Solstice

by David Hewson

  'Not to mention the fact,' Ruffin added, 'that we also happen to be the best-qualified people around for the job.'

  'Agreed, agreed,' Lieberman said. 'Look, I know when I'm beaten. I just want you to understand this isn't exact science. I'm making this up as I go along, so if you people see some holes in it, then holler.'

  The three heads nodded above their white uniforms and he knew that, at least, was going to happen.

  'The problem,' Lieberman continued, 'is simple. We need to turn Sundog off without touching her, and that, I have to tell you, isn't easy. I assume, Irwin, you still hold to the view there is no way we can get back into the control system directly and do something from earth?'

  'Not that I can see right now,' Schulz said on the link from La Finca. 'Charley has that tight in her hot little hand and isn't letting go.'

  'In that case, we really have only one option. We need to turn off the sun. We need to starve Sundog of what makes her work, wait for her to run down first into sleep, then into shutdown. Then, if I understand the system right, you guys can get your tool belts out and go to work on her.'

  Bill Ruffin smiled and said, 'Neat idea, Professor. How do you propose to do that? My information was that thing's burning brighter than ever right now.'

  'Shades. You just get out your sewing kit and start making some shades.'

  He'd stared at the model in the command centre for almost an hour trying to work it out beforehand, and still he couldn't spot a flaw in the idea. The part of Sundog he knew best, when he saw a physical representation of it, was almost exactly as he remembered. The satellite hung in space powered by four giant black solar panels on the sun-facing side, with most of the active gear pointed down toward earth. It looked like a huge metallic windmill slowly cartwheeling through the sky, and all you need do — all? — was work out the measure of the dance and move into two-step with it.

  'Sundog runs off four solar wings, each a hundred metres long and twenty wide. Now, you people don't need to worry about how much energy that generates or what kind of technology sits in those wings. All you need to know is this: It's big and fast and it's optimized to suck out every last jumping joule out of whatever sunlight falls upon it. And the other side of that equation is that it has no latency. If, for some reason, the light fails — and Sundog was predicated on the idea that this couldn't happen, of course — this little beast assumes it's got big internal problems and starts to turn itself off. So what we do, is this…'

  He pressed a button and the badly drawn graphic came up on the screen. 'Shades, four of them, a little oversized compared to the wings themselves, with a central hub so that they maintain the same ratio to each other as the wings. Your engineers can figure out the best way to pack all this into something you can get into the Shuttle. You need some kind of light-absorbing or — reflecting fabric and a means to erect all this in situ. I thought maybe some kind of gas system, like they use to inflate tents. Or poles, whatever.'

  Ruffin looked at the image on the screen and said, 'I get the idea. This is just like erecting some big kind of cover for the wings, except that we put them back from the panels and cast them in darkness.'

  'Precisely. So we get that in place, we manoeuvre it over the wings, we synchronize it with whatever movement there is — you can do that by hand. And we wait.'

  'Won't kill all the light,' Mary Gallagher said. 'There's bound to be some ambient illumination getting around.'

  Schulz chipped in, and Lieberman simply adored the enthusiasm in his voice. 'Doesn't matter. Like Michael said, this is a high-performance system. If it's getting anything less than fifty per cent of what it expects, it can't function properly, it goes straight into the sleep sequence. You can hold that frame a couple of metres off the wings themselves and it's still going to kill the thing. And quickly too. Maybe fifteen minutes to sleep. Another fifteen to shutdown.'

  Ruffin looked at Lieberman. 'Surely the wings on the satellite can angle themselves. They're supposed to tune to the best source of light they can find. As soon as we move the shades in place, they'll just start shifting Sundog around trying to dodge it, and that could make things real awkward for us.'

  'That's why you need the hub,' he said. 'If you tried to do this one shade at a time, that's precisely what would happen. You'd be chasing the thing all over the place, and the three other panels would continue to power it while it tries to improve the angle. Doing it my way, we assemble all four shades together out of sync with the wings, forty-five degrees around from their position. Then turn them into the blackout position all in one go when we're ready. Just like lining up a couple of kid's windmills. Sundog goes from perfect sun to near-total darkness in a second or so and there's nothing in her code that tells her this can be anything but some kind of system failure.'

  'Smart.' Ruffin nodded. 'Shame you can't be there to watch it.'

  'Yeah, thanks. Actually, I do want to watch it. Can you put cameras in or something?'

  'We can relay from Arcadia,' David Sampson said. 'And I can put out a floatcam to sit alongside you and feed back live video. If that doesn't trigger something, of course.'

  'No problem with radio or video,' Schulz confirmed. 'I just don't want you using any powered tools in the vicinity, and you're going to have to cut everything but the bare essentials on the Shuttle while you're close.'

  'Interesting…' Sampson said.

  Lieberman watched the three astronauts. Something was going on between them that they weren't about to share at large.

  'How much time will that give you? Drifting in like that?' he asked.

  'I need to work that out,' Sampson said. 'I can't match the exact trajectory of Sundog without using some power, of course, but if I come in slow I can get damn close. Provided we make sure we've got long lines out there to these two guys, we can reel them in nice and clean after maybe forty-five minutes or so, with some room to spare.'

  'That's enough for us,' Ruffin said, and Mary Gallagher nodded in agreement by his side. 'Let's take this part as read and let the engineers get on with the details. Once we have the system shut down, where do we go from there?'

  Schulz took over the graphics feed on the conference and zoomed in on the side of the satellite. 'There's an access panel here. We'll upload all of this so you have it with you, of course. You need an anti-torque driver to get in there, then a smart card and an access code. Once you're there, it's a simple shutdown sequence to take Sundog off-line altogether. And then we're done.'

  Lieberman waited for someone to say it. 'Not quite,' he added, when the line stayed silent for longer than he could bear. 'There's one massive solar storm going on up there right now, Irwin. Ordinarily you wouldn't dream of launching a Shuttle into all that crap.'

  'Our problem, Professor,' Ruffin said flatly. 'If worse comes to worst, we just burn some gas and move on over to the dark side. Nothing can touch us there.'

  'Maybe that would be a good idea anyway, after you're done,' Schulz said.

  'Yeah,' Ruffin agreed, and glanced at his watch. 'As soon as those guys have finished with their sewing, I want to be on our way. We've got a rough sector estimate for where that thing is up there, but it could take us a little while to find it, and when we do we have to come at it from the top, just so it doesn't get too grouchy. We need all the time we can get.'

  'Good luck,' Lieberman said, and suddenly felt foolish.

  'Hell, Professor.' Ruffin grinned. 'What's luck got to do with it?'

  CHAPTER 30

  In the Pentagon

  Washington, 1044 UTC

  The war room was up and running, and to Helen Wagner it felt deeply strange. This was a military location. They had senior representatives of the forces on tap, waiting silent and a little resentful in the wings. Tim Clarke was calling meetings when he felt like it, forcing the pace all along, taking a decisive control of the response. But the way the situation was shaping, it was the intelligence services and the team assembling around the Shuttle that seemed to be making the
running.

  Clarke, she guessed, knew this would happen, and picked the Pentagon bunker because it was neutral ground. There could be no range wars here. Your troops were too distant, sitting down the end of a video-conferencing line, to give you any comfort. There were safe areas, in Langley and at the Bureau, he could have chosen. But the Pentagon evened things out, and one of the side effects was that no one felt at home. Dave Barnside and Ben Levine sat side by side, looking gloomy. Dan Fogerty was opposite with a couple of Bureau people she didn't know. Lieberman was live from the peak, Schulz was on-line from La Finca. She sat next to Barnside, trying to feel part of that particular team.

  Clarke looked at the faces around the table, nodded at her, and said, 'Situation report, Miss Wagner. Where are we with the Shuttle?'

  'It looks optimistic, sir. We have a way to neutralize the satellite. Arcadia is in prelaunch sequence right now.'

  Lieberman raised a finger on the screen and began speaking. 'Basically-'

  'Spare me the details,' Clarke interrupted. 'I really don't have the time. How hot is it getting out there?'

  'We're doing okay, Mr President,' Lieberman said. The latest hourly projection sat on the giant screen on the wall opposite the conference table. 'I think the levels are pretty steady right now and they'll stay like that for three hours or so.'

  'Good. What's happening on the ground?' Clarke asked.

  'Minor telecommunications disruption,' Graeme Burnley said. 'Nothing we can't handle. We're getting some criticism for overreacting, to be honest, Mr President.'

  'Let them moan,' the President said. 'I'd rather overreact than underreact.'

  'And this hiatus is temporary, right, Michael?' Helen asked the image on the wall.

  He nodded. 'You bet. After this quiet period, my guess is that the spots will start to grow and join again and the effects of the storm will be correspondingly greater.'

  'Bigger than anything we've had before?' Burnley asked.

  'I'm an astronomer, not a fortune-teller. There's no way of knowing that. It's obvious that the radiation level is linked to the state of the sunspot activity, but it's not a straight-line relationship.'

  'Guess, mister,' Clarke said. 'This isn't an academic exercise.'

  Lieberman hesitated and took his eyes off the screen. Tim Clarke had a habit of staring at you until he got what he wanted. At least a video link gave you a break from the heat in his eyes. 'My guess, for what it's worth, is that it will be big, and continue to grow right up to the peak, which is a little over twenty-four hours away. By the zenith, this will be larger, more serious than anything ever recorded. Even without the toy Charley stole, we could be in trouble. This isn't just some passing heat wave. It has all manner of poisonous

  crap inside it. Add Charley into the equation and I just don't know. It could be radiation. It could be direct heat. We're dealing with a cocktail of solar particles that could turn up in any form they damn well feel like. The death ray from hell or just a very bad day on the beach. None of us knows, not even Charley. That's why we abandoned Sundog in the first place, remember. It was so damn unpredictable.'

  'A straight answer,' Clarke said. 'I appreciate that.'

  'So what do I tell these business guys who keep phoning me?' Graeme Burnley asked. They all stared at him.

  'Tell them to stay at home and watch TV,' Lieberman answered from the wall. 'For as long as it lasts. We're in the phony war stage now. It won't go on for long.'

  Clarke nodded. 'Let's hope the Shuttle idea works out, but it doesn't mean we let up on any other options. What about tracking down the Children?'

  Dan Fogerty cleared his throat and read from a piece of paper. 'It's slow, to be honest, Mr President. We've drawn a blank trying to trace any equipment-purchasing pattern that would match up with someone trying to set up their own transmission facility. Maybe they sourced this abroad. It's a possibility. But we do think they bought the wherewithal for a dome. We found a company outside San Diego specializing in geodesic structures. They say a bunch of people came to them two months ago with plans and specifications for the component parts for a unit that pretty nearly matches up with the Sundog model. Placed the order, paid cash, and collected a week later. The billing address is a phony, of course, and we're getting nowhere with an ID on the people at all. But the specs are too close to the Sundog model to be a coincidence. This is Gaia, all right.'

  'You're pouring men on that, I trust, Dan,' Clarke said. 'You're going to find where they went with that thing.'

  'Sure,' Fogerty said. 'It's happening. But there are a couple of points to remember. This is a kit. These people turned up with their own pair of trucks and took it away with them.

  They could transport it pretty much anywhere in the country and erect it on site.'

  'Not the sort of thing you'd miss,' Barnside said quietly, looking across the table. 'A forty-eight-foot dome.'

  'Not if it was in a built-up area, Dave,' Fogerty agreed. 'But think about it. They could site that almost anywhere the entire length of the Rockies, and who would know the difference? Remember that Aio that went missing a couple of years back? That took us two weeks to recover when it went down in the mountains, and it was one big pile of metal.'

  'So how do we track them down?' Clarke asked. 'They've got to be using this thing. What about the transmissions?'

  'We're flying AWACs over the less densely populated areas, sir,' Helen replied. 'But that's one big job, and I imagine they're being very careful about when they use the dome to transmit right now. Does that make sense, Irwin?'

  'Sure. If they've replicated the dome and the gear inside it, they don't need to stay on the line long. You could repro-gram the entire instruction set in under thirty seconds, and then switch off. I hate to tell you this, but unless we get real lucky, those AWACs are burning fuel for no good reason.'

  'Keep them there,' Clarke said. 'What about the dome we still own? You're sure that's secure?'

  'As sure as we can be, Mr President,' Barnside said firmly. 'We know what we're up against now. If she can break through this, she really can work miracles. We've put the men and resources in there, picked the place clean. And from what I understand, she doesn't have anything to throw at us from the sky.'

  'Not yet,' Lieberman interjected. 'I don't think you people quite get it yet. We don't know what this is going to be like when the spot activity gets hyper. We don't have the books to tell us. She could just turn that beam on us here and there'd be hell to pay one way or another.'

  'Maybe,' Clarke said, 'but there's no point worrying about things we don't understand or can't affect. Just make damn sure that place is as tight as you can get it. We lose that and we are in trouble.'

  'Sir,' Barnside said, scribbling on a pad.

  'This Vegas thing, Dan,' Clarke asked, 'is there anything in it?'

  Fogerty looked uncomfortable. 'Hard to tell, sir. A guy starts talking about the end of the world. Mentions the word "Sundog". Then kills himself. I mean: Why?'

  'Maybe he was trying to run away?' Helen said, knowing it didn't make sense.

  'Then why did he kill himself? Second thoughts?'

  She caught Lieberman's eye through the video link. 'Michael. Can you remember if Charley had some links with Vegas? Anything at all.'

  'She hated it,' he said. 'We went there once. For a Dylan concert at Caesar's, believe it or not. The concert was okay but the town — she loathed it. The tackiness. The venality. It's the last place on earth she'd choose to be.'

  'We need to ID this man,' Fogerty said, 'and we're working on that one. Newspapers. TV. Everything, not that we're handing out the real story. If we can prove some link, we may have a start.'

  'Assume there is a link, Dan,' Clarke said. 'What next?'

  'Big area, sir.' Fogerty grimaced. 'We can focus the AWACs, do some aerial reconnaissance.'

  'We can start doing that now, surely,' Helen said. 'I checked with our own imaging people. We have digital photography of every last square foot of this
country. We can set them working on that straightaway.'

  'Sure,' Fogerty said. 'But think of the scale of the task. Nevada, Utah, Arizona — it could be any of the three, and you're talking massive areas of bare rock there. Even if we knew what we're looking for, how long would it take to find it? Photo reconnaissance is a long-term exercise, not something you can pull up in an hour or two.'

  'We do know what we're looking for,' Schulz said from the screen. 'A dome. You've got these photos in digital form, right? I assume you have some kind of reconnaissance software that can search images on the basis of recognizable shapes.'

  'Sure,' Helen said. 'We developed it ourselves. Runways. Camouflaged buildings.'

  'Then set it up to look for a geodesic. Even if it's camouflaged you're going to get an outline.' Helen scribbled some notes on her pad. This was straight up Larry Wolfit's street. The room was quiet. They were all waiting for Clarke.

  'We're getting somewhere,' the President said. 'Maybe we can kill the satellite. Maybe we can take them. If we're in luck, we do both.'

  'Sir,' Helen replied, and looked at the faces around the room. There was some hope there, she thought. They were moving in on Gaia at last.

  CHAPTER 31

  Capital

  Yasgur's Farm, 1131 UTC

  'Martin never came back? We never heard from him again?'

  Joe Katayama shook his head. Charley Pascal smiled at him, the slow, strained smile he recognized as an expression of some real physical pain inside her. In the main room of the farmhouse, where the Children worked around the clock talking to the satellite, monitoring the wires, there was a slow buzz of excitement that was fast approaching anxiety.

  'Everything moves in its sphere,' Charley said as they sat alone at the edge of the room, watching the work go on. 'Everything has its purpose. We need to start moving people out, Joe. It's killing everyone to be glued to these screens. We need to start dispersing.'