Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

She wondered if she was being set up here for a photo op. And to his credit, Fahd scented her misgivings. “This would not, in any way, be a public visit,” he hastened to add. “On the contrary. Publicity would be counterproductive. Fortunately, we control the airspace.”

On that promise, Princess Frederika allowed as how she might consider a spontaneous shakedown cruise to the Line the next day, provided she could then fly back and be reunited with her good old Beaver. The prince took this as an unconditional yes and nodded. “Everything will be made ready,” he announced. “Departure will of course be at your convenience, but might I be so forward as to propose wheels up by nine in the morning?”

He was a hard man to say no to. He knew what he wanted, he was used to getting it, and his politeness was as a veil of finest silk draped over a brick. Thus did Saskia find herself suddenly obliged not only to accept the gift of the airplane but to sit in the co-pilot’s seat the next morning as Ervin flew it to the Line.

On the contrary. Publicity would be counterproductive.

Saskia ought to have been paying attention to the advanced controls and unusual features of the hydrogen-powered plane. Ervin was keen to show her these, on the assumption that one day she’d be piloting it herself. And she did manage to show a polite level of interest, but only by dint of a lifetime’s royal experience pretending to pay attention to things for the sake of other people’s feelings. She got the sense that Ervin was frustrated, or at least a bit nonplussed, by her tendency to drift off into long silences as she pondered the prince’s words.

Fahd wanted to show her something connected with the Line, something that must be climate-related but that was meant to be kept under wraps.

And there had been that stinger at the end: “we control the airspace,” with the emphasis on “we.” Kind of an obvious statement. Of course Saudi Arabia controlled Saudi Arabian airspace. Why bother even pointing it out?

Because he was emphasizing a contrast between the Saudis, and someone else who didn’t control the airspace. Probably T.R. Who had designed his whole system to punch bullets straight up through airspace he didn’t legally control. If you wanted to do what T.R. was doing, and you didn’t have to worry about the FAA shutting you down, what would you come up with in place of giant guns?

From the plane’s cruising altitude over the barren mountains of the Sinai, it was just barely possible to make out the two splayed prongs of the Red Sea curving along the horizon to right and left. The one to their right was the Gulf of Suez, visibly congested with shipping even from this distance, the air above it stained with their sooty exhaust. A good many of those huge container ships were, she knew, bound to or from Maasvlakte, the only port capable of accommodating them. The one to the left was the Gulf of Aqaba, running up the Sinai’s eastern shore, separating Egypt from Saudi Arabia along much of its length. It was less busy because it was a dead end. The Israelis and the Jordanians had footholds at its northern terminus and used it as a shipping outlet to the Red Sea and points east.

Just south of there, the Line was anchored to the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba on Saudi territory. From the waterfront it cut straight across the desert for more than a hundred miles. From the looks of it, the spine of the city—a pair of tunnels that ran its whole length, whisking people and cargo from one end to the other in high-speed maglev trains—was largely complete. Along most of its length it was just a faint scar on the desert where they’d backfilled lifeless and bone-dry earth over the completed tunnels. The beginnings of train stations and settlements were tidily spaced along its length. The far eastern end of it, 170 kilometers away on the other side of some mountains, she only glimpsed. But in that glimpse she saw neat phalanxes of black rectangles marching across the desert: photovoltaic panels taking advantage of the kingdom’s virtually infinite supply of sun-battered land. Much easier to see, since the airport lay near the Line’s western end, were the port facilities. There were two Chinese ships unloading and another waiting its turn out in the gulf, spewing a plume of soot into the languid, sunny air. In contrast to the ships at Rotterdam, which were a colorful, random mosaic of differently logotyped containers, these were virtually monochromatic. All the containers, with a few exceptions, were yellow, with a green logo. They were all, she could guess, carrying photovoltaic panels or related equipment from the same supplier, and they were all destined for the blank space on the map at the opposite end of the Line.

The plane landed itself adroitly. The weird ducted engines could vector their thrust, and so it didn’t need a lot of runway, especially when the hydrogen tanks were nearly drained. Formalities on the ground were nonexistent. That was only in part because she was a royal being greeted on the tarmac by a prince. The Line was supposed to have some kind of transnational status, free of the visa requirements and so on that made travel to the rest of Saudi Arabia burdensome.