Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

He now perceived an opportunity to be of service. Actually wrangling eagles was not a thing that he was ever going to learn. It was a whole world of fussy veterinary procedures, weird social man/bird interaction, and messing around with small dead raw animals that did not appeal to him and that he never would have become good at. Even if he were to somehow master all those skills, the fact was that the eagles they actually had at the Marble Mine had all bonded with specific human beings who were not Rufus.

But if the goal of this Special Project was to reboot the canceled Schiphol Airport Eagle vs. Drone project, then there were ways he could be of service. First of all by building practice drones, the sole purpose of which was to be ripped out of the air by eagles, using rotors with pivoting blades that would be less likely to damage the feet of an attacking eagle. These would make it possible for the falconers to train their eagles safely.

In actual practice, though, it wouldn’t make sense to assume that the bad guys—whoever they might be—would be so considerate as to build eagle-friendly equipment. So the second part of Rufus’s work was to construct eagle gauntlets: lightweight, hard-shelled gloves, like those on a suit of medieval armor, that could be slipped over the birds’ feet and lower legs to take the impact from spinning drone rotors. Once those had brought the lightweight blades to a dead stop, the eagles’ talons could close in around the body of the drone, the three front toes raking it back so that the hallux—the huge talon on the bird’s “heel”—could close in, crushing and piercing the drone’s hull just like the rib cage of a hapless bunny.

In the era before 3D printers, inventing eagle gauntlets would have been difficult, but now it was easy. Better yet, it gave him an excuse to purchase a fancier 3D printer that was capable of making stronger, lighter parts. Rufus was gradually getting clued in to the fact that dudes like T.R. actually liked it when you spent money, provided you did it within reasonable bounds. It proved that you were doing something.

In other words, he dropped, or at least set to one side, the pretense that he was actually patrolling the airspace of the Flying S Ranch with a personal fleet of drones and threw himself full-time into helping Thordis, Carmelita, Tsolmon, and Piet train their eagles. In military parlance, they were the Blue Team, preparing to defend the ranch against possible invaders, and he was the Red Team—a simulated opponent that the Blue Team could train against. And since all of them called him by his nickname of Red, it all seemed to fit. It gave him a story he could tell himself, as he sat down there in the cool recesses of the marble mine repairing drones torn apart by enraged birds of prey, as to why this all made sense. A story he could also relate to T.R., if T.R. ever asked. But he never did.