Energized

by Edward M. Lerner

The leading bot reached a packed-dirt plain scuffed with boot treads. She paused to look around. Nothing about the area seemed noteworthy. She resumed “her” progress toward the base and, coming over a low rise, saw a deep cave.

  Only its surfaces were all planes. Every intersection was at right angles. The opening was man-made, not a cavern.

  Scuttling closer, she saw coiled hoses and metal canisters along the walls. She could neither discern canister colors nor, if she were to sidle closer—not unless the labels had been written in ultraviolet-sensitive ink—read the descriptions. As natural as the grayscale holo appeared, it was all computer-graphic wizardry: the bot “saw” with lidar. The process of reconstructing images from reflections of a scanning beam was like the radar maps she so often worked with—as from-a-whole-past-life as mapping Titan now felt.

  But color blindness did not matter, any more than did the mechanics of bot “vision” with which she was obsessing. Only physics was easier to contemplate than what did matter: that she had found the base’s hopper garage—and it was empty.

  Where could everyone have gone?

  Almost, Valerie abandoned her search. She was at a dead end. The hoppers gone meant the people had gone. Doubtless she should tell someone what she had discovered. Tyler Pope, maybe?

  And then what?

  Maybe she couldn’t bear to accept that Marcus and the rest had set out. If they had, all too likely their intent was—somehow—to retake PS-1 from the terrorists. If they had, there was nothing more she could do.

  Maybe she couldn’t bear the thought of more waiting.

  Or maybe, she had a choice to make. She could take action, or she could defer to the debating society and hope they did something. She felt sudden empathy for poor Patrick, so many years ago. And she knew how Marcus felt about committees.

  With her pathetic squad of tourist bots, she continued her search.

  * * *

  Valerie pounded on the flimsy wooden door. It rattled in its frame, and the knocking should have awakened Lazarus.

  “I’m coming!” came the cross reply from inside. The door opened inward and Ellen Tanaka, bleary eyed, peered out. She was dressed (for the day, or, like Valerie, had she never gone to bed? Valerie guessed the latter). “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe Marcus and the others. Grab a datasheet, let’s find an unoccupied office or meeting room somewhere where we can spread out, and I’ll explain.”

  At the end of an isolated corridor they found an empty room with a long table. Valerie plugged in her datasheet, pulling up a holo of Phoebe base’s surface structures. She said, “Watch closely.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “There,” Valerie said. “Did you catch that stutter in the image?”

  “Ye-es. Wait a minute. How are we seeing this?”

  “From a tourist bot I marched across Phoebe. The rental center has an independent uplink to comsats, I imagine so sightseeing doesn’t compete for bandwidth with NASA business. The bot company’s link rebooted after the faux CME. Now keep watching.”

  The image hiccoughed three more times.

  Valerie said, “Now I’m switching to another bot.” The glitches continued. “Another.” More hiccoughs.

  “Interference?” Ellen asked.

  “I think so. And when a bot backs away even a little, the interference is no longer noticeable. I’ll bet we’re picking up a weak signal from inside the base.”

  * * *

  Marcus had a pounding headache. He was exhausted, short of breath, and a little sick to his stomach.

  He was succumbing to hypoxia.

  A month’s supply of oxygen waited in storage tanks outside the shelter’s sturdy metal hatch. Ice to electrolyze into yet more oxygen lay beneath the floor and behind every wall of the shelter.

  Breathing as shallowly as he could, Marcus hated the irony.

  Saturday morning, September 30

  Patrick rapped on the sturdy door of the Green Bank Observatory control room. He could hear music from inside. Half a minute passed without response, and he knocked harder. Still nothing.

  He resisted admitting himself with the access code he was not supposed to know. Revealing he knew the door code was no way to put off guard whoever was on duty inside.

  The observatory remained officially closed for the emergency, and Patrick had his choice of nearby empty offices to call from.

  “Control room,” a man answered. Over the phone, the music was recognizable. Jazz, with wailing sax.

  Patrick recognized the voice. If it had been anyone else, maybe he could have talked his way into what he needed. Not with Ian Wakefield. No matter how long they knew each other, Ian would never get past Patrick’s reputation.

  “Hey, Ian, it’s Patrick. You drew the short straw?”

  “Taking my turn.”

  Because the big dish was too precious to go unused. Someone had to baby-sit the controls and monitor the readouts, even though observation requests could be submitted over the net. This emergency was being treated like the average blizzard.

  “Would you let me in, please? Some status messages from the big dish look odd to me. I came in to review the system logs.”

  “Okay.” Click.

  Patrick returned to the locked door. The music had stopped; this time Ian heard the knock. One of the control room’s many computers streamed 3-V and showed a talking head. Audio was muted, but the crawl said plenty.

  “New attack?” Patrick asked.

  “Attacks. Tidal generator in Scotland. Several ethanol distilleries in Brazil.”

  “Bastards.”

  “Yeah.”

  Patrick waved at the curved console. “Where do you want me?”

  “Station six. Which system log?”

  Patrick named it.

  Ian frowned. “That’s nothing privileged. I would’ve mailed a soft copy to you. You don’t need to be in the control room.”

  “The world is going to hell. I feel like company today, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure. Sorry.” A burst of typing. “Okay, you should have your log now.”

  Someone needed to take action. Patrick had once flattered himself that he was a man of action. And by the actions he had taken, made everything so much worse.

  He had to fix things. He had to.

  A real man of action could have intimidated or coerced or just convinced Ian to provide the sysadmin password. But overweight, out-of-shape, middle-aged him? No way. He could not intimidate anyone.

  But he could be devious.

  After scrolling through the log file for a while, Patrick printed off a page—only what he printed came from a file he had tweaked on his office computer. He handed Ian the sheet, saying, “Something’s screwy here.”

  “The dish appears to be acting fine.”

  “Maybe so, but the telemetry and this log don’t agree.” Patrick slipped his hand into his pocket to activate the homemade device inside. It emitted a short clatter like jangling keys: auditory camouflage. He rolled his chair next to Ian’s. “You see?”

  Ian scratched his head. “Odd. Any idea what might cause the mismatch?”

  “I once saw something like this with the forty-five-foot dish. It turned out that the diagnostic server was missing an operating-system patch.”

  “Which data are correct? The telemetry or the detailed logs?”

  Patrick shrugged. “I need to see the executables to know what patches are installed. Log me in?”

  Ian turned back to his keyboard and pecked away. “There you go.”

  Patrick spent ten minutes scrolling through binary files, making an occasional hmm for effect. “Everything looks fine, patch-wise. I’m going home to cogitate. Log me off?”

  “Sure.”

  Back in his office, Patrick took the recorder from his pocket. It collected the faint RF emissions of keyboard electronics scanning for keystrokes. It was sensitive enough to pick up keystrokes from twenty feet away—only not through the control room’s shiel
ded walls. The keystrokes immediately after Patrick had activated his recorder were what Ian had typed to log in Patrick.

  He had Ian’s sysadmin-privileged user ID and password.

  * * *

  “So are you ready to be a good little terrorist?” Jonas radioed.

  Dillon was ready to be damn near anything, if it would release him from the claustrophobic shelter. “I won’t interfere,” he answered cautiously.

  “Good. Make sure you’re sealed up, and I’ll let you out.”

  Dillon double-checked his suit. “Confirmed.” The hatch opened, and he stepped outside. “Where are Lincoln and Felipe?” Dillon asked.

  “In shelters, taking a break.”

  Overhead, Earth was at about half phase. They were over Central Asia. With his visor set to magnify, ominous black clouds dotted the Middle East. New petroleum fires?

  “Our doing?” Dillon asked.

  “Excellent choice of pronoun. We’re in this together. And yes. Plus assorted other strikes that do not declare themselves so visually. A special today on ethanol distilleries and wind farms.”

  No matter that Dillon had resisted many such projects, seeing them destroyed was worse. The world was a funny place. “Explain something to me: How much longer can this go on?”

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Jonas laughed mirthlessly. “While we can. Till someone loses patience and blows apart our home away from home.”

  “You make this sound like a suicide mission.”

  “You should work on your reading-between-the-lines skills. If only you had the time.”

  Dillon shivered. “Why would you agree to such a thing? I certainly didn’t.”

  “Have you ever said no to Yakov and made it stick?” Pause. “I didn’t think so.”

  “Look,” Dillon said hastily, “don’t get me wrong. I hate big engineering projects like, like … what we’re standing on. Over the years, in my own way, I’ve held back lots of so-called progress. But resistance is one thing and”—he gestured overhead—“that is quite something else.”

  “Missing your luxury suite already, boss?” Jonas’s hand rested on the coil gun that hung from his tool belt.

  Dillon edged away. “You don’t want to die. I can feel it. We can all run and…”

  “Right. Have Yakov sic the Russian intelligence apparatus on us.”

  “We’re dead if we stay. You said it yourself.”

  “If the Russians don’t nab us, the CIA will. It’s not like either side’s radars could fail to notice escape pods setting off or reentering the atmosphere. If we aren’t quietly executed, or with a tad more formality sentenced to the chair, then what? Guantanamoed for life? After what we’ve done, how long would that be?”

  “We have nothing to lose by trying,” Dillon protested.

  “We don’t. Our families do. If we don’t follow Yakov’s script, how do you think the world will treat our loved ones? They’ll be associated forever with what we did. Disgraced. Ostracized. Hounded by reporters, the curious, and revenge seekers. And by the way, our wives will be left penniless after our victims’ families sue.

  “Accept it, boss. There is no way out. We keep attacking until PS-1 is blown apart. Then people can suspect whatever they choose. No one will be able to prove who was responsible.”

  Hope of a sort, if only for Crystal. Dillon sought comfort in that, but a new implication shook him. Everyone on Phoebe had seen them. “So the people in the shelter on Phoebe…?”

  “Collateral damage.” Jonas said. “Once the missiles come down our throats, no one will be up here for a long time. Debris will make it too dangerous.”

  “And if no one blows us up?”

  “Oh you innocent fool.” Jonas turned away. “There are oil-shale mines across Canada. Why don’t we see if a bit more vigor will put us out of our misery a little sooner?”

  * * *

  “We have no choice but to destroy PS-1,” a White House adviser insisted. She had teleconned into Mount Weather from the District.

  Tyler Pope could not retrieve the woman’s name. He found these political geeks as interchangeable as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Frick and Frack, the Olsen twins, Eng and Chang, Shemp and Curly Joe—

  Stop that, Tyler ordered himself. It was not only that he thought the woman was flat-out wrong. Which she was: As essential as it was to stop the attacks, it had to be done another way. A way that would not plunge the country back into its Day After the Crudetastrophe hopelessness. And, damn it, he did not care how launching missiles played with focus groups in Peoria.

  He was not the only one struggling. At the front of the conference room General Rodgers had pressed her lips so thin, the wonder was she hadn’t cut someone with them. It was no secret she wanted to take out PS-1 with an overwhelming salvo of missiles.

  After frantic efforts in a dozen missile silos, finally they could launch. ICBM guidance systems had been reprogrammed. Nuclear payloads too heavy to lob up to PS-1’s orbit had been swapped out for muscular post-boost vehicles fitted with lighter high-explosive warheads.

  Had throwing nukes at PS-1 been doable, they still would not want to. Nukes in space would violate the Outer Space Treaty—as if America was not already living a public-relations disaster. And nukes released electromagnetic pulses. Unlike the recent, imaginary CME, an EMP in space would fry satellites.

  But the missiles would not launch until President Gibson ordered a launch. And the president had requested another review of his options, because, “We need to be sensitive to world opinion.”

  Was world opinion so difficult to read? Death and destruction rained from the skies! If it came to using strategic missiles to end the slaughter, what rational person could object?

  But for as long as they debated they were not launching a slit-their-own-throat assault on PS-1. A stupid reprieve remained a reprieve.

  As the discussion dragged on—and as new reports of attacks from PS-1 kept trickling in—even Tyler began to waver. Because no one, least of all him, had had an alternative to offer. He was among the most senior analysts in the Agency’s Russian section, and his failure stung.

  At some point waiting for a new option to turn up became the stupid plan. At some point they would have to cut their losses, even at the cost of destroying the powersat and losing access to Phoebe. And they had to act before another government shot down PS-1, making the U.S. look impotent and paralyzed.

  “To continue,” Rodgers said. Without raising her voice, some trick of voice quality compelled obedience, and the White House aide then posturing trailed off. “Presume the decision is made to send missiles against the powersat. Our analysts have assembled several attack scenarios.” Rodgers pulled up a PowerHolo chart that summarized a number of options. “In overview first, our launch options include…”

  None of the civilians—Pope included—was qualified to make a choice.

  A few friendly governments claimed to accept American protestations of innocence in the attacks. No one doubted PS-1 was the instrument of destruction. Everyone blamed America for building the powersat, and blamed her again for not ending the attacks. While Russia sat back and gloated.…

  Major Garcia leaned over and whispered, “Where is your brain trust this morning?”

  “I let them sleep in,” Tyler whispered back. Because, really, what benefit could have come of them sitting through this bombast?

  “Good call,” Garcia said.

  * * *

  A quick walk-through suggested Patrick and Ian were the only people in Jansky Lab. The control room was on the second floor, so Patrick picked a random office on the first. Before touching anything, he put on latex gloves. It would not do for the authorities to find his fingerprints here. The authorities would be here soon, looking.

  The workstation came up, as it was meant to, with a log-on screen. He rebooted, this time interrupting the start-up sequence with the keyboard combination that forced the computer to run from a flash drive. He installed a telephony app
lication that would, at the appointed hour, phone out for him.

  As of that moment, the clock was ticking.

  He opened the window, the better to locate this office from outside. When he found the open window, he trampled the grass beneath it. Then he tossed a rock through the glass. Whoever investigated the bomb-threat call would think a stranger had reached through the broken glass to unlatch the window.

  * * *

  Patrick backed his pickup truck to the testing shed where he had long stored his “SETI” transmitter. The transmitter, a toolbox, a spool of heavy-duty power cable, and a two-wheeled hand truck were on the truck’s flatbed, tied and padded for their short trip, by the time his robodialed call went out.

  At least he hoped the call had gone out. If he had screwed up that, he had already failed.

  “I have placed a bomb in the Jansky Lab,” the computer-synth voice would have told the Green Bank 911 operator. “You need to evacuate the building at once.”

  There was no bomb, of course, but Patrick needed the control room empty so no one could follow what he was doing. He needed a few hours unsupervised—and searching every nook and cranny of Jansky Lab would take hours. Computer gear, souvenir gadgets, electronics memorabilia, and esoteric paraphernalia littered every office, storeroom, closet, and lab. Boxes and crates lined the hallways, old stuff due to be carted away and new stuff yet to be unpacked.

  At the first faint wail of a siren, Patrick sped toward the big dish. When he came to the interior gate he circled around it off-road rather than use his access card. A mile down the road, he backed his truck up to the Green Bank Telescope’s ground-level elevator.

  The sirens were much louder now.

  Ironically, he had never intended, nor expected, his transmitter to be used. But to make the interminable make-believe credible—to convince everyone that he had no idea where the Verne probe had gone—he had had to work on the transmitter doggedly and diligently. He had had to convince really smart Ph.D. physicists and radio astronomers that he thought his transmitter would work.

  It would work.

  And that was damned fortunate. He saw no other way to mitigate what he had done.

  Patrick stacked everything on his hand truck and rolled it to the elevator. The dish was tipped, tracking … whatever. Leaving the hand truck by the elevator, he let himself into the nearby trailer. With the purloined sysadmin password, he took local control of the GBT. Ian would have evacuated the control room by now.