Solstice

by David Hewson

  Finally, some small voice inside chastising her for the order of things, she turned to the academic Net. Here they sifted through what data was still trickling through on the monitoring network that should, in another world, in another time, have leisurely recorded the course of events from apex to apogee, waited a few years, then produced some learned papers.

  There was a consistent, unbroken line of reporting from only a single point in the chain, Learmonth, in Australia. Everywhere else was down, either through a direct storm effect or because somewhere in the chain of digital command that ran through to La Finca the line had snapped. Did it matter? Probably not. Just now, Learmonth was all they had.

  And the data was incredible, outside the bounds of anything anyone had ever seen.

  Learmonth recorded the temperature of the photosphere, the sun's outer layer, at 7,000 degrees centigrade, a thousand degrees higher than its previous record. The fire at the core was constant at a steady 22 million degrees, 2 million above its historical peak, and a temperature which, she guessed, a physicist might believe theoretically impossible, if theories made sense any more.

  You didn't need to rely on the observatories in any case. Those who were rash enough to wander out into the day could, with the naked eye and a suitable filter, see most of the disc of the sun obscured by a single giant blemish. Soaring flares were visible without a telescope, like a halo around the burning core, and on the earth there was a stream of reports about freak atmospheric conditions involving sundogs, false coronas, and strange lights in the sky that were so bright they blotted out even the sun itself.

  Schulz walked over and interrupted their frantic keying. 'We need to give them the news,' he said, and the sound of his voice made both of them jump. The power of what they had seen on the screen was so magnetic nothing else seemed to matter.

  'We're ready,' Lieberman said with a nod. In La Finca, three heads appeared in a video window at the top of the screen: Helen Wagner, Dan Fogerty, and the dark, complex face of Tim Clarke.

  'We were following your reports,' Helen said quietly. 'That's excellent work, and I know it must be harrowing too.'

  Mo and Lieberman had painstakingly painted the major incidents on the screen, recording every confirmed event that came in over the wires, marking it with a little electronic flag coloured for the seriousness of the effect: pale yellow for minor, bright yellow for substantial, red for an emergency-level disaster. The markers ran in a curve, following the true circle route across the northern hemisphere, rising in the Pacific east of Japan, then moving slowly with the rising sun, through the eastern provinces of Russia, through China and Mongolia, on relentlessly into Kazakhstan and the Urals. The yellow flags disappeared long before the sweep of the storm reached the Caspian. From then on there was only red, sporadic, and they all knew why. When the effects grew more serious, it was harder to report them. They could only stare at these blank spaces on the map and wonder what was going on there, guessing how long it would take to cross into Western Europe, which sat in the path of the maelstrom.

  'What's the worst we know of?' Clarke asked. 'What's this?' He pointed to a red marker near Sapporo in northern Japan.

  'There's been a rapid trigger of earthquake activity in the region,' Lieberman said. 'Most of it offshore, fortunately, but that's led to tidal wave activity. There's hundred-foot tsunamis reported, major damage, serious casualty figures. We've also got seismic readings from several stations around the world that indicate quakes around Beijing and some activity in central Asia, close to Samarkand.'

  'Communications?' Helen asked.

  'Patchy. We're getting a surprising amount out of Japan and the Far East. Maybe that's because a lot there is based on cellular technology already. They never got around to building physical wired systems, so there's less infrastructure to be knocked out. I don't know. It's just a guess. The way things stand now, I guess we're looking at a national emergency that beats anything we've seen in Japan in living memory, certainly the Kobe quakes back in '95. The rest of it, we just don't know. The TV news is also running stories about political uncertainties in some of the central Asian states, even Moscow too. You must have something through diplomatic channels.'

  'Not that you can rely on,' Clarke replied. The President looked hard at the map.

  "This is all really northern. Yesterday you people said we were getting reports of hits way down to the equator, in the southern hemisphere even. Now they seem safe.'

  'It's what you'd expect,' Lieberman said. 'Yesterday the storm was more diffuse. It was weaker and it covered a greater area. Today the alignment is more effective. So everything is more focused. More powerful. And confined to a smaller area.'

  'I didn't realize that would happen,' Clarke said. 'It's a blessing of a kind, I guess.'

  'Not really,' Helen added. She looked at Lieberman and knew he was thinking the same. 'We can't be fooled into thinking the effects are confined to the vicinity of the storm. Tsunamis can have a wavelength of several hundred miles. We haven't seen any volcanoes triggered yet but if that happens the collateral damage can be huge, a really long way away.'

  'Yeah,' Lieberman added. 'And these earthquakes? You know what kind they are yet?'

  'From what we've seen they're all strike-slip faults,' she replied quietly. 'That seems to be the type that is more likely to be triggered by the storm.'

  He closed his eyes for a moment. 'Don't tell me. Let me guess. The San Andreas. This is a strike-slip?'

  'Yes. We are going to put out a full-blown quake alert from north of San Francisco to south of San Diego, the length of the fault, pretty soon.'

  'Jesus.' He hated the very idea of an earthquake — that something you took for granted, something that lived beneath you, the rock you walked upon, should suddenly give up the ghost, shrug its shoulders, and collapse into chaos.

  'Well,' Clarke said finally, watching them all, 'is someone going to try to answer the big question?'

  The La Finca team was silent.

  'Professor Bennett,' Helen said, 'you're the expert here. How much of this is Gaia? And how much would we be getting anyway? What will we gain by taking Sundog off-line when we find them?'

  Bennett shook his head. 'I can't answer that precisely. We have no way of knowing. Without Gaia, these would be extraordinary circumstances. This bad? It's hard to believe. They're orchestrating this, even if they don't understand the detail any better than we can.'

  Clarke nodded grimly at the team around him. 'This information stays with us for now. Understood? I don't want those people out there shoving those damn papers at me all over again.'

  'Sir.' Fogerty nodded. 'But they will be back.'

  'Then get inside that damn farmhouse and make sure they got no reason.'

  'Right,' Fogerty said. 'The earliest we can hope to secure this is two-thirty am.'

  'What?' Lieberman's face stared at them from the screen, contorted with disbelief.

  'You heard,' Fogerty snapped.

  'That's more than two hours from now. That's like ninety minutes or so from the zenith.'

  Fogerty looked exasperated. 'We have the one chance here. I don't want it to go wrong.'

  'Michael,' Schulz said. 'If we get back control even fifteen minutes before zenith, that's enough. We can switch off whatever input the Children have.'

  'Great. One chance. And this may decide whether we wake up tomorrow with a world we recognize or not.'

  'Correct,' Tim Clarke said. 'Do you have any other suggestions?'

  Lieberman fell silent. He hated the way people in authority had this effect on you. 'Yeah,' he said, just as he felt someone was starting to reach for the off switch. 'Why don't we use our brains instead of racing around chasing our asses?'

  'Meaning what, Michael?' Helen asked.

  He looked at her face on the screen and was shocked by the impatience, the momentum in her face. 'Mo,' Lieberman said, taking her hand. They both stared into the monitor.

  'You see this woman, Mr President? T
hey sent her here to help them. She didn't. She's getting treated now like she's some kind of pariah. Like she's your old man, Helen. And you know what? Even though she didn't help them, and they know that, these people still seem to be running rings around us. You get that? You understand why we always seem to be one step behind?'

  Tim Clarke glanced at his watch. 'No, mister. Do you?'

  Lieberman said nothing.

  'We know where they are, Michael,' Helen said slowly. 'We can get in there, take back control, and put an end to this thing. We're not done.'

  And he understood that. He just couldn't work out why it gave him no comfort.

  CHAPTER 49

  HRT

  Nellis Air Force Base, 0531 UTC

  John Collins, the head of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, had assembled Helen Wagner, Larry Wolfit, the two other people in the Langley S&T team, and Dave Barnside for a short, personal briefing before the main meeting. At the end, Helen asked, 'So you mean we stay out of your way until you think it's all secure?'

  Collins was a big man, six feet tall, a fit-looking fifty or so, with grey, close-cropped hair, and bright, piercing eyes. He stared at her and nodded. 'Guess that about sums it up. Once we have that place under our thumb, you can do what you like. My job's over. But until it is, I don't want my folks tripping over you, understand?'

  Helen nodded. 'The odds are these people won't return fire or anything like that.'

  'Probably not,' Dave Barnside said. 'Nothing that neat or clean. More likely the place is wired with Semtex, just like it was in San Francisco and Spain. You got anything to keep us clear of that? I don't want my ass blown all over Nevada.'

  Collins's expression stayed deadpan. 'We've got equipment that can detect the obvious signs of explosives. It's a trade-off, really. You people are short of time, and a complete scan of that site would take a day or more.'

  'You've got fifteen minutes,' Helen said. 'Any longer than that and we might as well not be there.'

  'Right. In that time we can clear the obvious signs. We got sniffers that will detect common explosives, triggers, trip wires, pressure plates, that kind of thing. And, while I hear what you say — these people haven't used guns before — I'm not taking any risks. We go in there on the basis that this is a hostage rescue and the equipment that interests you — in the farmhouse, in the dome — they're the hostages. We immobilize anything that threatens that objective.'

  'Don't get too excited,' Helen warned. 'We may need those people in there to help us get things moving again.'

  Collins shrugged his big shoulders. 'Point taken. We'll do what we can.'

  They walked out and watched him take up his place in front of the overhead projector in the Nellis briefing room. The air-conditioning made a loud, continuous noise, but it still couldn't dispel the close, enervating heat of the night.

  The walls were plastered with aerial photographs and local charts. There were no more than twenty HRT agents there, plus some Marine helicopter crew members who would ferry them into the area using big twin-rotor Sea Knight helicopters.

  Collins rose at the front of the room and started to talk. 'We can keep this short, folks. I want you people in the air at ten to the hour. The target is forty miles almost straight due north from here. We've got five Sea Knights handling the transportation. That means you should be hitting ground around two-fifteen am local just under a quarter of a mile from the target. I want the farmhouse and the dome secured in twenty minutes maximum. Then we hand over to the specialist guys, though the team leaders may be required for some local interrogation. We work in four teams, five in each. What information we can glean from intelligence suggests there may be up to thirty people in this building. Currently the light output is modest. My guess is a good number of them are taking a nap. Even if they're all awake, the likelihood is that few if any of them are carrying handguns. We can't take that as read, so use all the usual precautions and act with discretion. But the brief here is to treat this like a hostage situation. We want control and we want this situation stabilized, with minimum damage, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Bill?'

  A tall black man with a lean, ascetic face rose and faced them. 'The template for this is one of those nonnegotiable, low-damage situations we know so well. We practised this long and hard. Now's the time to make it work. We got one main room in this building, some smaller ones off it, down a long corridor…'

  He pointed to the plan on the wall. Yasgur's Farm was a sizeable place, Helen thought There could easily be thirty people or more in there.

  '… plus bedrooms, of course. Now remember: low damage. And that goes for equipment as much as people. We want to pass this property on to the folks who need it in much the same condition it is now. You're all familiar with these.'

  He held up a small metal canister and a pair of goggles. 'Flash grenades are the key here. We divide into four teams, one for each door. Each team has a delegated member for grenade duty. On the signal, you pop a single one through the window and the rest of us go through. You know the drill. These things are pure light. Anyone who's awake inside that room won't be able to see straight for two minutes once the cycle ends, and then won't regain full sight for another hour or more. And remember too that you get four flashes over thirty seconds, and just now and again we get a rogue one that misses its timing and fires up later than that. The rules matter here. Your goggles stay on for two minutes after that last pop, just in case.'

  John Collins, arms folded at the podium, stared down at them. 'I go with the first team. Now, isn't that a surprise?'

  A line of laughter ran through the team. She liked Collins's timing. It punctured the nervousness they all felt

  'Once we're through, if this thing goes right, they'll be sitting on the floor, immobilized, before they even get their eyesight back. If you see weapons, respond, and warn the rest of us. When every last man and woman of them is out of action, we hand over to the technical people. Okay?'

  Bill was handing out sheets of paper. It was the floor plan of the farmhouse, with delegated areas for each team to control.

  'Sir?'

  Collins peered at Helen. 'Miss Wagner?'

  'The dome. How do we handle that?'

  'Okay,' he said, and turned to the aerial photographs, pointing at them with a laser wand. 'The dome is on a rocky incline to the northwest of the property. We can't land any closer to it than we can to the farmhouse itself. What's more, if you look here' — he pointed to a series of marks on the image, moving in a straight line from the farmhouse to the dome — 'you can see what we interpret to be some kind of control system, probably microwave. We'll have to reach the dome on foot and the only way to do it is to cross the microwave system on the way. Our guess is that they have, in all probability, wired this up with some line-of-sight detection system. Hell, you can buy the stuff you need down at Radio Shack for twenty dollars. They'd be crazy not to. But what that means is we don't want to be running up this track until we have secured the building. That could give them undue warning, and, if there are any devices in the way, it would prevent us from dealing with them.'

  'So?' Helen asked.

  'So,' Collins replied, letting them all see his eyes roll upward a little, 'once we are in control, four Cobra support choppers come up with the lighting rigs from a U2 concert strapped to their asses. When they switch that on, the desert floor will be as bright as it looks at midday. We get to see anyone trying to sneak out of the area. We get to see every inch of the way from the building up to the dome. My men clear it first. You and your team follow. We know the time situation, believe me. We will do this as quickly as is humanly possible. But until we give you the nod, I'd be grateful if you'd stay clear of the area. Understood?'

  'Sir?'

  Collins looked at Barnside. He'd had enough questions already. 'Mr Barnside?'

  'I'm Operations. I should be with you in the farmhouse.'

  'I know your job, Mr Barnside. You can come along behind with the support team if you
like. But the same rule applies. You stay out of our hair until we invite you through the door. Plain manners.'

  'Hey' — Barnside grinned — 'I'd come just for the pleasure of watching you guys perform.'

  They laughed at that. Just good old male camaraderie, Helen guessed, and exchanged knowing glances with Larry Wolfit, who was busy scribbling notes on his pad. Wolfit leaned over and whispered in her ear, 'Look. If these people want to play soldiers, I'd rather Barnside was with them than us. We let the other two guys go on ahead, and we just stay back, wait until it's clear. Okay?'

  'Yes,' she said. Then John Collins clapped his hands and the room began to empty.

  Ten minutes later they approached the huge, dark shadows of the Sea Knights, like giant crows beached on some faintly lit shoreline. The rotors began to cut through the hot, black air, winding up until they made a noise so deafening it was impossible to talk, impossible, even, to think beyond this brief, urgent slice of time that lay ahead of them, hidden in the vast, all-enveloping folds of the night.

  CHAPTER 50

  Doubts

  Yasgur's Farm, 0617 UTC

  Joe Katayama made a spire with his hands. Long, thin fingers, powerful, all-encompassing. Charley Pascal smiled at him and said, 'Be patient, Joe. We have to wait.'

  They sat alone at a desk at the end of the big control room, now half-empty. The Children were leaving as planned, climbing into the collection of old cars they'd acquired, slowly heading off down the dry dusty road that linked them to the outside world. She felt happy. Something so large, so cosmic was starting to fill her head. It felt warm, familiar. Full of love and some odd kind of recognition.

  The whir of the big network server was just audible, like the distant sound of an army of tiny night insects. There were enough people still left to do what was necessary. Soon they could be safely down to just three — herself, Joe, and young Eve, who knew the system so well now, and would stay right up to the final sequence before she too left to find some new life in a world that would be rebuilt around her.