“And why is the CIA interested in space weather?” Patrick asked.
Pope said, “Dr. Clayburn, you’re in no more trouble than the rest of the country, but unfortunately, that’s a great deal. Lawyers can’t help us. So will one of you please explain that call?”
“My friend is on Phoebe.” She shivered. “I hope he’s on Phoebe. The last contact I had, a short e-mail, he was at work on the NASA powersat. But because of adverse space weather, a radiation hazard, he would have been evacuated to Phoebe. The problem is, there’s been no communication from Phoebe since just after the weather alert.”
“And your call to the space weather people?”
Patrick gestured at the muted 3-V. “Don’t you have a crisis to attend to?”
“Who says I’m not?” Pope turned back to Valerie. “Your call?”
She had made three calls, the first two routine. “You mean when I said that yesterday’s CME—sorry, that’s coronal mass ejection—wasn’t acting like a CME. No auroras. They couldn’t explain it.”
“But your question stuck with them,” Pope said. “Here’s the thing, Valerie. May I call you Valerie? The thing is, there was no CME yesterday.”
“I reviewed their data, and I’m qualified to make sense of it.”
“I’m sure you are, given accurate data.”
“I hardly think you’re trained to—”
Pope cut her off. “Because of your questions—for which, thank you—a staffer at the Space Weather Prediction Center took the initiative to double-check their records. I’m told data from the early-warning spacecraft downloads through NASA’s Deep Space Network. So this young man went back to the DSN, and in the buffer DSN keeps to diagnose any problems in recent communications they found…”
“No trace of a CME,” Valerie completed. “So what did I see in the weather center’s database?”
“Except for time stamps, the supposed readings for yesterday’s event turn out to duplicate a CME from 2019. When the security folks at the weather center reinstalled their intrusion-detection software, they found they had been hacked by experts. That’s when they called the DOD Cyber Command.”
“But how…?” She trailed off in thought. Suppose one wanted—never mind why—to fake a CME. Could it even be done? “People interested in flares and CMEs go to the official repository, and that’s the Space Weather Prediction Center. When an alert goes out to subscribers, the hundreds of satellites that a CME might clobber get put immediately into standby mode. When satellites reawaken undamaged, people just think how fortunate they were. Any independent scientist trying to measure the CME’s ground-level effects, when she doesn’t detect any, is apt to run diagnostics, check calibrations and the like, before questioning the official alert.”
Pope nodded. “You’re very sharp, Valerie.”
“Still,” Patrick said, “those ground-based measurements will eventually check out. It can’t be a matter of more than days.”
Hiding a CME to destroy satellites might appeal to the sorts of fanatics who blow stuff up, Valerie supposed. Why do the opposite? Why fake a CME? And why bother if questions were sure to be raised after a day or two?
Then an even stranger question struck her. “The Russians have a space weather system, with independent data sources, run by their Space Research Institute. That weather center also shows a CME. Were they hacked, too?”
“Or,” Pope said, “are the Russians showing bad data on purpose? Do you begin to see why the CIA is interested?”
* * *
All very intriguing and bizarre, Patrick thought. But relevant, how? “What does this have to do with Valerie, or our armed guards?”
“Look outside,” Pope suggested.
Opening the window blinds, looking down into the parking lot, Patrick saw a Pocahontas County Sheriff’s cruiser.
“I asked the local police to keep an eye on you until I got here,” Pope said. “The people I’m investigating have bigger ambitions than hacking the Space Weather Prediction Center. I found out you were asking perceptive questions. Someone else might.”
“I’m in danger?” Valerie asked, incredulous. “If I am, what about my family?”
“I don’t think anyone is, but I won’t take chances.” Pope gestured at the troops. “I’m leaving these men behind. Your family will be well protected.”
“They will. Where will I be?”
“With me, I hope. You spotted something important before anyone else. A government crisis team is gathering, and we need your kind of insight.”
“I need to be here, where my friend can reach me.”
“We’re working to reestablish communications with Phoebe, too. Trust me, we have resources you cannot begin to imagine.”
With Marcus unaccounted for, she was so vulnerable. Patrick could see her wavering. “Do you want to do this? And would you like me to come along?”
“I don’t recall inviting you,” Pope said, glowering.
Patrick refused to react. Of course Mr. CIA had seen his government files, and judged Patrick unworthy of trust. Bastard.
“Will you keep an eye on Simon and my parents?” she asked.
“Of course.” Patrick hesitated. “So you’re going? You’re sure.”
“I have to,” she said.
Because if the CME was imaginary, then why had Phoebe base gone silent? And how could any of this, as Pope had hinted, relate to this morning’s terrorist attacks? By joining this task force, Valerie might find out—and about Marcus, too.
“I understand,” Patrick told her. “Do what you have to do.”
“I’m glad that’s settled,” Pope said. “If we can be going, Valerie, time is of the essence. We have a chopper waiting.”
* * *
Wooded, rolling countryside vanished behind the helicopter. Overwhelmed by events, Valerie had scarcely noticed when they took off from Green Bank’s tiny and seldom-used airstrip, but from the chopper’s shadow their course was east-northeast. Except for the pilot, she and Tyler Pope had the aircraft to themselves.
“Are you all right?” Pope asked her.
“Truthfully? I’m too numb to know.”
“Sorry to whisk you away like this. It is urgent. And there are things I couldn’t share around your friend.”
“He’s a good man!” she protested.
Pope shrugged. “I don’t doubt that. Good and well suited to a crisis are very different.”
Such as losing the Verne probe by acting in haste. Taking Pope’s point did nothing to assuage her pangs of guilt.
“Valerie.”
She turned to look at him.
“Contrary to what you’ve seen on the Internet and 3-V, the attacks aren’t bombings. Governments are sitting on the real story for a little while, so the bad guys don’t know we know.”
“Who are the bad guys?”
“Unclear.” He sighed. “But I have my suspicions.”
“The Russians, you intimated. Their space weather center could have been hacked, too.”
“Maybe. Russians involvement doesn’t mean all Russians.”
“If their space weather center isn’t complicit,” she said, “then how does any of this involve the Russians?”
“Consider the targets. Most are alternate-energy-based power generation and distribution facilities. The one petro facility to be hit is the main export hub in Venezuela. The Russians haven’t been happy with Petróleos de Venezuela shipping way over its cartel-approved quota.
“Did you happen to check the price of oil futures today?”
The Crudetastrophe had taken away Keith. Now another oil-related crisis? She could not bear to think about losing Marcus.
“Valerie. Valerie, stay with me.”
“What?” she said, woodenly.
“The nonbombings. The attacks come from space, using a microwave beam from PS-1. That is why everyone is suppressing the true nature of the threat. Until the news gets out, no one will question NASA and Cosmic Adventures sending a relief shuttle to
Phoebe, to repair whatever has gone wrong with their comm and to bring back anyone needing evacuation.” Pope glanced at his wrist. “They should be taking off right about now.”
Maybe Marcus wasn’t doomed! “A rescue mission!”
“Indirectly,” Pope said. “The shuttle will carry a squad of special-ops folks, trained for combat in space. At the last minute they’ll veer to retake control of PS-1.”
* * *
Patrick accompanied the soldiers to Valerie’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Yarborough had not struck him as the kind to take well to the military descending on them. Then again, who did?
He settled into Valerie’s home office, ready to intervene for her parents if the need should arise. A 3-V droned in the living room. Whenever they cranked up the volume, it meant another terrorist attack.
His impression was of attacks all over the place and he did not see the logic. He hunted around until he found an Ethernet cable with which to net his datasheet. After plotting the attacks on a globe, he still saw no pattern.
Maybe another of the day’s mysteries would somehow shed light on the situation. A fine idea—except that he had no idea how to plot a counterfeit CME.
There was yet another mystery, the one that had Valerie frantic. Why was there no news from Phoebe? Patrick expanded his plot, draping his holo globe of Earth in a broad sinusoidal band. Little pennants stood here and there within the band.
Every one of the terrorist attacks had happened in view of Phoebe and PS-1. And every attack had taken place while PS-1, if not always the target, had been in sunlight.
“What have I done?” he whispered.
* * *
Big Momma lumbered down the Cape Canaveral runway. The plane lurched—its engines laboring, as always, under the weight of a fully fueled orbital shuttle—off the tarmac into a cloudless blue sky. Glowing gases, 2,700°F hot, streamed from the turbofan exhausts.
High overhead, a sensor once a part of the Phoebe infrared observatory homed in on the heat source. Powersat controls designed to maintain focus on a surface location—despite the powersat’s orbital motion and the Earth’s rotation—maintained a lock on the target.
At the appointed time and altitude, Big Momma released its cargo. Lighting its main engine, spewing 6,000°F exhaust, the shuttle shot skyward. The sensor redirected its attention to the brightest infrared source in its field of vision—
And an intense beam of microwaves lashed out.
Shuttle electronics shut down, overloaded, and arced. Liquid oxygen and hydrogen in the shuttle’s fuel tanks flashed into vapor—and vapor pressure burst the tanks.
In an instant, the shuttle became the heart of a fireball.
For a time the fireball was the hottest thing in sight; microwaves continued to pour down on it. But the fireball burnt out. The debris dispersed and cooled.
And the distant sensor redirected the ravening microwave beam onto the blazing exhausts of the fleeing aircraft, Big Momma.
Friday afternoon, September 29
By the West Virginia standards to which Valerie had grown accustomed, Mount Weather was not much of a mountain. Not that she had gotten much of a look: the chopper had swooped in low to the ground, skirting the little town Tyler Pope had identified as Berryville, Virginia. Hustled from the helipad into a sprawling underground tunnel complex, she had been left waiting, all alone, in a small, sparsely furnished meeting room.
Her mind clung to irrelevancies because she could not bear to think about the worldwide terror, or the disastrous rescue attempt, or Marcus’s uncertain fate. She was supposed to help the CIA? The idea was ludicrous. She couldn’t help herself.
Other than a table and six chairs, the room offered only a 3-V and some rolled-up datasheets. Cans of tepid soda, forlorn, waited on the table. The institutional gray walls were windowless and bare.
She searched in vain for an Ethernet cable, then laughed at herself. She was beyond the quiet zone. This shelter must have wireless service.
For a while she watched the news, much of it dealing with aircraft worldwide diverting to the nearest airfield lest they, too, be swatted from the sky. But since the destruction of the shuttle and its mother ship, the terrorists had returned their attention to stationary targets. She turned off the 3-V when coverage cut to the Philippines. Something about a geothermal power plant being reduced to slag.…
By shoving chairs against the table, she cleared space to circle the room. What kind of people would do such terrible things? Had killed … how many? By now, perhaps thousands. What would such people care for the lives of a few score civilians in orbit?
She did not notice the door opening.
“Excuse me,” a woman said, closing the door behind herself. She was tall, clearly Asian, maybe Japanese, and wore thick, round glasses.
“Yes?”
“I’m told we’re the red team.” The woman laughed nervously. “Let me back up. My name is Ellen Tanaka. I’m with NASA, from the powersat project.”
Marcus’s boss! “Valerie Clayburn. I’m a radio astronomer. I questioned the CME alert, and for that lapse in judgment the CIA brought me here.”
Ellen cleared her throat. “Shall we acknowledge the obvious? You’re seeing Marcus, and I’m the one who sent him up. I hope you don’t hate me for that.”
Did she? Valerie thought of the last time she had seen Marcus, so eager to begin his adventure. “Had you sent anyone else, he would have been disappointed. And if you don’t know it, he likes and respects you. A lot. So, no, I don’t hate you. I don’t blame you, either.”
Ellen pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I wish I could say the same.”
Valerie did not want to dwell on Marcus going away. “What’s a red team?”
“Surrogate bad guys. We’re to try to think as the people controlling PS-1 would, with luck anticipating what they’ll do before they do it. I think the term comes from Cold War war games, when red teams stood in for the Russians.”
“And still do?” Valerie asked.
“So I’m told. Right or wrong about who, though, PS-1 is the problem. Where shall we start? With how the bad guys are doing what they’re doing?” Ellen popped the tab on one of the warm sodas. “Mind you, the person we really need is Bethany Taylor, the contractor’s chief engineer. She was in the air, though, and her flight got diverted to Fargo. So far no one’s been able to set her up with a secure enough connection to link into this facility. Bethany knows way more about the powersat than, well, anyone.”
“If also something of a bitch on wheels.”
Ellen grinned, and the mood lightened. “I can guess where that comes from.”
Not that Ellen had disagreed, Valerie noted. She grabbed a datasheet and handed Ellen another. “Okay. Let’s get to it.”
* * *
They worked.
Ellen, despite her modest disclaimer, knew a great deal about PS-1. Valerie had retained more than she would have thought possible from Marcus’s enthusiastic descriptions.
An orderly delivered food and coffee. They must have eaten, because sandwiches disappeared and the carafe went empty, but Valerie could not have said how or when it happened.
Checking e-mail, she found nothing from Patrick. Adages be damned: no news meant only no news. She hoped. She sent a note, asking him to hug Simon for her, how Mom and Dad were coping, and would he keep listening in on Phoebe?
Ellen kept trying to access security cameras on PS-1. The subsystem rejected her reactivation requests: Unauthorized command. “I should be able to do this,” Ellen muttered. “Viewing is not a sysadmin function. Not supposed to be, anyway.”
“Can you contact a sysadmin to do it for you?” Valerie asked.
“Any I can reach, the ones on rotation to the ground, can’t help. As a matter of security, sysadmin functions can only be executed from hardwired terminals on PS-1 itself.”
“What access do you still have?”
“None.” Ellen sighed. “Someone up there must have changed authorizations t
o require sysadmin access to do anything.”
The more attacks, the better their chance of spotting patterns. They turned on the 3-V for any breaking stories that might be instructive.
Instead they got the Russian president, in full-throated, lectern-thumping rage. In translation he condemned the U.S. for building a powersat. “This so-called power satellite must always have been intended as a weapon of mass destruction. Or are we to believe that within hours an innocent electrical power plant can be converted into a terrible weapon? The world is not so naïve. Nor do we fail to notice that the facility that all were told would hang stationary in the skies over the Americas instead threatens our entire planet four times each day. And to compound its earlier deceptions, America now claims to have ‘lost control’ of its illegal weapons platform to Resetter fanatics. It is a matter of criminal negligence at best, a matter of—”
Ellen hit mute and set down the remote. “This isn’t helping us.”
“Why blame Resetters?” Valerie asked. “Have the terrorists identified themselves?”
“From the selection of targets, I would guess. Most are alternate-energy projects, the sort the most extreme Resetters oppose.”
“Only it took Russian connivance to get the terrorists, Resetters or not, where they are.”
Faster than either of them could react to a quick double knock, the door swung open. “How’s it coming in here?” Tyler Pope asked.
“I don’t get the point of these attacks,” Ellen said.
“Me, either,” Valerie admitted. “Or why whoever controls PS-1 hasn’t—apart from the shuttle—touched the U.S.”
“Was that a question?” Tyler waggled the coffee carafe, deemed it empty, and set it back down. “Oh, the U.S. has been hit, and it’s insidiously clever. The anger from around the world comes right back at us. Powersats are fast becoming more untenable than the alternate-energy systems being so openly targeted.”
“The Russians took over PS-1!” Valerie shouted. “That’s what you said.”
“I believe that more than ever,” Pope said. “NSA wizards have looked over the computers at the Space Weather Prediction Center. I’m told that the intrusion and the code left behind have all the earmarks of a Russian pro hacker who goes by Psycho Cyborg. Still, the evidence for Russian government involvement is entirely circumstantial.”
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