by David Hewson
'Microwave,' Bevan said. 'And don't worry, we're putting in a landline.'
'It's a start. Now tell me. If she hit your network right now, how long would it take you to get the thing back up?'
Mo shrugged. 'Ninety minutes. Two hours.'
'Can you cut that? I mean, I'm no geek, but can't you just unhook one of those workstations, make it into some emergency system, and then leave it by the network with the cable unplugged so that it stays free of anything she sends our way?'
'Yes.' She nodded. 'It's not the normal way-'
'Let's do it,' Schulz said, grinning. 'That's a great suggestion. And I want that on the peak too. Ellis will sort out the transportation.'
Lieberman blinked. 'Excuse me? We have something in the air out there that brought down Air Force One and you people are thinking of flying civilians around in one of those damn jumped-up dragonflies? Are you insane?'
'We can't do it all from here,' Schulz said. 'We have people up there already but no one with high-level system administration knowledge. It's okay. If it's a problem I'll go.'
'No way,' Bevan said firmly. 'You're needed here. This won't be a problem. It's just fifteen minutes up there, fifteen back. You'll be okay.'
'So why aren't you doing it, then?' Lieberman asked.
'Dumb question. Because I don't know how. And because I'm needed here too.'
Mo Sinclair stared at the notepad in front of her. She was really scared, he thought, and this was about more than just personal risk. She was scared for them all. And all because he had to open his big mouth. 'It's all right,' she said. 'I'll do it.'
'Lieberman,' Bevan said. 'You weren't happy with the visuals on the workstations here. You didn't think they were that good.'
'Sign of age. I never bought this virtual reality thing.'
'Up on the mountain we've got a twentieth-scale model of Sundog. Perfect in every detail. You think that might help?'
'It might.' He got the point and it was nice of Bevan to make it. 'Maybe I ought to take a look at this elusive dome anyway.'
Schulz scribbled some notes on his pad and passed them over the table. 'Some ideas of my own, Michael. I wondered whether we couldn't hang a power cable down onto the solar cell system. Short it or something.'
He stared at the doodles on the page. He'd run through the same idea himself and rejected it as unworkable. 'I really need to get into those control circuits, Irwin.'
'Not possible.'
'How long do I have on this?'
'The latest we can schedule the Shuttle launch is for 1500 UTC. I need you to come up with something over the next three hours. We're arranging a video briefing with the crew anyway. If you have any ideas, we need them. Either way, the launch happens, but if there's any special equipment you want along, we need to know then.'
'The crew? Volunteers, huh?'
Schulz nodded. 'Apparently they're queuing up at Canaveral for the privilege.'
Lieberman stared at his hands.
'You'll have something to give them, Michael,' Schulz added. 'I just know that.'
CHAPTER 28
The Red Mountain
La Finca, 1003 UTC
The pilot wasn't part of the military operation. He was, now that Lieberman thought about it, the same English guy who picked him up at the airport on the way in. Until you got close up and saw the wrinkles, he looked about twenty-five. No, correction, Lieberman thought, nineteen. He wore a T-shirt, faded jeans, and filthy trainers.
'You're all coming?' The pilot grinned. He had one of those odd estuarial accents that seemed, to Lieberman, to have become the Queen's English these last few years.
'You really know how to fly this thing?'
'No,' the pilot said. 'But I'm learning fast.'
Annie was crouched down by the machine, playing with something. It was a magnifying glass and she had it aimed right at something on the ground. A thin wisp of smoke was curling up toward her face.
'Hell, Annie,' Lieberman muttered. 'Burning bugs is wrong. Don't you know that?' He stuck the folder of papers he was carrying between the glass and the sun, watched the smoke disperse, and got an angry stare from down below.
"Wasn't a bug. Just some grass.'
'All the same, this place is like a tinderbox. The last thing we need is a fire.'
She glowered at him and mouthed the word B-O-R-I-N-G.
'Sorry. In spite of appearances, I am a grown-up.'
Annie looked at the pilot's right arm. It was thin but muscular, and a big blue tattoo sat on the skin. 'What's the tattoo?'
'Army helicopter corps. I used to ferry men in masks around Northern Ireland in the middle of the night, looking for other men in masks. Before I became a civilian, that is. You should hear my war stories sometime. They're good.'
'You look too young. What's your name?'
'Why, thank you. Bob Davis. What's yours?'
'Annie.'
Davis looked at Lieberman and Mo. 'Why don't you just stay here while we pop up the mountain, Annie? I mean, this isn't really a pleasure trip.'
'I've never been in a helicopter before.'
'Plenty of time for that later.'
'I've plenty of time for that now,' she said firmly.
'Right.'
'We stay together,' Mo said quietly.
Davis shrugged. 'Well, don't say I didn't try. Ladies in the back. Strap yourself in tightly. You, sir, are next to me. We'll have you up there in fifteen minutes flat, no problem. And today there is no sightseeing. I have my orders. We stay in the air for as short a time as possible. Okay?'
Lieberman hooked the videophone over his shoulder and wished Schulz hadn't been so insistent they carry it. The thing was like a small video camera on a leather sling and it was heavy. Then he climbed in, his heart sinking, and listened to the blades beginning to spin. Some rusty mechanism in his head was trying to shift gears.
'No need to be afraid of flying.' Davis grinned, looking at him. Lieberman tried to smile back. 'Now, crashing… that's a different matter,' the pilot continued. 'Crashing scares me shitless, to be frank.'
'Thank you, Bob,' Lieberman said, then turned round, blew a big kiss to Annie.
'What was that for?' she asked.
'Inspiration,' he said, and hit the mike. 'Irwin?' His stomach began to churn as the craft lifted off, seeming to struggle in the meagre, steaming air.
'You've got an idea,' said the voice in the headset. 'I can just tell.'
'Maybe. Now tell me. What if I don't cut off all the power. Only, say, eighty per cent or so. Would that be any good?'
'Fine by me. Once the thing is getting less than fifty per cent from the panels it goes to sleep for fifteen minutes. Then, if the power doesn't come back, it goes into suspend. When it's sleeping, it's still lethal — there's enough power there to bite you. When you reach suspend, the thing truly is harmless. We can climb all over, do whatever we like.'
'Sounds good.'
'So…?'
'So let me call you when I've looked at this model and given it some more thought.'
Lieberman turned to the pair in the back and shone a big grin on them. They looked mystified. The big broad sweep of the Mediterranean appeared to their right. The golden stone of La Finca and the dry, brown fields around it disappeared beneath them. The machine clawed its way into the meagre, hot air and even he had to be impressed by the majestic isolation that surrounded them. The mountains ran sheer to the sea on both sides of them, the tumbling rock too steep and arid for anything to live there except some gaunt scrub vegetation, the occasional wild goat, and, wheeling around close to the cliff edge, eyeing this distant mechanical bird, the odd soaring eagle. It was the same as they got higher. He kept expecting to see some corner revealed, some sign of human habitation brought into view by their fast-increasing altitude. None came. This line of primal rock was uninhabitable. Nothing but the wilder creatures of the earth could flourish on these bare sierra escarpments, and just to satisfy himself of the fact he wriggled until th
e phone was in front of him, pushed the on button, and looked at a blank screen.
The pilot laughed. 'Won't work here, mate. Blocked by the mountains. Unless you've got some line-of-sight chain — like they set up for the microwave back at the mansion — you're lucky to get a squeak out of anyone. Even air-traffic control until you get out of the top.'
'But I thought they said there were other aircraft around here,' Lieberman yelled. 'How the hell do you keep out of their way?'
' "F-16s active above and below you,"' Davis chanted in a bad American accent. 'Jesus, some of these people they've shipped in are dorks. Listen to me. They have short, stubby wings. And we've got rotors. We are different. Watch.' Without warning, the helicopter lurched upward and to the left, climbing at a dizzying pace toward the sheer rock face, now gleaming orange in the midday sun.
'No tricks,' yelled Lieberman. 'We got a kid on board.'
'Oh yeah,' Davis said, shot a glance at Annie, and saw how she was loving this. 'They said to come the fast way. And this is it.'
The craft skirted the flat, beetling face of the mountain, cut in close to the rock no more than ten feet away, then veered directly into the sierra, Lieberman thinking this really was the end, until the face opened out into a narrow, craggy col leading inland.
'Keep cool,' Davis said. 'I know this run like the back of my hand. If you look down, on the scar there, you can see some ruined shepherds' huts, maybe even a ruined house. Got to be a hundred years old at least. Some life they had then, eh?'
Lieberman stared down, saw the little piles of rock rushing beneath them, felt giddy trying to work out these different sensations of height. The rock escarpment could have been no more than fifty feet from the glass of the windshield. The long, dramatic descent behind, down to the deep blue waters of the sea, seemed to stretch forever, so far it would take years to fall into those crystal, limpid depths if this fragile mechanical apparatus dissolved around them.
'Hold tight,' Davis said, the words jerking them back from the window. Ahead was a flat rock face. It seemed impassable, and the helicopter was headed directly for it.
'Bob…' Lieberman said quietly.
'Shush,' the pilot answered, and ran the engine up several notches. They were moving forward quickly now, rising on a steady incline. And Lieberman knew, with everything that had stood for certainty in his life, they weren't going to make it. 'Bob!' he yelled, and wondered what you did when you found yourself in the air with a madman. You couldn't grab for the wheel in this flimsy hunk of metal. He hadn't the faintest idea how it came to stay in the air, let alone guide itself.
The craft was now less than thirty feet from the bare rock slope, and the distance was closing fast. Lieberman looked in the back and saw Mo and Annie silent there, eyes wide open, waiting, and tried to smile. Thinking to himself all the time: These Gaia people probably don't mind dying, not at all, and maybe don't mind taking someone with them.
Ten feet.
He looked at the pilot. No expression there. The ridge was coming up, and as they approached, above and to its right, he saw something new, something man-made, golden, and circular, emerging like an artificial planet cutting through the horizon.
Five.
You get too scared in these situations, Lieberman repeated inwardly. The dust was blowing up from the ground, billowing around them like a sandy cloud that stained the lower windows of the helicopter until, to his horror, it was impossible to see the rock below at all.
'Bob,' he said quietly, no other words alive in his head. Then, with all of them, he thought, rising in their seats to help the thing along the way, they were over. The helicopter cleared the ridge — how much to spare? He didn't even want to think — and he breathed deeply. Then, for the first time, he truly thought he was going to throw up.
The helicopter had almost come to a halt. They dangled over a sudden, blood-chilling drop of a good thousand feet down into a jumble of misshapen rock. To the right, towering above them, was the dome, like a giant honeyed golf ball attached to the landward side of the sierra peak.
'Almost there, folks,' Davis said quietly, and dropped the craft forward, tucked into the rock face, following the curving line of the bare cliff down toward a bluff that sat six hundred feet or so beneath the dome, large enough to accommodate what looked like a prefabricated white single-storey building and a small helipad. A scattering of tiny dark figures watched their approach, rifles in their hands.
'Welcome to Puig Roig,' the pilot said calmly. 'That's Mallorquin for the "red mountain". Now, we have some queer currents at this point, so just hold on, and don't be surprised if this isn't exactly the smoothest ride you've ever had in your life.'
With that, he twisted the helicopter around sideways and edged in a descending arc toward the helipad, curving it around at the last moment to land square in the centre of a big painted H. The dust was swirling around them as high as the doors. 'One minute. For the rotors,' he said. And stared at Lieberman, then at the pair in the back.
'Apologies,' he said. 'It's normally a touch more enjoyable than that. But they said to keep this as short as possible. So I came the way I normally use on my own.'
John Capstick was walking toward them, beaming. The pilot turned away, started to examine the landscape. Lieberman found it hard to look at anything but the dome, perched on the peak several hundred feet above them. By comparison the low, white command centre seemed puny.
'Beautiful day, beautiful day,' Capstick said, watching them get out of the helicopter. 'You'll be giving us a return time on that detail, of course.'
'We need two hours and forty-five minutes,' Lieberman replied.
'That's very precise.'
'Call me superstitious,' Lieberman replied, 'but I know when that big yellow thing in the sky is starting to get angry today, and I'd rather be on the ground down there when it does.'
'Good idea,' Capstick said. 'Noted. So what are you people here to do? And who the hell's looking after the kid?'
Annie glowered at him.
'She's with me,' Mo Sinclair said, not smiling. 'Check with Irwin if you like.'
'I will, I will.' Capstick smiled. 'Now, the pilot guy I know is staying with us until you folks want out again. So that leaves you.'
Lieberman couldn't take his eyes off the complex. 'Just the standard tour, a good look at the satellite mock-up and whatever it takes to get up to the dome. Plus I think we're supposed to have some video conference with a couple of spacemen. An economy lunchbox and a bottle of San Miguel will do.'
'No alcohol on site. I'll find someone from the admin team. This is all Greek to me.'
The pilot was smiling at Capstick with a knowing, impertinent expression.
'Can I help?' Capstick asked.
'You're happy with this, then?' the pilot said.
'You mean the security status?'
'Yeah.'
'I'm content. Yes.'
The pilot just looked at him. 'What's that on the hill over there? Those ruins?'
Capstick followed his line of sight. 'Old shepherd dwellings or something. Don't worry. We've checked them. We've checked every pile of stones you can see. They're all dead. No money in agriculture, huh?'
'I thought that. Until I took a closer look.'
'Really.'
'We're above the grass line here. What are the sheep supposed to eat? Rock?'
Capstick paused, thinking. 'They're old. Maybe they predate the climate change.'
Lieberman took an appreciative look at the pilot and said, 'Climate change doesn't happen that fast. How high are we?'
'Four and a half thousand feet.'
'You should think again,' Lieberman said.
'So. You two are the smart guys.' Capstick looked thoroughly pissed.
Lieberman shrugged.
'Maybe shepherds used to use machinery too,' the pilot said.
'What?'
'Take a look. There's rusted iron. And workings. At least I think that's what they are.'
'Wo
rkings?' Capstick nodded. 'I knew that.'
'Mines. The rock formation underneath the dome. If you want my opinion, someone's mined tin or something around here a long time ago. Probably mined this whole area. This ridge included.'
Capstick looked impassively at them. 'Interesting thought,' he said flatly.
CHAPTER 29
Canaveral
Puig Roig, 1012 UTC
'You mind me saying something?'
Bill Ruffin, the commander of the Space Shuttle Arcadia, had a broad, friendly, intelligent face, short, spiky red hair, and a wry, seen-it-all grin that seemed to fill the entire screen.
'Nope,' Lieberman mumbled.
'Can we cut the awe stuff out, please? I expect it when we do the school visits and that. But not now.'
'Right.' Lieberman detected something close to a ripple of laughter from Mo next to him in the big control room on the mountain. 'It's just that — '
'Yeah, yeah,' Ruffin said amicably, waving a giant hand that bobbed up and down on the wall monitor. 'You always wanted to be an astronaut. Join the queue. Next you'll be asking me how we get to do a dump up there.'
'Commander…'
'Professor…'
'Look. I get airsick in elevators. Nothing would get me where you're going. But do you really know what you're in for?'
Ruffin reached down, pushed a button, and the two other members of the Shuttle crew came up in windows beside him. 'In case you forgot, my name is Bill Ruffin. Four missions, two as a commander.'
He pointed to a stoic-looking, thickset black guy with a shining bald head. 'This is David Sampson. Three missions too. Best Shuttle pilot we got on the planet right now, present company included. And this…'
The third was a woman, dressed like the rest of them in standard NASA ground uniform. She wore close-cropped blonde hair and had a thin, intense, impatient face that kept looking at you as if to say: And then? 'Mary Gallagher. Four missions. Just as many EVAs. Do we know what we're in for? I guess not. But… hell, Mary, you tell the guy.'
The woman leaned into the camera and said, 'Professor, we put this damn thing there. If anyone gets the right to turn the off switch, it's us. Okay?'