“Welcome! We made it!” T.R. announced, and then paused for a brief round of polite applause. “You’ll notice a distinct lack of luxury accommodations. Or accommodation of any sort, really. That’s what this train is for! Not just to get y’all here, but to keep y’all comfy during your stay! For your staff, there’s plenty of space in yonder bunkhouse.” T.R. waved toward the village of mobile homes. “You are of course free to get out and walk around. Look for the individuals in the white cowboy hats! They are the good guys! And gals! You should know as much from the movies! They are here to help you and keep you safe from rattlesnakes, dehydration, hyperthermia, hypothermia, and other unique and special hazards of the Chihuahuan Desert.” Saskia looked around and noticed that several of the event staff had indeed put on white cowboy hats.
“Brown hats are ranch staff—also very helpful,” T.R. continued. “The guys and gals in the black hats are also here to keep you safe, in another sense which is perhaps hinted at by the color of their headgear. They are bad dudes and dudettes. They will not be bad to y’all, of course, but they will be bad in your service and for your protection should any issue with trespassers of the two-legged sort arise. They are, as a rule, less approachable than the white hats or the brown hats. But you may certainly approach them if you need anything. Just don’t sneak up on them. They hate that.”
The Biggest Gun in the World was so big that it had its own elevator, shoehorned into a space between two of its barrels. The elevator could only accommodate three people in comfort. So T.R. did the tour in two shifts: first Sylvester and Michiel, and, an hour later, Bob and Saskia.
Only a few buildings on the whole site rose to more than a single story aboveground. The most prominent was the head frame: a term from the mining industry referring to the aboveground machinery that bestrode a mine shaft. It was maybe ten meters high and consisted largely of open steel framing through which large reels of cable, motors, and other lifting-and-hoisting sorts of gear were visible. Pipes and cables converged on it from other parts of the complex and plunged down into the shaft.
Of course you couldn’t dig a shaft without raking up the rock and dirt you were displacing. This material—“spoil”—had been distributed around the complex and used to buttress, or to completely bury, outlying facilities such as tanks, processing plants, and buildings that seemed to have a lot of expensive people in them (“command and control” in T.R.-speak). Without being terribly obvious about it, the designers had, in other words, hardened the site. Rufus, at a glance, had identified some of the spoil-piles as “revetments,” obliging Saskia to look up the word. It meant a sort of blast wall built around a potential target to protect from near misses by artillery. It didn’t take a military expert to know that a cruise missile could obliterate anything on the surface. But it seemed proof against small, furtive attacks such as bomb-bearing drones or mountaintop snipers. Large areas were screened by nets with strips of fabric woven through them. Their purpose wasn’t entirely clear to her, but they would definitely stop drones, provide much needed shade, and make things complicated for surveillance satellites.
Projecting straight up from the top of the head frame was a neat array of six tubes. Each of these was fattened at its top by a construct that Saskia could not help likening to the flash suppressor on the muzzle of a carbine.
A white-hat drove her and the lord mayor in a small ATV to the head frame’s ground-level entrance, where T.R. awaited them, sporting a huge ornate Flying S belt buckle. Looking up from this perspective it was evident that those six tubes were arranged in a radial pattern, like the barrels on a Gatling gun. They ran straight down into the mine shaft. Because the six barrels, at about one meter, were so much smaller in diameter than the shaft, which was big enough to swallow a small house, there was abundant space in between them for other stuff. The exact allocation of that space had obviously been the topic of much brain work among engineers. Through a kind of verbal osmosis, Saskia had picked up a new bit of technical jargon: “routed systems,” which was engineer-speak for long skinny things like pipes and wires that had to go from one place to another. The results of the lucubrations of the routed systems engineers were summarized in a cross-sectional diagram posted near the door: a big circle with the six smaller circles of the gun barrels evenly spaced around its periphery, and everything else a fractal jigsaw puzzle of advanced industrial cramming and jamming. But the biggest single rectangle in the whole diagram was the elevator shaft. Second biggest was a circle labeled “shell hoist.”
“Y’all do your homework?” T.R. asked, not the least bit seriously, as they got into the elevator. The outward-facing door was solid, but the walls were open steel mesh.
He was referring to a set of YouTube links he’d shared with them last night on the topic of how mine shafts were dug.
“I actually did click through,” Bob admitted. “I’ve a toddler-like weakness for construction equipment.”
Saskia shook her head. “I don’t.”
“Start at the top,” T.R. said. “Place charges. Blow shit up. Scoop out the spoil. Repeat. The whole rig for setting the charges and scooping up the spoil gets lowered into the shaft by this”—he slapped one of the steel members of the head frame—“as you go. That’s the point of this”—slap, slap—“to move stuff up and down. Line the walls with reinforced concrete a few feet at a time on your way down. Pretty simple really. Just got to keep at it.”
He pulled the elevator’s door shut behind them. The three of them fit into it without touching each other. Four would have been a crowd. “Anyone claustrophobic?” T.R. asked. This was merely a formal courtesy, as event planners had already asked Saskia (and presumably Bob) this question three times in the last twenty-four hours. Both she and Bob shook their heads. T.R. hit the “down” button, overhead machinery whined, and they began to descend. “We had a head start on digging this hole,” T.R. continued, “because of an old abandoned coal mine that was already here. But it was only four hundred feet deep, and not wide enough.”
“But you just had to use it anyway, I’ll wager,” Saskia said. “Because of the symbolism.”
T.R. nodded, but didn’t respond other than to get a slightly mischievous look on his face. Their surroundings were clearly observable through the lift’s steel mesh walls. The shaft became more and more crammed, as per the diagrams, during the first few meters’ descent, as various underground pipes, conduits, ducts, and cables sprouted through its walls and turned vertically downward. Past a certain point, though, it didn’t get any more crowded, because it couldn’t. Horizontal stripes and numbers had been painted on things so that you could tell you were moving. A panel on the lift’s wall gave the depth belowground in meters and showed their progress on a cutaway diagram.
“Not the world’s fastest elevator,” T.R. remarked. “Obviously, the device is not manned when it’s running. It is as automated as a zillion bucks’ worth of robotics can make it. So whisking people up and down was not a priority for us.”
“And if I understand the nature of your plan—” the lord mayor began to ask.
“Our plan, Bob. Our plan.”
“It will be running all the time. Nonstop.”
T.R. nodded. “The design spec is for it to run for two years with ninety percent uptime before it needs an overhaul.”
Bob furrowed his brow. “How do you overhaul something like this?”
“There’s always a way,” T.R. answered. “But the real answer is, you probably don’t. Just fill it up with dirt and build another one. Remember, in two years the world is gonna be a different place. A cooler place, for one thing.” He looked at Saskia. “I had my eye on some of your old coal mines for a while. Down in the southeastern corner of your country. Some nice deep shafts there. Saves some digging. Great symbolism. Decided against it though.”