Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

And yet the overall lines of the giant airplane were not at all rakish or science fictiony. It looked like a child’s model, scaled up. The wings, which were extraordinarily long, stuck straight out from the sides. Nothing was swept back, nothing optimized for amazing speed or maneuverability. It really looked like a sailplane—a glider. But it had engines.

A hard-hatted man with an East African look about him was waiting behind the wheel of a golf cart. Saskia was a bit sick of being whisked around from place to place in vehicles controlled by others. She was a pilot for a reason. In the Netherlands, in front of cameras, she’d have made a point of walking. But . . . when in Rome. After donning the inevitable pair of safety glasses, she and Fahd were treated to a slow pass down one side of the plane and up the other.

“If you were anyone else, I would give you a laborious explanation of what this is,” said Fahd, as the golf cart swung wide around the slender, exquisitely sculpted tip of one wing. “But since it’s you . . .”

“It’s modeled after a U-2 spy plane,” Saskia said. “Those, in turn, were modeled after gliders. It is designed to operate at extremely high altitudes—seventy or eighty thousand feet. The thin air makes it tricky to design and even trickier to fly. It’s probably not even stable unless there are computers in the control loop.”

“Very good,” said Fahd. “And the cargo?”

“The fuselage will be full of tanks, with baffles to control sloshing and weight distribution. The tanks will be full of sulfur dioxide when it takes off, empty when it lands. Because the whole purpose of it is to inject SO2 directly into the stratosphere.”

“Clearly my presence here as tour guide is superfluous!” said the prince, allowing his usual mask of stony dignity to be cracked open with a grin.

The compliment was appreciated, but she knew flattery when she heard it. People had been talking about making a plane like this for decades. She’d seen CGI renderings. Not of this exact plane, of course, but of ones very like it, in PowerPoints and videos envisioning how solar geoengineering might change the climate for better or worse. Depending on how you felt about the idea, you could soundtrack the animation with scary war drums or with soaring anthemic strains and make it seem like the end of the world or the dawn of a new era. In any case, she’d have to have been pretty ill-informed not to know this for exactly what it was.

“You had the airframe designed by . . . someone who knows what they’re doing,” she continued. “Composite wings made by people who do wind turbine blades. I recognize the engines—but you’ve had them modified for high altitude. The airframe is built, but that’s the easy part. Now the fancy systems are being integrated into it by contractors from around the world.” The coveralls worn by various teams were blazoned with corporate logos, most of which she’d seen before. But it was all pretty understated and you had to get up close to make them out. Americans, Germans, Israelis, Japanese were working on different subsystems, many using AR goggles to gesture at figments in the air.

“With all due respect to Dr. Schmidt,” Fahd said, “who really has accomplished something quite remarkable, we think that this is the future of solar geoengineering. The second wave, if you will. The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO2 into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .”

Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.”

Their loop around the plane ended at a cafeteria that had been set up in the corner of the hangar. Several rows of folding tables, a buffet line staffed by what she guessed were Filipino and Bangladeshi food service workers, the very latest in coffee-making robotics. “You must be famished,” Prince Fahd said, extending a hand to give her unnecessary help in alighting from the golf cart. She had to admit that a cup of coffee sounded good. Maybe a pastry. Lunchtime was over. So only a few workers were here, taking solo breaks or holding impromptu meetings. Saskia peeked over the shoulder of a man with close-cropped, sandy hair and a deeply tanned neck as he fluidly worked his way through the user interface of a coffee machine. By the time he had finished, she had an idea what to do, and without too much floundering was able to get away with a decent enough macchiato. She turned around and scanned the tables until she picked out Prince Fahd, who had chosen a seat conveniently far away from any other diners. He was scrolling messages on his phone. She sat down across from him and began to enjoy her coffee and her Danish. “A thousand apologies,” he mumbled, “something has come up, you know how it is.”