing had suddenly turned into a family affair. For complicated reasons, he had to go back to Lawton and make sure he wasn’t burning any bridges by taking part in a weaponized eagle program. So he took a couple of days off, got into his truck, and drove five hundred miles east-northeast to the place where he had been born, and, up to the age of eighteen, raised.

There was the usual amount of driving down streets that he had known since boyhood, and thereby having random memories triggered. Lawton and the immense army base of Fort Sill were wrapped around each other like two wrestlers on a mat. Much of the town’s population were ex-, active, or future army. There were a few carefully delineated pockets of squalor, and the odd person who didn’t mow his lawn, but those only emphasized the place’s overall windswept tidiness.

It was a roomy place where all the development had long since gone over to modern commercial big-box strips. The only change since his childhood was that old signs had been ripped out and replaced with electronic ones on which managers could advertise the latest specials or job openings from the air-conditioned comfort of their offices. These provided a weird sort of digital peephole into their minds. A bakery was looking to hire a dependable baker. Two miles down the road, an auto parts store had a job opening for a dependable sales associate. Dependability was a major preoccupation of Lawton’s managerial class. Rufus could see people walking, bicycling, or skateboarding up and down the same streets who, it could be inferred, had failed the dependability test.

Young Rufus might have assumed that this drought of dependability was a problem peculiar to Lawton, had he not joined the army and become aware of the fact that it was a worldwide phenomenon. If you did happen to be one of those rare people blessed or cursed—take your pick—with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere. The world’s howling need for it would suck you into all kinds of situations that might look peachy if you had just fallen off the Lawton turnip truck but that, in the light of experience, probably needed to be vetted a little more carefully before saying yes. Which was part of why he was here. T.R. had checked the “dependable” box next to Rufus’s name. Rufus now had better keep his wits about him.

Despite carrying a tribal ID card, he had always refrained from calling himself a Comanche. It seemed presumptuous, and it put him at risk of being called a Pretendian, which was absolutely not a label you ever wanted to have slapped on you. And yet that branch of his family had always been more welcoming and, for lack of a more devious way of saying it, loving, in an unconditional way, than any of the others, whenever he came around to visit. Possibly because he didn’t come around that often.

He drove north out of town past the Comanche Reformed Church. This massive red-rock pile had always been there. It was where he had first heard names like Bildad and Peleg being read out from the pulpit. But recent developments in his life had made him aware that it had been founded by Dutch missionaries. So it was technically an offshoot of the Dutch Reformed Church, which in a roundabout way was the same church Saskia belonged to. He’d been to his share of christenings, weddings, and funerals in the place. But he had never been aware of its connection to the Netherlands, and certainly could never have imagined the whole Saskia thing, which as time went on seemed more and more like a dream or hallucination to him.