Energized

by Edward M. Lerner

  With the local controls Patrick suspended the observation schedule and ordered the dish into its maintenance mode: stationary, the dish in its birdbath position, one end of the L-shaped instrument arm pointing straight up. He walked back to the GBT itself and rolled his gear into the elevator car.

  The car doors opened about two hundred feet above the ground. The wind whistled through his hair. Grateful for the handrails, trying not to look down, he rolled his gear along the walkway in the instrument arm’s presently horizontal segment. Another elevator took him straight up the instrument arm’s now-vertical segment to the receiver room.

  Only when his work was done, receiver room would be a misnomer.

  The turret on the room’s roof could house up to eight modular receivers. Any receiver could be rotated into position at the dish’s secondary focus. The modular bays in the turret implemented a common interface, to which all receivers were designed and built. Standardization made it easy to plug in units designed to receive at new wavelengths.

  Standardization had let Patrick design a transmitter to mate with a bay in the turret.

  Climbing a stepladder Patrick poked his head through an access panel on the receiver-room ceiling—almost five hundred feet above the ground. A mile away, vehicles surrounded the Jansky Lab. Emergency lights pulsed red on the fire trucks, blue on the Pocahontas County Sheriff’s cruisers.

  So far, so good.

  He climbed down and started unplugging and removing a receiver module. By the time he had installed his transmitter module and rotated it into focus, he shook from exhaustion and dripped with sweat.

  He had to rest before continuing. He unfolded the datasheet in his pocket and used a fiber-optic cable to tap the receiver room’s network access. He found the bastards on PS-1 still at it; on their current pass over North America, they were destroying Canadian oil-shale facilities.

  There was no time to rest.

  The turret’s modular bays, for all their general-purpose flexibility, were limited in one respect: they were meant to accommodate receivers. They provided a correspondingly modest amount of electrical power.

  He needed to transmit, and with lots and lots of power. For that he had to drop power cable down the instrument arm to the telescope’s six-hundred-kilowatt, diesel-powered backup generator.

  There was no time to rest.

  At last he finished. He rode down to the ground and retreated to the ground-level trailer, in the shadow of the big dish.

  Marcus had been as good as his word: PS-1’s orbital parameters and real-time position as determined by GPS were both available online. Trying not to think about Marcus, Patrick input the data into one of the observatory’s smaller dishes.

  The powersat was unmistakable. Harmonics, or side lobes of the power beam, or individual transmitters out of tolerance? Patrick wasn’t sure and didn’t care. Valerie would know. He tried not to think about her, either.

  Only Patrick couldn’t not think about Marcus and Valerie. Not when Valerie was Patrick’s best friend, when sometimes she seemed like his only friend. While the big dish slewed into position, Patrick dashed off a mea culpa to Valerie. Just in case …

  When the dish settled into position and began to track PS-1, Patrick initiated transmission.

  An intense microwave beam, focused by the world’s largest fully steerable antenna, blasted skyward.

  Saturday, midday, September 30

  “The beam shut off!” Felipe shouted, from where he sat tethered by a main computer complex.

  Dillon twitched. “How can that be?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Go wake Jonas.”

  “I’m awake,” Jonas radioed from one of the tiny shelters. “I’ll be out in a minute. And I’ll wake Lincoln. The problem could be electrical.”

  Earth was at full phase, meaning PS-1 was between Earth and sun. The four of them—the four terrorists—were on the solar-cell side of the satellite, in direct sunlight. Dillon could only see a bit of Earth, glimpsed between his boots through a small view port. Palls of smoke stained western Canada, from the attacks on oil-shale mines.

  Only Dillon could not bear to think of himself as a terrorist. Saboteur seemed a nobler way to resist “progress.” The powersat’s beam had failed? Great!

  Jonas emerged from his shelter and sped hand over hand by guide cable to join Felipe. Studying the console, he muttered under his breath.

  “What’s the problem?” Dillon asked.

  “The controls say damn near every transmitter on the platform went out of tolerance. Some safety system cut the beam.”

  “This is a test bed,” Dillon said. “I guess it failed the test.” We’ve done what we can, so let’s get out of here!

  “That’s interesting.” Jonas did not sound as though he was responding to Dillon. “This bears looking into.”

  “What’s interesting?” Felipe asked.

  Jonas pointed at the console. “The uplink monitor. Someone is beaming at us.”

  Dillon winced. “Is it our turn to be cooked?” He had resigned himself to death, or so he had told himself—but not to dying that way. Poetic justice be damned.

  “That’s the funny thing,” Jonas said. “This new beam carries only a tiny fraction of the power that PS-1 emits. Could emit. Still, from the timing, this new beam must have something to do with our beam cutting out.”

  “The incoming beam drowns out any beacons?” Dillon guessed. Because if so, maybe they were done up here.

  “That’s not it,” Jonas said. “Well, okay, an incoming beam might prevent us from hearing ground beacons. But the targeting beacon is the first thing to go up in smoke. I had tweaked the beam-control code first thing to capture the exact lat/long of the beacon before we open fire. After the beacon’s gone, we keep aiming at the associated lat/long.

  “When our beam stopped a few minutes ago, the target beacon was already gone. It’ll be trivial, just not quite as accurate, to work entirely by entering target lat/longs up here.”

  Lincoln had finally emerged from his shelter. He must have been listening to the conversation. “That’s a lot about what’s not our problem. So what is?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jonas answered. “Yet.”

  * * *

  In a cacophony of beeps and ring tones, and a dozen aides bursting into telecon rooms across the country, the presidentially ordered strategy review shuddered to a halt. Because:

  —The NSA’s primary East Coast telecomm eavesdropping station—euphemistically the Navy Information Operations Command—had gone deaf. Or, rather, someone had begun shouting too loud for NIOC to hear anything else. The prelude to an attack? An attack by PS-1?

  —Because PS-1’s latest assault, on a Saskatchewan oil-shale mine, had stopped abruptly before inflicting any significant damage.

  —Elint satellites reported that PS-1 had cut off its power beam! Another, far weaker, power beam appeared to be scattering off and penetrating through the powersat itself. From a hasty analysis of the scattered microwaves, probable beam strength: a half megawatt. Probable origin: West Virginia.

  “Where is NIOC?” Tyler Pope demanded. He had to shout to make himself heard.

  “Sugar Grove,” an NSA guy called back.

  “And where the hell is that?”

  “West Virginia. Middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone.”

  In other words, not far from Green Bank. Pope called Valerie’s room. No one answered. He called Ellen’s room, and no one answered there, either.

  His chair crashed as he leapt to his feet. On his way out of the room he caught General Rodger’s arm. “Make sure the Pentagon and White House know the attacks have halted. Tell them someone found a way to suppress the beam from PS-1.” Only who the hell was that someone? “Make sure they know we can delay a decision on a missile attack.”

  “Understood,” she said. “Where are you going?”

  “To find an astronomer.”

  * * *

  For long minutes, Dillon basked in the
inactivity. Maybe PS-1 had been disabled. Maybe the worst of the horror was past. Maybe—

  “Aha!” Jonas said. “PS-1 has sensors to pinpoint out-of-tolerance transmitters. The beam from the ground is saturating the sensors, which misread the situation as lots of our transmitters crapping out. That’s why software cut our beam. Once we’re over the horizon from the transmitter, we should be able to restart.”

  “Three hours later, we’ll be back in line of sight of whoever figured out how to jam us. And for all we know, another transmitter waits just over the horizon, ready to keep us neutered. What then?” Felipe asked.

  “Still reading code,” Jonas said. “I can’t answer yet, but this looks useful. The shutoff code is in a recent overlay to the control program, not very integrated. If I can bypass it…”

  “We’ll be back online, even on this side of the world,” Felipe said. “So then do we ignore this beam from the ground?”

  Jonas said, “In the long run, soaking up these microwaves can’t be good for us or PS-1.”

  Because it’s healthier to take a missile down the throat? Dillon thought hysterically. “With no beacon to aim at wherever this signal comes from, I don’t see that we have any choice.” Other than taking the hoppers back to Phoebe and grabbing escape pods.

  “Oh, we’ll have a choice,” Jonas said, “as soon as I tweak some other code. The beam will be our beacon.”

  * * *

  Thad stared at a piece of safety apparatus that had always terrified him. The chemical oxygen generator would run 600°F hot, releasing oxygen for as long as it burned. Unless the candle had the least bit of contamination, in which case it was as apt to explode as to burn.

  But his head was pounding, and he was exhausted.

  So: Light the candle, or in a few minutes they would all slip into comas from the lack of oxygen.

  Gritting his teeth, Thad struck the firing pin in the igniter module.

  Blessed heat and oxygen began to flow.

  They would live a little while longer.…

  * * *

  “What in the world?” Ellen muttered from across the room.

  Valerie looked up. Ellen’s bot’s eye view showed a stretch of dark plain dotted with light-shaded … Valerie could not guess what she saw. In the image reconstructed from lidar scans, light shades denoted surfaces that were comparatively reflective of UV light. Scattered patches of exposed ice?

  “Move closer to one of the things,” Valerie suggested.

  The bot sidled closer, and the blobby shape in the foreground became, maddeningly, almost recognizable. Other objects came clearer, too, and she recognized a clipboard and, yards away, a pen.

  “This looks like a wad of cloth,” Ellen said.

  Laid flat, the object was a T-shirt.

  “A blowout!” Ellen said. “This is bad.”

  Terrified of what she would find, Valerie sent two bots racing toward the base’s main air lock—

  Where inner and outer hatches gaped, exposing Phoebe base to vacuum.

  * * *

  Through bots’ eyes, Valerie stared in dismay.

  With Ellen’s guidance, Valerie had—somehow—maneuvered two bots into the depths of the base. Rather than figure out how bots could—if they could—descend a ladder, she had run them into an open shaft, sending them into slow-motion falls. After a second tumble, she had two bots on the shaft floor outside the radiation-shelter entrance.

  Another two bots, one at the top of the shelter’s access shaft and the second in the main corridor, daisy-chained toward the ad hoc network that reached across Phoebe back to the bot corral and its high-powered, comsat-linked, radio transceiver. Two more bots waited at the air lock, one inside, one out. The moment the hatches closed, Valerie would lose her tenuous connection.

  The bots outside the radiation shelter stared up at a latch jammed with a pry bar. The pry bar did not look heavy, or difficult to remove. Only a bot could not reach the latch …

  One bot standing on another still could not reach the latch. Could the bots find stuff to drag here, with which to improvise a ramp or staircase? Conceivably—if, first, they did not have to somehow climb the human-scaled ladder to find the stuff. And if the bots’ batteries were not almost out of juice. Nor were there more bots to send: she and Ellen had dispatched every bot with any significant charge in its batteries.

  In desperation, Valerie jumped a bot. It had no jump mode, but by contorting its tentacles and then twitching them, she got a sort-of leap that lifted the bot a few inches above the floor. As it floated like a dandelion puff in Phoebe’s insignificant gravity, she wanted to scream. Instead, while the first bot drifted down, she fine-tuned her technique with the second. It leapt perhaps a foot into the air. The first bot landed and she jumped it again—

  And landed it on the latch!

  “Are you ready to close the air lock?” Valerie asked Ellen.

  “Just say when.”

  Valerie edged the bot into position. Four limbs coiled around the latch itself. Three grabbed the pry bar. The remaining tentacle pressed against the jamb beside the hatch, for alignment. She heaved.

  Nothing.

  Loosening her grip she wiggled the bot into another position. The pry bar shifted! She changed her grip and pulled again. And again.

  * * *

  There was nothing left to try.

  Here and there, people sipped dregs of oh-two from counterpressure-suit tanks by taking turns with the helmets. Most people hunched over paper or datasheets, recording their last thoughts, wishes, and wills.

  Marcus had written notes to his parents and brother. He had written to Ellen, assuring her he had come to Phoebe by his own choice, and thanking her for her many kindnesses. He had written Lindsey, wishing her well, because life really was too short to carry a grudge. And because he really needed the closure, the better to say good-bye to someone truly special.

  If Valerie felt as he did—and he thought she did—their brief time together was about to morph into trauma. He was about to become another man who made promises he could not keep and then did not come home.

  Marcus shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Was there a noise beyond the pounding in his head? A grating, rasping sound?

  He edged through the crowd, toward the noise. Toward the hatch. He was so short of breath, he could hardly walk.

  * * *

  The bot teetered on its perch on the latch, the pry bar removed and still in its grasp.

  How could she get the attention of the people inside? On Earth, dropping the pry bar to the floor would raise a clamor. Here? As the tool gently landed, it would scarcely make a sound.

  Valerie swung the pry bar against the closed hatch. From the bot’s precarious perch on the hatch, she could pull back only a couple inches. How much noise could it even make inside?

  She swung it again. Again. Again. Again …

  * * *

  Patrick knew the instant his luck turned: the lesser telescope with which he kept watch on the powersat had just gone blind.

  PS-1 had resumed beaming. At Green Bank, it would seem.

  He had failed—again.

  The safest place for him was in this control trailer. The quarter inch of steel plate all around that shielded the big telescope from the trailer’s electronics would shield him. But like a metal spoon in a microwave oven, the steel plate could absorb only so much energy without melting or arcing.

  He told himself the telescope itself, sixteen million pounds of metal, would absorb most of the beam. He reminded himself that the telescope absorbed lightning strikes several times a year. He told himself that, before long, orbital motion would drop PS-1 behind the horizon.

  He might yet survive his latest failure.

  Creaking came from the direction of the big dish. He imagined metal softening. Warping. Bending. Sagging.

  Then: piercing squeals. The tortured shrieks of Brobdingnagian motors, gears, and bearings seizing up.

  He jumped at a tremendous bang! D
iesel fuel vaporized, the tank exploding? With a crackle and a shower of sparks, power in the trailer died. In utter darkness, he felt … hot. He told himself the sensation was only his imagination.

  Renewed creaks and groans, louder and more ominous. Tearing sounds.

  Then a rumble like the end of the world. Only it got louder and louder and louder and …

  * * *

  The rasping stopped—or, more likely, had never existed in the first place. Marcus pondered staying where he was. But then, faintly, he heard tapping. He resumed walking. He was gasping by the time he reached the hatch. Definite tapping.

  “Hello?” he called.

  A few people looked up at him, puzzled. Most did not stir. No one answered, inside the shelter or out.

  “Hello?” he called again, louder.

  Not quite rhythmic: continued tapping. Like someone torturing a nail.

  Everyone was about to die in here. Someone was out there. Although the hatch had never budged since Dillon and his people left, Marcus tugged on the inner latch.

  The hatch blasted open.

  And all the dank and fetid air in the shelter spewed out after it.

  CONQUEST | 2023

  Saturday, early afternoon, September 30

  The gale blew Marcus from the shelter.

  People screamed. Papers, datasheets, emergency-ration wrappers, and drink bulbs pelted Marcus, then whipped past him up the access shaft. As the wind lifted him, too, but more slowly, the hatch rebounded from the shaft wall to slam into his side and send him spinning.

  Someone shoved him aside to clamber up the ladder into the station. Someone in a blue counterpressure suit and helmet.

  Suddenly air gushed the other way: down the shaft. Toward the shelter.

  Marcus crashed into a wall. Debris swirled about. As did an eight-legged something. A silvery tourist bot.

  “I knew you would hear me,” he told Valerie. And passed out.