Energized

by Edward M. Lerner

“We’ve got to get this man to the infirmary,” the hotel doctor said. “Will the CME have passed yet?”

  “Not necessarily,” someone answered. “The infirmary isn’t as far belowground as the shelter, but it’s still underground. Maybe it would be safe there.”

  Thad roused himself. “And when you poke your nose out the door, and they shoot you? How safe is that?”

  “Whatever they meant to do, by now they’ve done it,” Marcus Judson said.

  “Uh-huh.” Thad gestured at the hatch. “You certain enough to go first?”

  The doctor and Marcus exchanged glances. Neither moved for the door.

  Thad breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s showing good sense.”

  Maybe, just maybe, if he could keep everyone inside the shelter long enough, the radiation would kill Yakov’s people before one of them found a reason to expose him.

  And if, in the meanwhile, Irv died?

  Irv for Robin, Thad told himself. As, once, it had been Gabe Campbell for Robin. Even as Thad bargained with himself, he wondered what Jonas and gang were up to.

  And how many more would die.

  * * *

  Clasping a hopper by one front and one rear handhold, Dillon lifted. With excessive force: the hopper sailed over his head. As his arms reached their full extension, the hopper jerked his elbows and lifted him bodily off the garage floor. Just above the garage floor, his tethers brought him to a safe halt—and the hopper delivered a painful yank to his arms.

  Felipe, standing nearby with another hopper in hand, guffawed.

  The utility craft weighed only about as much as Dillon did: call it three-quarters of a pound. But while an object’s weight varied with gravity, its mass did not. He had to handle massive objects with care to avoid injuring himself.

  Gravity, what little there was, and the tension on the tether slowly returned him to the garage floor. He set the hopper back down and, with practice, mastered moving it about. Only then, with an extra forty feet of tether unreeled, did he tote the hopper out the garage door. Depositing the hopper on Phoebe’s dark surface, he turned around for another load. Phoebe’s garage was filled with the hoppers flown over from The Space Place. He had many trips ahead of him.

  “How are you guys coming?” Jonas radioed on a private channel. He and Lincoln had hoppered to the infrared observatory to scavenge parts, and Dillon had no idea why.

  “Fine,” Felipe said.

  “Coming along,” Dillon said. “But why are we doing this?”

  “Because the rodents might come out of their burrows.”

  So that no one could pursue them to PS-1, Dillon interpreted that. Until a shuttle came up from Earth, the four of them would be free to wreak havoc on the accursed powersat. He would have spent their limited time dismembering Phoebe’s factories, to keep more powersats from being built, but perhaps Yakov was right. Destroying PS-1 itself would be more dramatic.

  Yakov’s mysterious orders—secret, anyway, from Dillon—did not involve drastic action against the prisoners themselves. Thank Gaia for small favors. Eve Moynihan and her grandfather already burdened Dillon’s conscience.

  And his own death? “No CME?” he prompted Jonas.

  “Again, I told you. There is no CME. Never was. If you don’t trust me, just think about it. A real CME would be playing havoc with our helmet-to-helmet chatter. That’s why I broke the particle monitor. So the rodents won’t find out.”

  Wonderful, if somehow true. By every account, radiation sickness was a horrible way to go. But what if Jonas lied? To judge from the casual way he had shot the station chief, Jonas would not scruple to speak convenient fictions.

  And so, Dillon labored on, fearful at every crackle, hiss, and pop of his helmet speakers that he was a dead man walking.

  Yet a part of him could not help but marvel at events. Like secret agents on 3-V shows, they had codes: the encryption software Jonas had uploaded, as soon as they left Phoebe’s shelter, into everyone’s helmet comm. And exotic weapons. Recalling TSA’s near strip search, Dillon could not imagine how Jonas had gotten the guns.

  With many laps yet to go, Dillon tried to tune in audio from a DirecTV downlink of today’s Indians-Tigers game. He got only static. Duh: comsats were offline. Proactively, because of the fiction of a CME, he told himself, desperate to believe.

  Passing Felipe outbound, Dillon returned to the garage for yet another hopper. They each had another two utility craft to move. Dillon radioed, “When do we head over?”

  “Shouldn’t be long,” Jonas said. “We’re almost done here.”

  Jonas and Lincoln had each taken a hopper. Dillon and Felipe would each take another.

  With a gleeful hoot, Felipe flung the first of the extra hoppers into space.

  * * *

  The shelter was packed.

  The inmates—their floor space limited, virtually without gravity—more crept than paced. Lines formed and circled for food, water, and the two toilets. Fans roared and air scrubbers labored to handle so many people in the small space. Lost to sight within the crowd, someone sobbed.

  Marcus paced as unsuccessfully as everyone else. He worried about the base commander, whom the doctors said had lost a great deal of blood. He worried about Valerie, who would be frantic with worry about him. He worried about Thad, who seemed overwhelmed. He eavesdropped on wild speculations about what the terrorists could want enough to die horribly for, and how the damage they were surely wreaking could best be undone.

  As the hours passed, as he could do nothing, it was all Marcus could do not to scream.

  The particle monitor on Phoebe’s surface was not reporting; it or the comm link to the shelter must have been knocked out by the radiation. The particle monitor in the shelter, though its counts bounced around, never detected any significant influx. As reassuring as he found those readings, it meant their inside monitor would be useless for telling them when the storm had passed.

  After ten hours, Marcus had had enough. “It’s been plenty long. Everything I know about CMEs tells me it’s safe to come out.”

  “What do you know about suicidal fanatics?” one of the hotel evacuees snapped back.

  Savvy said, “Suppose they are dead. What’s our signal to leave the shelter? When we run out of food or water or oh-two?”

  Alongside Irv, the hotel doctor cleared his throat. “The bullet has to come out. It’s deep in the leg; I’d rather not go after it with only a first-aid kit. It would be much better for the patient if we can get him to the base infirmary.”

  Marcus bellowed at the hatch, “We need to bring this man to the infirmary!”

  “Pipe down,” Thad yelled back. The din in the shelter quieted a bit. More softly, he said, “I’m in charge here, remember?”

  “So what’s the plan?” Marcus countered.

  “We wait for rescue. People will wonder when they don’t hear from us.”

  “How long will that take?” Savvy asked. “NASA is apt to assume at first that the CME damaged our comm. They’ll wait a bit for us to bring it back online. And when people do come, why would they come armed?”

  “We wait,” Thad repeated.

  The hell with that, Marcus thought. “Dillon Russo! Dillon’s colleagues! Two of us will be bringing out the man you wounded. We need to get him to the infirmary.”

  From beyond the hatch: silence.

  “Do not do this,” Thad warned.

  “Don’t shoot!” Marcus shouted. He grabbed the hatch latch, but it did not budge. He yanked harder. Nothing. He braced a foot against the jamb and, putting his whole body into the effort, heaved.

  In shock and dismay, Marcus said, “We’re trapped in here.”

  * * *

  Descending a docking post, Dillon tried, and failed, to take in the immensity that was PS-1. The powersat’s straight lines and foreboding blackness could not have stood in starker contrast to the achingly beautiful orb that hung overhead.

  The hubris to build this monstrosity left him speechless, a
lmost in tears.

  When he regained his composure, he would help his colleagues to destroy this evil.

  * * *

  From his perch beside a docking post, Dillon turned, trying to take in everything.

  Jonas floated in arm’s reach of a gaping access panel about halfway from the center of PS-1. Felipe flew back and forth across the powersat’s vast surface as though plowing a field, his hopper puffing gas all the while. For all Dillon knew, the man was joyriding. As for Lincoln, the only evidence was the tether that snaked through the gap opened where he had removed solar panels and whatever structure lay beneath.

  Here, there, everywhere: little octopoid bots. The little automatons had come tumbling out of shelters, dispersing to do … whatever it was they did, when Jonas canceled the CME shutdown. Maybe they would be tasked to help with the disassembly.

  Dillon radioed, “I’m ready. Where should I begin?”

  “What do you mean?” Jonas asked back.

  “This thing is huge. As fulfilling as it would be to rampage and smash, I can see that’s not realistic. We have to concentrate our efforts on what’s most important, what will be hardest to repair, before NASA sends up a ship. If we’re to destroy this abomination while we have it to ourselves, we have to work smart.”

  “I’m not following,” Jonas said.

  “About how to destroy it?”

  “No,” Jonas said. “About why you think that’s our purpose. That’s not at all what Yakov intends us to do.”

  * * *

  Yakov sat in his study, the rain drumming against the windows. The night sky, were he to step outside, would be a uniform, ominous slate gray. As much as he wished to see the signal with his own eyes, that was impossible. His night-vision binoculars would stay in their case.

  Trusted men and women were in place, waiting, around the world. It would suffice for them to forward their observations. He would know soon enough.

  Sipping hot tea, he waited for the phone.

  At last, it rang. After idle pleasantries, Arkady Vasilyev said, “You will never guess what I spotted on my last hike. A rose-breasted grosbeak! We hardly ever see them in California.”

  Above Los Angeles, unlike Washington, the sky was clear tonight.

  “You are sure of what you saw?” Yakov asked.

  “I am positive.”

  “Then I envy you. I would like to have seen it.”

  “I understand, my friend.”

  They discussed other rare birds they had seen, or heard, or wished to—and it was all lies. What Arkady Vasilyev—not his real name—had seen with his night-vision binoculars was far more remarkable than any bird sighting: a slightly cooled stripe across the sun-warmed surface of PS-1. Someone from Jonas’s team was cooling the area with gas sprayed from a utility craft.

  And so, without any radio transmission from the powersat to attract American notice, he knew his team was in place.

  After several minutes of such prattle, Yakov excused himself. With Psycho Cyborg’s expert assistance, he, too, had secret messages to deliver.

  * * *

  Blades spun lazily in the stiff breeze over the Pacific. The windmills were enormous: their blades spanning two hundred and fifty feet, their pedestals rising two hundred feet above the ocean. When the wind blew fast enough, each windmill generated almost two megawatts of power. A hundred windmills stood spaced across a few square miles.

  One by one, in a hundred electrical generators, copper coils fused and melted. Power output sagged and surged on the high-voltage transmission lines that ran to the coast. Distribution substations ashore overloaded.

  In cascading power failures, Yokohama, Tokyo, and Osaka ground to a halt.

  * * *

  Venezuela’s greatest triumph ringed the harbor and sprawled along the coast. A jumble of storage tanks brimming with petroleum, diesel fuel, gasoline, and liquefied natural gas. The modern refinery with its capacity of three hundred thousand barrels per day. Pumping stations. A cat’s cradle of pipeline, moving vast quantities of fluids about the complex. More pipeline, snaking out to the oil fields. Lighters shuttling fuel to supertankers too huge to enter the harbor.

  Much of the rambling facility was just coming back online after a preemptive shutdown in the face of the coronal mass ejection. Everything was checking out fine—

  Until explosions ripped through the night. The fires soon raged out of control.

  Fortunately, disaster struck on the third shift. The dead and unaccounted for remained, just barely, below four hundred.

  * * *

  Like colossi, mighty pylons bestrode the desolate plain.

  High-capacity, high-voltage, superconducting cables swooped from one pylon to the next, to the next, to the next … across thousands of miles. And so, vast solar farms in the Outback fed their gigawatts into the power lines that spanned a continent—

  Until, deep within the desert, stretches of the cable flashed white-hot before exploding in a spray of metallic vapor. More slowly, like candles in the sun, nearby metal towers melted.

  And a continent away, Melbourne went dark.

  * * *

  Dillon had taken his turn at the console, obliterating a few of the grotesque, counterproductive, hubristic constructions of “civilization.” And proudly, even giddily, so: every target they destroyed with the powersat’s microwave beam had been an outrage against Gaia.

  But the adrenaline rush had passed. Beyond some point—and how could they not already have passed that point?—the destruction they inflicted was equally an affront to Mother Earth.

  “I think we have everyone’s attention,” Dillon said, desperately.

  Except for the smudge of black smoke off the Venezuelan coast, the effects of their activities could not be seen from this altitude, even with visors set to full magnification. The rest he had fleshed out from Jonas’s matter-of-fact descriptions and his own—ever more appalled—imagination.

  So much death and destruction!

  “I imagine so,” Jonas admitted.

  “Then use it.” Dillon gestured at the nearby radio antenna. The transceiver meant for routine operation of the powersat was in no way constrained to that purpose. “Send them our”—Yakov’s!—“demands, so that this slaughter can stop.”

  “Demands,” Jonas echoed. “We have demands?”

  Friday morning, September 29

  Valerie sat up with a start.

  She remembered reluctantly turning off the 3-V, because her folks would not go to bed until she did. Not that staying up past two had accomplished anything, because the only news from Phoebe was: no news. Formless dread had kept her tossing and turning until—the latest she remembered checking the bedside clock—after four.

  Her bedside clock read 9:12 A.M. Maybe now there would be information. But turning on the bedroom 3-V, she found she had awakened into a new nightmare.

  There was a knock on her door. Without waiting for a response, Mom came in wearing a nightgown, robe, and slippers. “Go back to bed, hon. Everything is closed today. I’ll wake you if there’s any word about the people on Phoebe.”

  “Everything is closed.” Valerie gestured at the 3-V, in which a refinery blazed, while the crawl scrolled a litany of other disasters. The headline: TERRORISTS STRIKE WORLDWIDE! “Because of this? What is this?” She threw off the blanket. “Did you get Simon to school?”

  Mom shook her head. “Simon is in the yard, tiring out your father. Hon, everything but essential services is closed. The president declared a national state of emergency.”

  “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “It’s closed.”

  “Regardless, Mom, I have to get to the observatory.”

  When Valerie pulled into the parking lot, twenty minutes later, she saw bikes and cars. She wasn’t the only staffer unable to just sit home.

  Patrick found her in the break room, as she paced waiting for coffee to brew. He took one look at her and gave her a hug. “Any word from Marcus?”

  She
shook her head.

  “If you insist on being here, I’m working from your office. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “Thanks.” The pot finished brewing and she filled their mugs. “I was thinking. Suppose the CME fried Phoebe’s main base transmitter. Could happen, right? They’d still have low-power stuff. Like spacesuit helmet radios.”

  Remember when we met, Marcus? I said I could eavesdrop on a cell phone on Titan.

  “And we have a big receiver. Good thinking.”

  “Now if I could only find a bit of free time on the big dish.…”

  “You know? I seem to recall an anomalous reading the last time I ran diagnostics. I’ll be taking the big dish offline real soon, now.”

  This time, she hugged him. But as long as they tracked Phoebe, they heard—nothing.

  * * *

  Footsteps in the Jansky Lab corridor were nothing unusual. These footsteps were. Too fast. Too soft. Like people sneaking up …

  Valerie twitched as someone shouted, “Clear!”

  Turning, she saw two men wearing camo, flak jackets, and helmets. Carrying guns! Shuffling noises in the corridor suggested others.

  Nodding to the soldiers, a tall, ruddy-faced man in a rumpled blue suit walked into her office. He had thinning, close-cropped brown hair and a bristly mustache gone gray. He could have been the father, maybe even the grandfather, of any of the soldiers.

  But the sight of a grandfather did not ordinarily send a chill down her spine.

  “Dr. Clayburn?” the older man asked.

  Patrick stood. “Someone’s serious about giving us the day off.”

  Ignoring the gibe, the man in the suit offered his ID. A holo logo shimmered above it. “Valerie Clayburn. May I have a minute?”

  “That’s me,” she said, although he seemed already to know that. “And what the hell is this about?”

  “My name is Tyler Pope, and I’m with the CIA. You placed an interesting call yesterday to the Space Weather Prediction Center.”

  “I’m an astronomer, Mr. Pope. We’re interested in space.”

  “Don’t talk to him,” Patrick said. “Not without a lawyer.”

  “Thank you for your opinion, Dr. Burkhalter. Don’t look so surprised. I told you I’m CIA. You’re still in the room because you were also on that call.”