Solstice

by David Hewson

  She watched the big shape of the main block loom up out of the darkness. 'Speaking of wolves…'

  Wolfit grinned. 'Please. If they could speak, they'd be offended. Wolves are highly social, team-oriented animals, with a strong sense of what we would call duty and loyalty. They wouldn't flourish here at all. Which is one more reason why I'm thinking of going.'

  And that would be a loss, she thought, one she would try to avoid. They needed people with Wolfit's qualities: intelligence and the ability to think outside the box. She'd copied everything they had on Sundog to him for his arrival and he was already up to speed on the situation. His insight was, she knew, going to be vital.

  The night was hot and airless. It made her catch her breath as they walked purposefully across the quadrant. The sky was clear, bright with stars, pregnant with some power Helen Wagner could only guess at. She had been racing to catch up on the subject of solar energy these past few hours and felt she had a reasonable brief under the circumstances. But there were so many holes in the subject, so many unfilled doubts, even for someone like Lieberman, who seemed to know it by heart. With the best will in the world, they had to guess their way through this one.

  Lights burned throughout the Langley complex but they were alone on the walk. These spaces between the component parts of the Agency could be huge, she thought. They turned into the old block, walked to Levine's first-floor office, entered, saw the acting director waiting there, Barnside next to him, and she wondered how Belinda would have handled this. Only one way: directly. This was, in some sense she did not understand, some kind of struggle, between her and this static, slow-moving traditionalism that Levine and Barnside personified. The difference was generational. Both men failed to realize that the ecosystem around them was changing, the threats were different, and the old, simple, forthright solutions didn't apply any more.

  She led Larry Wolfit into Levine's office, breathed in the smoke from his cigarettes, saw them seated at the table, watching her, uncomfortable, almost sullen. Then she sat down, looked at their faces, and said, 'How the hell did they get to know about that poor kid? Where did that come from?'

  Barnside sighed, a long low moan, reached for a can of Coke on the table, took a swig. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his face looked lined, older. 'Jesus, Helen. Do you have to be so predictable? No one said Ops was a safe ticket. We're not pushing keyboards. This was a field operation. Everyone knows the risks.'

  'Great. Now that that little speech is out of the way, can I have an answer? How the hell did they find out?'

  'She'd been out of touch with us for months,' Barnside said, shrugging his big shoulders. 'Something went wrong. The most likely explanation is that they tumbled to her some time ago and waited for the right moment. Maybe she was a bad choice. I wouldn't deny that. The point about these people is that they are from outside. We never put them through much formal training. That's what gives them their value — they don't wear the uniform.'

  Helen Wagner took a deep breath and knew that what Barnside said made sense. That didn't stop it from bugging her.

  'We got an inquest running on the girl,' Levine said. 'Nothing more to know about that at the moment. Let's talk about some broader issues. These Gaia crazies have got all this equipment in the sky. Like some kind of death ray from outer space, the way these Sundog people talk about it. Why did they do all this hacking to get into the Lone Wolf unit?'

  She nodded. 'It's an interesting question. They want to disable the dome — that's the unit that was developed to house the Sundog antennae and control equipment. We know Sundog can disrupt telecommunications and produce some pretty nasty physical side effects. It's got lots of gears. They could have thrown at Lone Wolf what they threw at us.' Helen was thinking on her feet. It didn't come naturally.

  'So why didn't they do that?' Barnside asked.

  Wolfit looked up from the papers. 'I spent a couple of hours going through the records of what happened during the Sundog trials. The reason the thing got abandoned was that it was so damn hard to control. It had all manner of attack media in there — laser, microwave, particle beam. You could create anything from a sea of white noise to a radio or network blackout. Even real damage on the ground — fire, high magnetic and radiation fields. What they threw at us was something designed to flex a muscle or two, I guess, and it happened to coincide with a peak in the sunspot cycle. Maybe that was lucky. I wouldn't want to rely on it for taking something out entirely, and clearly they wanted to do that with Lone Wolf.'

  Helen nodded. 'I agree. We didn't know how to control Sundog with any degree of accuracy and my guess is Charley doesn't either. And this just gets all the more unreliable as we swing up to the zenith. Even without the satellite we could expect some pretty visible effects on the earth in any case. If they can tap into that, then they probably could hope to bring a dome down, but not quite yet, not with any certainty anyway.'

  'Makes sense,' Levine said. 'So. Why did they do it?'

  'It may have been just a demonstration of their strength,' Helen responded. 'They threatened some signs that would persuade people to prepare when they put up the Web site. Maybe that was a sign. There's no way of knowing. They haven't even claimed responsibility yet.'

  'Or?' Levine asked.

  Helen grimaced. 'Or it's the start of an all-out war to remove our capability to talk to Sundog in any form. The Children clearly have their own facility somewhere. It would take money to build a replica of a dome, but the equipment is available on the open market and Charley sure knows how. I've got the FBI tracking through contractors to see who's been buying the right sort of installation. They want to take us through the zenith using their own dome, but they have to live with the possibility that we might regain control of the network. If they take out our three control centres, that's impossible. In fact…'

  She turned to the monitor and keyed in the La Finca address. After a few moments, Bevan's face came on screen. 'Is Irwin there?'

  'A moment.' She waited.

  'Hi,' Irwin Schulz said, looking exhausted.

  'We need to understand more. Let's say the Children somehow manage to take out the two remaining domes. Then they program the satellite to do its worst through whatever installation they have and destroy that. Is there any way we can get back on it?'

  Schulz licked his lips and said, 'Not from the ground.'

  'What if we start building a dome right now?' Levine asked. 'As a precaution?'

  'No time, sir,' Schulz answered. 'It takes a month or more to bed these systems in.'

  Levine stared at Barnside. 'Put some heavy-duty security teams on site in Kyoto and La Finca. And scour everything there, make sure there are no little surprises waiting for us already.'

  'Irwin,' Helen asked, 'you think it takes a month to get one of these things working? That's after you get all the equipment.'

  'Oh yeah. It's a real pain.'

  Levine looked at her. 'Well?'

  'Charley Pascal basically had a blueprint for an entire dome in her head, is that right, Irwin?'

  'Sure. She designed most of it.'

  'So if she wants to do this quickly, surely it makes sense to copy everything right down to the last nut and bolt?'

  'The telecom equipment's heavy-duty but standard.'

  'Maybe they built a dome too,' she said. 'Is that a possibility? Maybe they got the same kind of design just to make it easier. Could they do that, Irwin?'

  'I guess so. If you found the contractors.'

  Levine stared at her, cast a sideways glance at Barnside. 'Good work. We pass that over to the Bureau. There can't be that many people who can build one of those things.'

  'Irwin,' she added. 'Mail me the plans for the dome, and the names of the contractors you used.'

  'Sure.'

  'So what are we getting from your guys, Dave?' Levine asked.

  Barnside shrugged. 'You got the list. The President tied our hands a lot, you know. Insisting that this really was a Bureau job.'


  'Yeah. I heard. But no one knows for sure they're inside the US.'

  'I think,' said Helen, 'we have to assume that's a probability. We have no evidence that there is a foreign government in play here, and they surely would need that level of assistance to try to produce a dome abroad.'

  'And here you just go buy it from the catalogue. Wonderful,' Levine grumbled. 'It doesn't mean we sit on our hands and watch this game go by. The priority's clear. We have to take every step to ensure nothing happens to the two remaining domes. Talk to the military, the politicals. See if we can get air exclusion zones, whatever, put around these things. And sweep every last inch of them.'

  Barnside shook his head at Levine. 'We're not going to get an easy ride over any air exclusion requests. The President is taking this through the UN Security Council right now, they're in permanent session. He's not having an easy ride.'

  'So we're the bad guys,' Levine grunted. 'Again. What's new? Pile everything you've got into those places. I do not want a repeat of Lone Wolf. Understood?'

  They nodded. Levine gave her a baleful glance. 'I got a gut feeling Operations isn't going to get us out of this one, Wagner. The best they can do is keep the fire damped down. What about S&T?'

  'We have things to work on. The possibility of the dome. Also the appearance of the Web site. That has to use some conventional network and IP addressing system. There are ways of cloaking your location, but we have people looking at it.'

  Wolfit shook his head. 'I don't want to hold out unrealistic hopes, sir. These people know what they're doing. The idea they might leave a loophole that lets us find them through the Net has got to be a touch fanciful'

  'Yeah,' Levine said. 'But no one's perfect. You give us somewhere to search. It's a start. I got to see the National Security Council now. I got more briefings on the go than minutes in the day. Dave, you take the FBI liaison meeting in the morning. Communicate anything of moment in it to Wagner straightaway. You hear?'

  'Sir.' Barnside nodded.

  Levine watched her, and she couldn't work out what he was thinking. 'You think this Shuttle idea has got some mileage?' he asked in the end. 'It's a hell of a risk.'

  She didn't try to hide her doubts. 'We can probably get the thing up there in one piece. The problem is what we do then. Unless Lieberman can come up with something, it's pointless. We won't get anywhere near it.'

  'Twist his arm,' Barnside said.

  She thought about the deep, intelligent face she'd seen on the monitor. 'I don't think it works like that. He has to find his way there on his own.'

  'Scientists,' Levine complained. 'Worse than working with goddamn movie stars. Barnside's right. Twist his arm. Do whatever you can. Then try to get some sleep tonight, the pair of you. It may be the last we get for some time.'

  CHAPTER 22

  Nature, Rising

  Yasgur's Farm, 0432 UTC

  She watched the needle go into her arm, closed her eyes, let her head go back, and sighed. Joe Katayama looked into her face, checked the dilation of her pupils, then felt her pulse. The morphine dose kept getting stronger all the time. It had to be watched carefully. And there were times too when he had to say no. They needed her in full control. She understood the system better than anyone. Outside, in the control room, they had enough pure programming skill to run a small corporation. But Charley had the vision, and the breadth of knowledge too. She could turn her hand to hexadecimal one moment, and offer an expert interpretation of the data coming through the feed on the sunspot cycle the next. They couldn't function properly without her.

  She opened her eyes and understood the way he was looking at her. There'd been a time when the slow, warm comfort of sex had helped, but that was behind her now.

  'Joe,' she said, and reached forward, stroked the tanned, muscular strength of his forearm. 'No more.'

  She wore a white shift and lay on the large white bed, soaked in sweat from the heat that seemed to issue in waves from the white painted walls of the farmhouse. She had slept quickly, a deep, narcoleptic sleep, after Tina's death. When she awoke, she found Joe had curled up beside her and lay like a tight, foetal ball, looking so much younger, no cares, no fear in this place his sleeping being had found. She had watched his body, the way his chest moved slowly with each long, patient breath, and wondered at the space between them. Joe Katayama was ever-present in her life, she relied upon him for so many things, personal and physical, but practical too. Yet in some way she still felt he was a stranger.

  Awake now, he was his old self, watchful, waiting, always ready to obey. He didn't seem disappointed by her refusal. 'Whatever you say. You feel worse? Is there less feeling?'

  'It's partly that. But things move on, Joe. From now on I think we begin to leave the body behind. We start to get closer to the Mother. When we make love… it's like being back in the Garden, like Adam and Eve. But they were children, Joe. We're growing, changing. We need to focus on that.'

  'You're right,' he said flatly, and slipped off the bed, pulled on his jeans, began to dress. Charley shrugged on the loose clothes that were still lying at the edge of the bed, let him carry her to the wheelchair, comb her hair, then push the chair to the bathroom.

  Afterwards, she asked, 'How are they feeling?'

  Joe Katayama thought about the others. They were, effectively, in his care now. Charley's ability to control them through anything but the force of her will was slipping. This didn't worry him. They were loyal, faithful. Or, to put it differently, they didn't think much beyond the confines of the farmhouse. All they saw of the outside world was what appeared on the monitors in the room, and these images were so distant, so intangible. Reality began and ended at the door of Yasgur's Farm. This was their great strength. He shrugged. 'They'll be fine. It shocked some people. Billy Jo. Anthony. The weaker ones.'

  She smiled. 'You have to get rid of that way of thinking, Joe. Those days are over. It's not their fault they're shocked. We're all shocked. We all weep for Tina. And ourselves. But more than anything we weep for the earth. We're nothing next to her.'

  'I know,' he said. 'I kind of told them that. Besides…' He hesitated.

  'Besides what?'

  'Where could anyone go? We're here. We're safe. If anyone tried to leave until it's time, I'd know.'

  'You always think in terms of force,' she said, and wondered whether he resented the comment. 'It's not necessary any more, Joe. They won't do anything we don't tell them.'

  'Maybe not.'

  'It won't happen. They couldn't do it. And okay, if you like, you won't let it happen.'

  She pushed on the rails of the wheelchair. Joe opened the door into the control room. It had a low, active buzz about it, people hovering over computer monitors, watching newscasts, printing out papers, posting them on the whitewashed walls. There were fans scattered throughout the room, setting up a perpetual hum of motion, a flow of thin air that scattered papers, made your sweat feel cold on your brow. Maybe it was like this in a war, he thought.

  The constant movement stopped as she entered. The family gathered around her. She smiled at each of them, taking care to look into their eyes, seeing there a mix of emotions, fear and uncertainty, without doubt, but loyalty and commitment too. On her signal, they stopped work, came and gathered around her wheelchair, silent, waiting.

  'Tina would have betrayed us,' she said. 'She was placed here by those who wish to kill us. We had no choice. And it was finished quickly. Now we have to focus on why we were put here, why we were given this chance.'

  No one spoke.

  'Gunther?' Charley said. 'I thought someone might wake me. I gather Lone Wolf went according to plan.'

  'Sure.' Gunther had shoulder-length hair and a soft, formless face. He spoke with a marked German accent. 'We didn't want to disturb you unnecessarily. The dome's out, Charley. Here, we got running copy from the news wires.' He passed her some paper off the printer. She scanned through the words, smiling, then stopped when they mentioned the casualty.

 
'Charley?' one of the women asked. 'You okay?'

  'Sure. Someone was hurt?'

  'Yeah,' Gunther said. 'I read that. Some woman who worked there.'

  'I knew her. You see? This thing can take from us all. We all have our price to pay. It's what we must sacrifice for all these centuries of waste. Do any of you doubt that now? Can't you feel this motion inside you?'

  She closed her eyes and rocked slowly, backward and forward in her chair, to some unheard rhythm, her stricken body moving with such conviction a couple of them in the room started to copy the motion.

  'What do you feel, Charley?' Joe asked, watching them, not her.

  'I feel the sun and the moon and the stars. I feel the earth stirring. I feel nature on the rise. Humanity in its proper sphere.' She stopped suddenly, opened her eyes, stared at them, incredulous. 'Don't you feel it too?'

  'Sure,' said Joe.

  'I feel it,' Gunther said. 'Whenever you're around, I feel it, Charley. So strong. Moving.'

  'Me too,' someone else echoed.

  'It's only natural,' Charley said, 'you should have doubts. We're fighting a war now. We're fighting for the Mother. It scares us. And soon we'll begin to leave this place, wait for what comes next. This is only the beginning. The fire and the chaos wipe this slate clean. Afterwards we need voices that can be heard, when the TV and the newspapers aren't there to spread their lies. When people discover they can look into their hearts again and find what's there.'

  'We've got to go anyway,' Joe said, looking at them. 'They'll find us, one way or another. We have to separate. For good.'

  'But…' Billy Jo stood by one of the screens, mouth half-open, looking lost, Charley thought. 'What do we do, Charley? What happens afterwards?'

  'We get a second chance. The earth, Gaia, gives us that. Don't expect miracles, Billy Jo. They'll get their TV sets back, probably sooner than you might think. They'll bring in their newspapers and their police. But all that doesn't matter. We're going to open a hole in the sky, one so big that people will be able to see what we see. After that nothing will be the same again.'