by David Hewson
'Thanks again for the welcome information,' Ruffin said calmly. He looked more closely at the panel. Something was visibly amiss. He pulled the floatcam farther in. 'Take a close look at the seal. It looks warped down one side to me. Does that mean anything?'
The line went quiet, then Schulz replied, 'I agree. It looks as if the material is compromised in some way. It's pressurized from the inside. I guess if it's loose maybe the servo doesn't have enough power to break the seal.'
'So all we need do is rupture this manually, and then the panel will depressurize? We should be able to pry it off if need be?'
That long silence again.
'We need decisions here,' Ruffin said, and noted the anxiety in his own voice.
'I just want to be sure. I was looking at the actual plan of that section. And you're right. There's no reason why you can't pry the panel off completely now. The backup system has accepted the ID card. It's going to stay quiet.'
'That's nice.' Ruffin looked at Mary. 'You got something like a screwdriver in there? This is going to be like prying off the lid of a jar of jam, I guess.' She pulled out a long, flat-handled lever and handed it to him.
'Just get underneath the seal, loosen it, use as much force as you need,' Schulz said. 'The pressure should do the rest.'
'I'm with you there.' Ruffin thrust the blade gingerly into the crevice around the near edge of the panel. 'I'm getting right-'
It happened in an instant. He felt the lever go loose in his hand, then the panel door shot up violently toward him, collided with the front of his suit with an impact he could feel through the thick material and the pressurized interior. The force was astonishing. It sent him bucking backward, rolling head over heels out toward the panels, out toward the blackness of space. He could hear people screaming in his headset. His mind was a blur. Then the safety line attached to the satellite cut in, jerked him to a painful stop, and the pictures gradually stopped spinning in his head.
Someone, a familiar voice from NASA, was yelling in his ear, 'Check suit integrity, Bill. Goddamn check it!'
Ruffin took a deep breath, closed his eyes, found himself thinking once again of home, that beautiful beach, gulls squawking lazily overhead, then looked at the gauges on his sleeve panel. 'Looks good here. You people getting any readings down there that suggest otherwise?'
A pause, then the NASA voice said, 'No. Guess we were lucky.'
'Yeah.' He pulled gently on the line and floated back down to the satellite. Gallagher watched him all the way, and he guessed her eyes were wide open and worried behind the glass.
'Hey.' He reached over, touched her with his big glove, a ridiculous gesture and he knew it. 'There was nothing you could do. It's okay.'
'Sorry,' Schulz said over the line. 'I guess there must have been more pressure inside that thing than I appreciated.'
'No problem. Like the man said, we're all making this up as we go along.' The panel door was gone now, long gone, floating off somewhere into the void. The opening revealed precious little: another covering panel, this time held by tamperproof
screws around the edge.
'Teamwork time,' Ruffin said. Gallagher passed him an electronic, torqueless screwdriver, and took out an identical device herself. Then they turned the tools on and set to work on the screws, three down each vertical side, the same number on the horizontal. It took ten minutes, but this time there was no pressurization problem. The plate just came away in their hands. It revealed a dark, deep hole that wasn't reached by the lighting they had originally jerry-built. Ruffin motioned to Gallagher and she unhooked one of the flashlights, held it in her hand, and pointed it down the hole. Ruffin smiled. This was what he had been praying to see ever since the Shuttle had lifted off from Canaveral: a small LCD screen with sixteen places for digits on it, each blank, and beneath a numeric keypad. He pulled the floatcam in farther and listened to Schulz's purr of relief.
'Sixteen numbers and we're there,' Schulz said.
'Know them by heart.'
'I'll read them off all the same.'
Ruffin punched the first one in and couldn't believe it. His hand really was shaking, deep inside the cumbersome glove. It took a couple of tries to get it right. Then he hit the green enter button, watched the number come up in its little window, and moved on to the next.
He was on the seventh when Schulz said somewhat nervously in Ruffin's ear, 'What happened to the sunlight?'
Ruffin fumbled the number again and swore mildly. 'Sorry. You lost me. We're nearly there. Can't it wait?'
'No,' Schulz said firmly. 'We've got a wider view of the area than you from the floatcam. Pull your head out of that hole and take a look around you. The sunlight's changing.'
Something stirred inside Ruffin's head, annoyingly out of reach. Reluctantly, with a sigh that was audible to everyone listening around the world, he pushed himself away from the control panel and blinked in the bright, piercing shaft of sunlight that was now falling on their backs.
'Shit. I jerked the damn satellite when I got thrown back like that. It's moved. It's out of sync with the shades.'
'Bring the floatcam back,' Schulz barked. 'I want to see the wings.'
'No need,' Ruffin said grimly, but moved the camera unit anyway. Up above them he could see the two clover leafs, one attached to Sundog, the other floating free. When he got thrown back by the pressure of the door, his line had shifted the entire satellite out of kilter with the shade above. Ordinarily, he guessed, some adjuster rocket would have fired in and straightened the thing up. But Sundog was down. Just then, anyway.
'No problem,' Schulz yelled, in a voice that said just the opposite. 'I can't risk trying to key in the rest of the sequence. We just need to get you back out of range of the thing, back where you were, then put the shades in place again.'
Ruffin looked at the flimsy silver apparatus they had erected. The four identical wings had now moved close to thirty degrees out of alignment with the satellite. The solar panels had to be getting almost their full entitlement of the sun, and what Schulz had said rang in his ears: This thing stayed down as long as the power was off.
'How soon?' he asked, unhooking his line from the satellite, watching Gallagher do the same, slowly, certainly, making sure she got it right the first time.
'Don't know. Look at the LED.'
Ruffin took hold of Gallagher's arm and pushed both of them away from the hull, back out toward the errant wings. They rounded the back of the satellite. He glanced at the base plate. The light was red. He took a deep breath, and then it was orange.
'She's waking up, Irwin,' Ruffin said slowly. 'Orange now.'
'Get yourself out of there, nice and steady,' Schulz yelled. 'Get out of range. We go back to square one.'
'Yeah.' The light changed again. 'It's green.'
No one spoke. The two suited figures floated out into space, out toward the silver wings. They were ten metres or so from the base plate now, Ruffin guessed. The line was still silent. He watched the metal plate begin to retract, slowly, with a mindless, mechanical certainty, sliding open to reveal a deep, complex pit of equipment. What lay underneath was impossible to recognize, a tangle of spikes and antennae, sensors starting to move sluggishly, like some waking beast sniffing the air, trying to locate its prey.
'The door's open,' Ruffin said. 'It's connecting.'
In the tinny speakers of his helmet someone said, 'Oh my God…'
They were clear of the thing now. Far enough away to have been safe, if Sundog had failed to pick up their presence during their slow flight back from its perimeter. Beneath them, radiant blue and gold, the earth lay like some precious, distant jewel. Bill Ruffin reached out and held Mary Gallagher's hand, and still the picture of the damn beach wouldn't leave his head. The gulls circling, the smell of salt water, the taste of that drink, these things were real.
'Our Father,' he said quietly, 'who art in Heaven, hallowed — '
It looked like something from a kid's game or a prop from a m
ovie set. The thin red beam just came right out of the guts of the beast straight at them, a waving wand of energy slicing through space, slicing through their suits, their bodies, making this last moment seem so strange, so unreal, a writhing, agonizing dance in the airless black vacuum they'd dared to brave, so big, so endless it could swallow them up forever and never leave a trace.
In Bill Ruffin's helmet, now floating through space attached to a dead torso severed in half by a waving wand of light, there was a cacophony of voices, yelling and screaming, all on top of each other, none making sense.
Eighteen hundred metres away, in the cabin of the Shuttle, Dave Sampson, mind reeling, still trying to believe this was happening, listened to the babble of sound, tried to pick out what he recognized, what was foreign. Someone he knew, a NASA voice, not calm now, but still familiar, was yelling at him to get out of there, and damn fast, screaming so loud it covered up completely Schulz yelling the exact opposite. Idly, without thinking, he reached down and flicked the buttons on the start-up sequence, heard the giant machine start to come to life.
There was a sound, familiar and encouraging. Servos coming to life, pumps energizing, the slow rumble of power feeding into the system, electricity running the complex length of the spacecraft. And something else, from way behind. When Dave Sampson looked up from the winking lights of the panel and stared over his shoulder, there was nothing there now except fire, a vast, all-consuming fire, that rolled toward him like some ancient, fearsome weapon from an old and angry god.
CHAPTER 48
In the Waking World
La Finca, 0511 UTC
'Not your fault,' Lieberman said gently to Schulz, who looked pale as death. 'It's not anybody's fault.'
Schulz looked devastated. 'I should have thought about it. When he got kicked back and held by the line. I should have realized that would move the satellite out of sync'
'And so should I. Those guys knew the risks. They wouldn't blame you, any of us. They were bigger than that.'
'Yeah.' Schulz sighed miserably.
'So let's get on with the job. This game's not over yet.'
And it wasn't, even though Charley clearly thought otherwise. Schulz guessed she must have known something was wrong when Sundog went off-line. That had to show up on the Children's system. She didn't need to activate the defence mechanisms and blow the Shuttle team out of the sky. The satellite was perfectly capable of doing that for itself. But she could take some kind of revenge. Fifteen minutes after they lost the ship a curt E-mail came through from her, copied to La Finca, the CIA, the Agency, and the main international news wires. It gave a brief, deliberately inaccurate account of the destruction of Arcadia. The last word Charley wrote was: Prepare.
Schulz had closed his eyes and asked Mo Sinclair to watch the wires, the Net sites, any source of information she could find, and try to monitor what Charley might be up to as the solar storm began to rise to its peak. Lieberman watched her working, saw the shock in her face, then sat down by her side, began to help, at one point touched her hand, felt good that she returned the pressure. And like this they turned these facts, figures, and pictures into a running report that chilled the blood, and brought home the true nature of the event
that was shaping around them.
This was a global catastrophe by its nature, not a contiguous sequence of discrete occurrences. It moved over the earth slowly, at the speed of the dawn, and breathed its poisonous fire in no particular order, to no discernible pattern. To Mo Sinclair it felt like being trapped in the path of an oncoming hurricane, unable to take your eye off this monstrous thing that was blotting out more and more of the horizon as it approached, and unable to move too. You might as well hope to dodge the footsteps of some fairy-tale giant who was stumbling drunkenly toward you. There was as much chance of salvation in standing where you were as trying to second-guess the program of this crazed, all-powerful leviathan.
There were such reports on the news wires. The storm had broken the precious digital thread that bound together the modern world, tied newspaper to radio station, TV network to the World Wide Web. Suddenly the conduit of information that had been taken for granted was leaking and flaky, and with this went the notion of currency, of validity. This was the digital world at its best and worst. Where the pipes held, the major channels came through with reports that were occasionally flimsy but at least held the promise of some grain of truth inside them. In the absence of fact, rumour raced in to fill the vacuum, and the Net was alive with dubious stories, half-baked theories, tales, and hearsay, multiplying around the world like some feverish digital bacteria. She found herself hating this junk, wishing it would go away. She didn't want to think about some of the crazier theories out there, the ones that said this was the end of everything, that Judgment Day was on us, and it was time for the earth to start cracking, the skeletons to start walking out of the ground.
What the storm did for some people, she realized, was strip away a layer from the outer part of themselves and let the baser, animal side that lay beneath come to the surface, grin insanely at the sky, and get on with the job of being 'free'. Chaos and freedom were close bedfellows and when that veneer of politeness, of community, of sensibility was destroyed, it was difficult to tell one from the other.
What she saw coming in from the sources she could rely on, the sporadic reports from CNN and the BBC running through the Web TV sites, only served to prove this. When the storm struck, people didn't stay inside. There was looting, there were riots. When the human animal was cornered, put into the tight, confined, inescapable space of the city and had the burning light of the sun in its face, not everyone wanted to curl up in a corner and dream of the good times. To some this catastrophe was welcome. It tore down the old world and put something wild and anarchic and new in its place. Which maybe was what Charley had wanted all along. And beneath this newness was something that, when Mo thought about it, was more terrifying than the prospect of cataclysm, of political upheaval, or of wide-scale fatality. Stripped of humanity, out in the open, beneath the feverish fire of the sun, people became something different, something that laughed at the very idea of an organized, decent, caring world. This rolling, teeming wave of fire didn't destroy the planet. What it unmade was the simple, accepted notion of society, and put cruel bedlam and the mindless, heated rage of pandemonium in its place.
The reliable information they could garner confirmed the scale of the devastation, and how ineffectual the measures taken to secure against it had proved. And these, she couldn't help thinking, were just the early reports. There could be much worse to come. According to both BBC and CNN a series of tsunamis that devastated the northern coasts of Japan had stirred some kind of millennial movement, led by local cults. Tokyo's subway had been occupied by sullen, terrified crowds, the red light district of Osaka destroyed by a machete-wielding mob. Secondary earthquakes devastated much of modern Kyoto but left the ancient temples standing, and it was here that the population congregated, scared, angry, vengeful. Martial law was put in place, as it was in most cities that lay in the path of the storm, but it was hard to persuade soldiers and the police to go on the streets to enforce it. These cities remained on a knife edge, even when the sky returned to normalcy. Once the storm was over, the streets became a little calmer. Some kind of amnesty for the rioting was being promised. Still, it was impossible to say when a semblance of normalcy might return.
From the main networks, they were able to gauge the amount of damage in the capitals from Japan through to Eastern Europe. It varied from minor — Moscow seemed to be untouched, if the reports were to be believed — to shocking. The ancient quarters of Tashkent and Samarkand were in flames, destroyed by sporadic fires and local earthquakes. The two remaining active nuclear reactors at Chernobyl seemed to have imploded upon themselves and dispatched into the clear golden sky a cloud of radioactive dust that threatened both Belarus and the Ukraine.
Telecommunications were a mess everywhere now, the chaos e
xtending beyond the path of the storm. The TV people said that most Western governments planned to keep the markets shut until they could invent some way of reopening them without a massive, disastrous collapse of confidence. Stock prices had fallen so deeply that several major financial institutions and multinational corporations were technically bankrupt at the point of suspension.
Beneath the facts lay a churning ocean of rumour and misinformation, and she couldn't turn her face from it, however hard she tried. It was like driving past an accident on the freeway. The rumours ran unchecked and multiplied around the unofficial Web sites set up to monitor the storm. There was no way of verifying them. All she could do was read the snatched, illiterate dispatches, a chill going down the back of her spine, and wonder at the state of the world.
In Islamabad a solar observatory was torched by a chanting crowd of hysterical worshippers from a city mosque, and every one of the staff inside burned to death, some pushed back into the flames when they tried to escape. A mob in a remote village in Armenia destroyed its local church, built a pyre on the bare hillside, and burned everything that could be stripped from the ruin. Afterwards, they crowned a seven-year-old girl with a diadem made from metal foil, paraded her around on their shoulders from sunrise to midday. By then she was covered in burns, her skin peeling, and they ceremonially murdered the child in the village square. The local chief of police wielded the knife that was used to kill her. In Istanbul, the last song played by Bosphorus Rock 101 before the power failed was by U2. Bono sang, in a low, melancholy voice, 'I'm not the only one, who's staring at the sun.' Then the airwave disappeared in a sea of white noise.
With Lieberman working alongside her, Mo patiently stored this rising flood of venom and promised herself that one day the world would recover enough of its senses to sort the wheat from the chaff, tell her how much of this really happened, and how much lived inside the head of the mob.