* * *
“So what shall it be, hmm?” Jonas floated above a terminal, hands poised. “I see beacons lit for a solar farm in Cuba, a garbage-fueled municipal power plant on Aruba, and a tidal power plant in the Azores. What’s your pleasure?”
Dillon shivered. Pleasure? “You know how I feel.”
“I’ll take that as a vote for something dramatic, something to get this over quickly.” Jonas studied his terminal. “More than cigars will be smoking in Cuba.”
“You really think that’s necessary?”
“I do indeed, boss.” Something changed in Jonas’s voice, and his customary mocking tone vanished. “Because if we don’t get a response soon we’ll have to up the ante. None of us want that.”
“Up the ante?”
“Uh-huh,” Jonas said flatly. “Population centers.”
* * *
“Shit, shit, shit!”
Abandoning a systematic search, Tyler Pope dashed toward the sudden, heartfelt curse. Valerie Clayburn did not strike him as the cussing kind, but these were not ordinary times and the pissed-off voice sure sounded like hers. He found Valerie and Ellen Tanaka in an out-of-the-way meeting room.
“There you are,” he began. Then he noticed—in grayscale, the shading somehow offending his sense of nature—a holo of what must be Phoebe and its base. At the heart of the image, an air-lock hatch ajar. And obstructing much of his view, a white-on-red blinking banner that shouted: Bots lost. User account frozen pending investigation. “What’s going on?”
The women exchanged anguished glances. Ellen nodded.
“First things first,” Valerie said. She opened another holo to show a hatch in an interior room or shaft, the door latch jammed with a pry bar. “People were trapped inside the Phoebe radiation shelter. Ellen and I had marched tourist bots across Phoebe to see what we could learn. This image was taken a few minutes ago.”
“Were trapped?” Tyler echoed.
Frowning, Valerie opened a third image: a blurry, canted, still shot of someone emerging from the hatch. “This is from maybe a minute before you joined us. I think the bot that took the picture is spinning in midair, knocked off the hatch latch from which it had removed the pry bar. But thin air, because we found the station in vacuum. The shelter hatch exploded open.”
“And what’s happening now?” he asked. “How are the people doing? What can they tell us about events on PS-1?”
“I don’t know,” Valerie said. She gestured at the original holo and its flashing disconnect banner. “Closing the air lock broke the radio connection to the bots inside the base. I’ve gotten myself blacklisted for seeming to have lost rentals.”
“This I can fix,” Tyler said, squinting at the logo in a corner of the images. “Out of Body Tours.”
As he reached into a coat pocket for his cell, it rang. “Pope.”
“It’s hitting the fan again,” Charmaine Powell said. By dashing off in search of Valerie, he had left his protégée doing the honors for the CIA in the war room. “General Rodgers wants you back, pronto.”
“Meeting still flailing?” he guessed.
“The attacks have resumed.”
“Okay, keep me informed. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He hung up, surfed to Out of Body Tours, and rang the tech-support number.
“Out of Body—”
“National emergency,” Tyler interrupted. “Your CEO, now.”
“What’s the nature of your prob—?” the tech-support guy began, squirming in his seat.
“Forget your script. The CEO, now. Homeland Security authorization code…” Tyler needed a moment to recall the string of digits. “You do know what’s happening in the world?”
“A … a moment, sir. I need to put you on hold.” Click.
“Homeland Security?” Ellen asked.
Pope shrugged. “I get fewer questions and more cooperation that way.” Because cooperating with Homeland Security might mean saving your own hide.
The frozen image on the phone dissolved into a puzzled-looking blond woman. “Regina Foster. What’s this about, Mister…?”
Whether it was playing the national emergency card or his government expense account, in three minutes Tyler had the CEO’s promise to transfer the entire bot operation on Phoebe to Valerie’s control. Everyone on tech support would be at her disposal.
“But I don’t know for how long we can keep it up,” Foster said. “I want to help, not that I understand what’s going on, but our Phoebe facility is running off backup batteries. We buy power from NASA, and their nuke hasn’t returned to service since the CME.”
Tyler’s phone gave a call-waiting chirp, and the name on his caller ID should not have been coming up. It wouldn’t unless yet more shit had hit the fan—and it was that kind of day.
He said, “All the more reason to make things happen now. Work it out with Dr. Clayburn. I’m transferring the—”
“I don’t have a cell,” Valerie interrupted.
He transferred the bot lady to Ellen’s phone and took his incoming call.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” said a soldier in combat gear: the leader of the squad left to watch over Valerie’s family.
Valerie must have recognized the sergeant, too. “Simon! My parents! Patrick! Are they all right?”
* * *
“Your family is fine, ma’am,” the soldier said. “They’re still at your house, with half my squad. Dr. Burkhalter left this morning.”
Valerie stared, her heart pounding in her chest, hearing disaster in the young man’s carefully flat and expressionless voice. “Why aren’t you with my family?”
“Mr. Pope, sir?”
“Go ahead, Sergeant,” Pope said. “What’s going on?”
“Yes, sir. While watching the doctor’s house, I monitored the police bands. The county sheriff received a bomb threat…”
Methodically, dispassionately, the soldier reported. Then he said, “Sir? I can’t begin to describe this next part. May I show you?”
“Go ahead,” Pope said.
The sergeant disappeared, replaced by sky and woods. The image swung crazily, then zoomed. But at what?
“Where was this vid taken, Sergeant?” Pope asked.
“From the top of the NRAO water tower, sir.”
Valerie squinted at the jumble of white arcs, lines, and crumpled white … paper? The heap had no meaning to her without some indication of scale. Only as she stared, a squat white something, peeking out from beneath the rubble, caught her eye. Tiny: like a shoebox. And she saw something black, even smaller, in a trough of the rubble pile. The black whatever-it-was reminded her of something.
The cab of one of Simon’s many toy trucks, likewise squashed.
The scale clicked in.
“The Green Bank Telescope has collapsed,” she said in awe and horror.
“Yes, ma’am,” the soldier said.
“The bomb?” she asked. Why would anyone…?
“No, ma’am.”
Pope helped her to a chair. “I came looking for you because someone was beaming microwaves from the quiet zone. Somehow, the beam stopped the PS-1 attacks … for a time.”
Valerie shivered. “Until, this.”
“So it appears,” Pope said.
That “shoebox” was the onsite trailer for maintenance control of the GBT. She knew that trailer very well. And she knew someone who drove a black pickup. Who, her heart told her, would be found inside that crushed trailer. Beneath many tons of wreckage.
“Oh, Patrick,” she whispered. “What have you done now?”
Saturday, late afternoon, September 30
Those assholes, Thad thought every few seconds. The curse, unbidden and unhelpful, returned no matter how urgent the matter to which he attended. To restart the base was complicated under any circumstances, and he was pretty damned sure no one had ever had to undertake a restart after a blowout. Or with dozens of tourists underfoot. Or with the station chief in the infirmary, doped up to his eyeballs.
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Assholes. Jonas and his buddies had left almost eighty people to smother in their own fumes. It hadn’t been enough to strand everyone by taking away every last hopper?
“Hey, Thad,” someone radioed.
With his head still throbbing from a hypoxia-induced migraine, Thad needed a few seconds to place the voice. “Go ahead, Chuck.”
“The power plant restarted without a hitch. I’m ready to send some juice.”
“Excellent,” said Dino Agnelli. He was flat on the floor, his head inside the main comm console. “Then we can get some heat in this place.”
“Let’s not take any chances,” Thad radioed Chuck. “Start at ten percent.”
“Ten percent. You got it.”
And Thad’s status board said they did. “Good job, Chuck. Stay there for a bit, in case there are any snags.”
Because there would be snags. The assholes.
Thad routed power to central heating, then shut down the emergency fuel cells with which he had restarted the base.
Dino inched out of the console. “Main comm is a total loss, Thad. They did a real number on it. Sorry.”
What if anyone found out they was me? Thad shivered, and it had nothing to do with the station’s chill. “Can you fix it?”
“I’ll have to assemble a new transceiver from scratch. In theory, we have spares of everything.” Dino stood. “With luck nothing that I need blew out the air lock.”
“Assholes,” Thad answered.
“You got that right. We’re damned lucky not to have lost anyone. You want the good news?”
“Absolutely.”
Dino settled into the command center’s second chair and did something at its console. “… continue to rage out of control. Spacecraft and, with few exceptions, aircraft remain grounded worldwide. Meanwhile, in breaking news, powersat attacks have resumed after an unexplained brief hiatus. Joining us live from Havana, BBC correspondent—”
“Turn that off,” Thad ordered. “How the hell is that good news?” Or even news? From the moment crew had stepped outside after their escape, people had been tuning into the radio and 3-V reports streaming down from broadcast satellites in higher orbits.
“I wired a spare helmet radio to the main antenna,” Dino said, clicking off the newscast. “By good news, I meant only that now everyone inside can know what’s going on. If they want to know.” A long pause. “So are we going to live through this?”
“Yeah.” Thad even half believed what he said. “With the nuke running, we have power for years. That means we have oh-two and water for years.”
“Not food for years, though. Especially not with so many guests.”
Because no one would be coming to get them. Not while PS-1 …
Assholes.
Thad checked the work board. Five crew and Marcus remained outside. What, exactly, Marcus did, Thad did not know. But had Marcus not heard, or hallucinated, the tapping at the hatch, they would all have died in the shelter. If the man intuited that his girlfriend would have left something useful on the surface—even though he had no idea what that might be—it was worth taking a look. Meanwhile, every moment of spacesuit chatter told folks listening groundside that people remained alive on Phoebe.
But who was listening, using a hefty enough dish to hear them? NASA, of course. But Yakov—in any event, some part of Russian intelligence—would be, too. Yakov, whose last-minute message had ordered: Do not reveal yourself unnecessarily, but the success of the mission comes first.
And Robin and her family remained forfeit.
Everyone working topside had been directed to limit their conversation to getting stuff up and running. Whatever they transmitted might be intercepted, and helmet “private” channels lacked military- or intel-grade encryption. Thad and Savannah Morgan had argued (doubtless, for very different reasons) that they leave it to NASA—and to someone they knew at NASA—to ask for any report. NASA and military comsats could reach Phoebe as readily as had the commercial broadcast satellites.
Do not reveal yourself unnecessarily, but the success of the mission comes first.
The mission. Thad now knew what it was. And that he had made the mission possible. How many thousand deaths were on his conscience?
And how many deaths were yet to come?
* * *
Marcus stood near the base’s main air lock, tethered to guide cables, looking about. But looking for what? Valerie, give me a sign.
He saw the brilliant star that was The Space Place—without hoppers, unreachable. He saw base workers reactivating gear from the CME shutdown. All around the air lock and leading off to mines, distilleries, and factories, he saw the endlessly scuffed, scraped, and scarred surface. He saw work bots scuttling about on chores of their own.
And one bot, well out toward the too-close horizon, gamboling.
Transferring tethers to a guide cable that led toward the strange bot, he set off for a closer look. Halfway there, he could tell the bot was a tourist model. As if the bot saw him, too, it ceased its odd behavior. When he reached it, the bot was motionless.
He muted his helmet mike. “Val?” he asked, feeling foolish. “Valerie?”
The bot extended a limb to scratch at the surface. Ice glittered where it scraped away the asphalt-dark coating. A circle. Two dots.
A smiley face!
Because via the bot, through his visor, she had recognized his face? Read his lips? It could be.
The bot resumed drawing … no, writing.
He mouthed, “What do you want me to do?”
The bot continued its scratching. As it wrote, Marcus captured pictures with his helmet camera. He thought he understood what she had in mind. No way did he have the computer skills to implement what she proposed.
Very methodically, he obliterated the message with his boot tip.
* * *
With four people inside and its hatch closed, the base command center was full, if still nothing like the erstwhile crowding in the radiation shelter. With only a blinking cursor on the main screen, Marcus found the wait unbearable. And then—
Letter by letter, a message formed: We have visual. Test audio.
“This is Stankiewicz,” Thad said. He had taken one of the room’s two chairs. Marcus and the rest stood behind him.
Loud and clear. Pause. This is Valerie Clayburn, radio astronomer and designated keyboarder. With me are Ellen Tanaka, NASA, and TLAs.
Thad said, “With me on this end are Marcus Judson and Dino Agnelli, both NASA contractors, and Savannah Morgan, civilian with the Air Force.”
“TLAs?” Marcus whispered.
Savvy whispered back, “Three-letter agencies. CIA and NSA, most likely. I suspect NSA wizards helped implement your friend’s clever idea.”
A clever idea Dino and Savvy had had to implement unaided at this end. Comm protocols were hardly Marcus’s forte. He gathered that the link involved tunneling a covert connection through the Out of Body Tours wireless network, then bot by bot across Phoebe to the base. With the nuclear plant once again feeding power to the bot corral, they had bots to spare.
Whatever privacy they had on the link came of subtlety, not security. It was a Catch-22 situation. Without mathematically robust, NSA-blessed, encryption software on Phoebe, anyone on the ground had no acceptable way to send such software to Phoebe. All that Savvy hoped to achieve with standard Internet encryption was to deter curious employees at Out of Body Networks.
The uplink from Earth had to hide inside the bot command stream. To indicate, for example, “Turn twenty degrees clockwise and walk forward,” entailed very few bits. Only text messaging, painfully slow, fit within the low-bandwidth uplink channel.
The downlink to Earth, however, got to hide in the high-bandwidth streaming video from bot “eyes.” Bots normally streamed video with thirty-two bits of grayscale depth. Val’s improvisation took grayscale video of the surface and overwrote the three least significant bits. Three bits sufficed for audio and a grainy, slow frame-rate
video of the command center. Only a very discerning eye—and a suspicious mind—would notice anything amiss in the composite image.
A picture might or might not be worth a thousand words. What was not open for debate was that a decent picture took thousands of times more bits than words required.
Letter by letter, text crept across the command-center display. Where’s the station chief?
Thad said, “Irv is in the infirmary, but he’s stable. Shot by the bad guys.”
Who *are* the bad guys?
“Dillon Russo,” Marcus said. “I met him at the Cosmic Adventures training center in Houston, and I’m almost certain he’s a Resetter. And the three guys who trained with him. Russo said they all worked for him.”
Thanks. TLA says that for other reasons, we thought those four were the culprits.
New topic: NORAD is tracking a few dozen new objects in Earth orbit, not launched from the ground. Big things: about ten feet long. Preliminary analysis shows their orbits buzzing Phoebe. Any ideas?
“My guess?” Thad said. “The hoppers the bad guys didn’t need for themselves. We know the hoppers were missing from their garage, just not where they had gone.”
The groups brought each other up to date. When matters reached the attacks from and on the Green Bank Telescope, Val’s typing went to hell: missing letters, extra letters, transpositions.
No one commented on the glitches, but Marcus worried. In weeks of texting with Valerie, he had never seen typos like this.
* * *
Thad had little to say, reticent less as a matter of strategy than in dread of what, in his fear and guilt, he might blurt out.
He answered direct questions but volunteered nothing. Asked about the IR observatory, he radioed for someone on the surface to check it out. The pillaging of the observatory seemed only to verify existing TLA suspicions. He confirmed the base no longer had hoppers. No one admitted to knowing how the terrorists got guns to Phoebe, so his pleading ignorance fit right in.
We doon’t know why the GBT attaked..
“This spy versus spy shit is fascinating,” Thad snapped, “but suppose we get real.”
The typing stopped. Marcus glared.
“Let’s get to the basics,” Thad continued. “You can’t send a relief ship with supplies or to get poor Irv to a hospital. You can’t stop the attacks from PS-1. Nor, even if someone here is crazy enough to go up against armed terrorists, can we. Without hoppers, we can’t get to PS-1.
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