Solstice

by David Hewson

  He peered into her lean, tanned face, no emotion on the surface there, some kind of brittle hardness, like an eggshell, between her and the world.

  'They're coming,' the pilot said. Across the main road a jeep was kicking up dust.

  Lieberman closed his eyes and shivered, trying to let these churning, feverish thoughts subside into something he could handle. Something scratched at his attention. It was the videophone coming suddenly to life, the small flat screen filling with a picture that seemed so familiar: the distant white gantry of the launch pad, the Shuttle there, hooked to the back of the booster rocket like a limpet trying to hitch a ride to the sun. But this Shuttle looked different. Bigger, like the old one on steroids. He recalled what he'd heard about the altitude requirements. Someone had strapped the mother of all engines on the side of this beast and now it was ready to blow. Smoke was billowing out from the base of this giant machine. Lieberman was trying to remember what Schulz had said about the envelope, how long it would take this vast hunk of metal, and the three small human beings inside it, to escape the gravity of the earth, to move beyond the point where Sundog and Charley could peer down from space, run out a thin, poisonous finger of power, and turn them into fiery atoms.

  Mo got up from the table, walked behind his back, put a soft hand on his shoulder, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. Davis shuffled his chair around, watched the drama begin. It sounded like a video game through the tinny speaker of the little phone. There was no hint of the vast mountain of energy that sat beneath these three, distant human beings. Then the Shuttle began to move, the camera following it, rising into the blue Florida sky, incandescent white beneath the power of the sun.

  'Fly, damn you, fly,' Lieberman whispered.

  And it did. For some period of time none of them could assess, the white shape rose in the sky, discarding the booster, rolling on course, pushing in a quickening vertical drive, getting smaller, heading for orbit. Heading for the game.

  The screen went black for a moment, then Schulz was back, grinning with a wide-eyed ferocity. 'You got that?'

  Lieberman nodded, and felt the way Mo was hugging him.

  'We're moving, Michael,' Schulz said. 'We can win this.'

  'Yeah,' Lieberman said, and wondered how stupid his own grin looked.

  CHAPTER 36

  Flying West

  Airborne, northwest of Las Vegas, 1724 UTC

  Clear desert, in every direction. Helen Wagner watched the empty plains roll beneath her and wondered why she couldn't close her eyes and get some rest. Barnside was sleeping thirty minutes after they left Washington, Levine not long behind him, right after he pulled together the briefing, made one last, uneasy conference call to the President. She watched them recline in the comfortable seats of the Agency jet, mouths half-open, and envied this effortless switch they had on their lives. There were just the three of them on the plane. Levine said both the HRT squad and the Delta Force team would be on the ground at McCarran a good hour before the three of them got there. Sitting on the asphalt, staring mutely at each other, waiting for someone to win the day, she guessed. There would be no changing Clarke's mind on the idea that HRT would be the ones to try to cast a nice, gentle net over the Children, of that she had no doubt. But that didn't stop someone in the military from making one last bid for glory.

  Tired of watching the ground slip past, she went to the back of the plane, sat in the communications centre, keyed in her password, browsed through the pile of messages there. She clicked on the one from Schulz marked urgent, and got the news about Lieberman.

  'Thank God for that,' she muttered, then shifted the rest of the E-mails into the pending tray and called back to Langley. Stuart Price took the call. He looked flustered.

  'So what's the problem?'

  Price blushed. 'Too much data or too little. It's the same old story with imaging. If you make the capture criteria too narrow, you get no hits. If you widen it just a little, in this case we're picking up everything from people's circular swimming pools to drainage tanks.'

  'Can't you refine it in some way?'

  'How? A circular object near a building? Plenty of those. A circular object away from a building? That's more promising. We're trying that. We've got some two hundred or so potential leads but before I even let you close to them I want to see them checked against what we know of them from public records. Most are turning out to be existing licensed structures.'

  'Understood.'

  'And in the meantime I've drafted in a team of trained photo analysis people from the Pentagon. Just to look at the pictures with a human eye. Still beats any damn computer I know of, and the more minds we have working on this thing, the merrier.'

  Price went quiet, glanced off screen.

  'Stuart?'

  'I really ought to get back to this.'

  'Say what you want to say. Please.'

  'The point is… I have to be honest, Helen. We read the newspapers. We watch TV. I know how bad this situation is, and it worries me to think you're relying on us to pull something out of the coals. If you have something else that can narrow this down, then we might be able to get somewhere. Without it, we're just looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. Give me a couple of weeks and that would be fine.'

  'We don't have a couple of weeks.'

  'I know. Let me put it another way. I'm real glad the Shuttle thing's going well. I think we should focus our hopes on that'

  A good man, she thought. Working his heart out. 'We are. They still have to track Sundog down, and the damn thing was purpose-designed to make that hard to do. It's got some small position-adjustment power systems of its own, so it's not even that easy to come up with a particularly accurate ballpark estimate based on last known position. So you see, we can't rely on that alone.'

  'I hear you. I just want you to be realistic about what we can achieve here.'

  'I am. One last question and then we're done. How's the network holding up? How confident are we it can withstand this storm?'

  'Search me. The MIS guys are going around the place clucking like hens, but that's nothing new. There's lots of bad shit going on out there right now in the public networks. But that doesn't affect us so much. Remember your history. They built ArpaNet to withstand a nuclear attack. I guess they have ways of keeping us running through this, even if we get some glitches along the way.'

  'I hope so. I'll leave you to it now,' she said, smiled, and cut the line.

  She looked at her watch. Another ninety minutes or more to go. They were late. But in any event, it hardly mattered. It looked as if they would be waiting on the ground, watching the sun set over Nevada, with nothing to occupy their time unless the Bureau had come up with some lead on their own.

  She opened up the private information channel Langley had set up for the operation. Lieberman's last report was almost six hours old. She keyed the button for La Finca and Schulz came on the line. 'Hi,' she said. 'I heard the good news about Michael.'

  'Yeah,' Schulz replied, half-grinning. 'Nice to have some breaks anyway.'

  'So when do we get to see a new report from him?'

  Schulz shrugged. 'Ask him yourself.'

  The picture changed. Lieberman came on the screen. He looked whacked. The wound on his scalp bristled with stitches. 'Whoa. It's the slave driver from Langley. Do you ever give up?'

  'No,' she said, looking somewhat amazed by the question.

  'I'll remember that.'

  'How's Sara?'

  'I called when I got back here. She's okay. Iron constitution, she needed it when she married me. She's worried, of course. About everything but herself. So what's new?'

  'Good. And you look… alive. Does it hurt?'

  'You're too kind. Not that much.'

  'The Shuttle's going to work, Michael, I just know that. But we still need to cover all the options. So when do we get that cycle report?'

  He made a face. 'Ten minutes. Half an hour.'

  'Great forecasting th
ere. Mind giving me a little peek?'

  He sighed. There was a pleasant relentlessness inside this woman you couldn't resist. 'You mean as far as the natural stuff is concerned? Dry and bad and nasty. Everything I thought was going to happen and some more. Heavy radiation, electromagnetic disruption. Massive UV values. You're going to be handing out some warning on general things like skin cancer and such?'

  She nodded. 'They're going out already.'

  'Sorry. I haven't had a lot of time to keep up with the news. Well, you tell people to stay indoors and catch the show when it comes out on video a few years hence. This thing is lighting up for the big one tomorrow.'

  'What time? When will it peak?'

  'Read my figures when I've done them. What I said initially still holds. I guess around 1210. Which is about as close to the solstice as you can get. It's still fluid, fluid enough to make Charley want to wait before pressing the final button, I imagine. But I think it's pretty certain that people on the Prime Meridian running from a little north of the equator up to maybe the tip of Scotland will get the brunt of it. Then it will start to die, only slowly, so you can expect a big wash of radiation and whatever else is inside that thing sweeping right across the northern hemisphere. We won't be anywhere close to normal until around 2400 or so. Which means it will affect everything from the Prime Meridian west right into the Pacific in some way or another. That's the real battleground Charley's got for tomorrow: London to Tokyo, and every place in between. And please, don't ask me what happens when she turns the magnifying glass on. What they got on Air Force One. What you got in Langley. All that at industrial strength, plus a little more I wouldn't care to guess at.'

  She went silent, knowing there was something he wanted to say.

  'You're really sure about this Vegas thing?' he asked finally.

  She shook her head. 'Why do you ask? No, as it happens. But we know the guy who killed himself here was one of the Children. It's a lead. It's the best we can do at the moment without some hard intelligence. Like I said, we need to cover every option.'

  'I understand that.'

  'But?' she asked, puzzled.

  He tried to smile. It seemed to be his lot in life to bring people down sometimes. 'I don't know. The idea of Charley in Vegas sounds odd to me. You be careful. I like these conversations. I'd prefer them to continue.'

  She looked flustered, in a way that Lieberman couldn't help but find amusing.

  'Is that a CIA blush, my dear?'

  Helen Wagner's face did go noticeably pink right then. 'Dammit, Michael. Time and place.'

  'Okay. That's a deal,' he said, feeling a touch guilty for embarrassing her this way. 'Hey, you want to see something that proves how careful we all ought to be? How different this world is starting to behave right now?'

  Lieberman's face disappeared. She heard him speaking off camera to Schulz.

  'Yes?' she said to nobody.

  The tanned, intelligent features came up on the screen again. 'I got to move this little camera thing from the monitor to the window so it's looking outside, not at my ugly face. Won't take a moment.'

  She waited, watched the moving image on the screen, then closed her eyes. 'Do I really want to see this?'

  'Sure! This isn't The X-Files. This is real.'

  In the Gulfstream jet moving effortlessly toward Vegas, she took a good look out this distant window in a remote Mediterranean farmhouse. The sun was setting in a sky the likes of which she had never seen. It was gold, burnished gold, mixed with a bright, sparking, rolling overlay of green, like an electric curtain, a dancing light show in the heavens.

  'Tell me I'm not going crazy, Michael.'

  'Of course you're not. If you lived in Iceland you wouldn't think twice about seeing this. The Aurora Borealis. The Northern Lights. And as fine a show as I've ever seen. You'd almost think this was the opening night of something new.'

  'Don't say that,' she whispered.

  'Hey, there you go, off on an X-Files trip again. This is pure physics. The Aurora is nothing but the solar wind burning up in our atmosphere.'

  'In the Mediterranean? It's rare even in southern Canada.'

  'I told you we had an industrial-strength dose of this stuff right now. Wait your turn. I'd wager the puny contents of my solitary bank account you'll be seeing this across a lot of the northern hemisphere tonight, probably tomorrow night too. Though Vegas may be pushing it a little far south. Sorry to disappoint. And you know something?'

  'What?'

  'It's beautiful. In a kind of cold, cosmic way.'

  'Beautiful?'

  'Yeah. Like a sign. The times they are a-changing. Remember that one?'

  'Not my generation, Michael.'

  'Or mine really. "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command." Maybe the generation doesn't matter that much after all.'

  'I have to go,' she said, seeing, somewhat to her relief, Levine and Barnside awake and in conversation at the front of the plane.

  'Right,' he said. 'Just don't get scared by what you see in the sky. That's natural, whatever we think. It's what's inside us that's scary. Sure frightens the life out of me.'

  She looked at this strange image on the monitor — the Mediterranean sky alive with gold and a dancing green curtain of arcs and bands and coronas of strangely coloured light — and said, 'I'll take your word on that.'

  CHAPTER 37

  Beneath the Green Sky

  La Finca, 1842 UTC

  Bennett looked a broken man. He sat in a corner of the control room, nursing a tumbler full of Scotch, silent, hardly watching what was going on. Lieberman nodded at Schulz. 'Is the old guy still with us?'

  'Up to a point. Bevan really chewed him out about security after we lost the dome. Can you believe that? Like it's his fault? Now that it's up to the Shuttle and whatever they can run up in Vegas, I guess he feels out of it.'

  'Speaking of the devil, where the hell is he?'

  'Out with what remains of the military guys,' Schulz replied. 'Looking for anyone who's still up there. After that we go quiet here until some word comes back from the Shuttle. The military go back to Palma in case they're needed for crowd-control duties. Nothing left to guard here, I guess. All they're thinking about is tomorrow, what happens if we get it wrong and the storm does hit. Understandable, I guess.'

  'They come across anyone else up there on the mountain?'

  Schulz sighed. 'A few. You look tired, Michael. To be frank, you look terrible. Why don't you get some sleep? When the Shuttle comes up with something, we'll wake you. Until then, we're pretty much out of this show.'

  The latest activity report was done. It was available on the network for Helen or anyone else who had access to it, and the signs were as bad as Lieberman had feared.

  'What happened to Mo?' he asked.

  'I think she went upstairs too. Her kid was absolutely out of it, from what I saw. You could all do with some sleep. If — correction, when — Arcadia finds that thing, you're in the driver's seat.'

  'I know.' Lieberman's head hurt. And only part of it was the wound.

  'Take a break, man. Think of that as an order, and be assured I'll be shaking you awake before long.'

  'Sir,' he said, making a fake salute.

  'And Michael?'

  'Yeah?'

  'I hate to ask. You and Mo? Is there something going on there?'

  He blinked. 'Are you serious? Under these circumstances?'

  'No, I didn't mean it like that. I just thought there was something a little weird between you when you got back.'

  'We got blown out of the sky and had to walk a million miles to find you people. Plus I confuse her, I guess. I'm a confusing sort of person.'

  'Say that again. Is that why you two can't look each other in the eye?'

  Some things you forget, Lieberman thought. Some things just hang around in the back of your memory, waiting for you to give them a little nudge. 'Is that right? Search me.'

  He shuffled off out of the barn, back to
the mansion, past the quiet bunches of soldiers who were waiting under this strange green light, then slowly climbing into the trucks taking them back to the city fifty miles away. His head was hurting. He was feeling tired, but alert too, something harrying away at the back of his consciousness.

  The bar was empty. He surveyed the line-up of bottles, then picked up some mineral water, threw a few chunks of ice and lemon into the glass, poured himself a big one, and went upstairs. He walked into his room feeling dog-tired, the drink slopping over the edge and splashing onto the tile floor. And jerked upright, stopped by the bed. The big double doors to the balcony were open. Outside, lit by the strange sky, Mo Sinclair sat on a simple white chair, back to him, a glass of something in her hand. From this angle she looked so thin, unformed, like a teenager.

  He coughed and said, 'Did I come into the wrong room or something?'

  'No,' she said, turning round, half-smiling at him. 'The door was open, so I used it.'

  'So I see.'

  'I've been drinking your vodka.'

  'Permission granted. Don't be offended if I don't join the party.'

  He went over to the balcony. She'd changed. She was wearing a thin red shirt, old and weathered, and cheap jeans cut off at the knee. Her hair was wet from the shower. She could have been sixteen, he thought, if you didn't look too close. Her face was naked, shorn of expression.

  'I couldn't sleep,' she said. 'Not right away. And there's nothing for either of us to do until the Shuttle finds something.'

  'And Annie?'

  'Like a log. Do any children suffer from insomnia?'

  'You're asking me?'

  'Yes.'

  'I don't think so. They tend to accept things for what they are. You need to grow up a little in order to fool yourself you make a difference.'

  She looked at him, and she wasn't a kid just then, he thought. She had all that knowledge and intuition inside her that women seemed to possess just when you hoped they were looking the other way. 'All that easy cynicism, Michael. Is that really you?'