Linksshifter II

Ultima Ratio Latronem

I drove my foot down and threw my arm up and over, bouncing the ball into the rough patch right in front of Paula's feet; three weeks out in this camp and that bit, right by the only place we could work the wickets into the ground, was coming apart, and I'd be able to get it past her. Nope – she read it from first to last, worked the bat back down flat with her foot planted behind the crease, and whacked the leather off it, with a crack that echoed around in the bush like someone'd fired off a leftover Buffalo device. The hell I could go field that; all I could do was turn around and watch it sail off into the scrub, a dusty red dot in the flat salt-white sky.

"Ball! Fido! Get the ball!" The drone hummed, its quad rotors picking up as it lifted off to go field for us. "Right, still not out – how many you want to count that for?"

I shrugged as I turned around. "Lost ball, three runs – not like I'm ever gonna catch up to you." The phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out; Paula was checking hers to see where Fido was, make sure it didn't get lost. "Message from Missile Park Base; the train should be coming through real quick, we need to get people's crap off the road and set up for a fire test in about three hours." I looked up; Fido was coming back with the ball in one of its undercarriage manips. "The train's going to be coming right by here, so we should be taking a break, even with all that." I pulled my bandanna up over the bottom of my face.

Paula nodded, and swung her bat over her shoulder. "All right, then; we'll pick up next break, Team Penrith still nil, Team Sturt 423 still not out." She held her hand out as Fido hovered at shoulder height, dropping the ball into her palm. "Come on, Nick, we've got to get Fido inside at least, and get the road screens up on the solar array." I nodded, and followed her off our makeshift pitch, past the field test truck and towards the main compound. Something started to vibrate by my leg, and I pulled out my phone to check again, but it was dead black, no calls or messages. The vibration kept coming, and it was only then that I heard the engines.

"Fido! Back! Mark sub two eight point four nine seven, one three zero point seven eight seven! Fifteen meters!" Fido jumped like the drone was actually startled by Paula yelling at it, zipping off up to the altitude she told it to get to and towards the reserve coordinates she'd given, and I jumped to dash ahead of her to the cranks and switches for the dust screens. We didn't need to jump, though, because by the time we'd finished locking everything down, closing the shutters that shielded the solar array on top of the base containers from the dust of the road, the trucks still hadn't come up, just the sky-crushing sound of too many too-big diesels pounding too hard. I adjusted my bandanna and stood on the head of the stairs to the control bunker, watching the road.

It wasn't more than a minute before they got up, shrouded in a pillar of dust – I put up a hand to cover my eyes against the rolling sandstorm. One, two, three – if that was all there was, because triple and quadruple trailers rigged, rolling line astern through the desert like it's a stunt train at a festival in one of the mining towns out west, it's hard to tell where one road train stops and the next starts. They were heading north – north into our back end of the Woomera range to turn those containers into a target. A target for the laser Paula was here to build, the one I was here to keep powered. The trains plunged on, the sound of the engines roaring through the bush, but the dust storm clearing and blowing past; I took my bandana down and turned to open the door in to the bunker.

Inside, it took a minute to adjust – as hot and bright as it was out in the desert, it was cool and dark in here, the chill of the heavy-duty cooling units keeping Samira's telemetry rigs from melting down prickling on my skin like the sweat was freezing there, the blue light from the monitors reflecting weird off Branko's glasses as he checked over the diagnostics on the solar panels, the heavy-duty tower of molten salt way out back that Paula'd told Fido to go sit on, and the cables and interconnects that kept the power going from all of that to the room in here, and to the laser on the dome over on the next bunker. I shivered, and Mikey noticed, pushing up his mic so he wouldn't snigger into the commo channel.