After getting into position, they unfolded and wrapped a dark gray blanket around themselves, covering their brightly colored counterpressure suits. While they drifted, any unwelcome observers might mistake them for a chunk of the exploded “escape pod.”
Marcus turned toward a tap on his left arm. Thad offered him a fiber-optic cable. Marcus nodded, took the end of the cable and jacked it into his helmet. “Thanks,” he said. He and Savvy repeated the process, and so on, until a fiber-optic ring around Verne connected everyone.
“Everybody comfy?” Dino asked.
“Just fine,” Thad said.
Savvy muttered something unintelligible.
“What’s that?” Marcus asked.
“Just fat fingers,” she said. She poked at the datasheet with which she had replaced Verne’s crunched flight computer. “Okay. Everything’s good.”
“So, Savannah,” Thad said, “what were you and Marcus whispering about just before we jumped?”
“Simply two friends wishing each other luck,” she said.
True as far as it went, Marcus thought. He did not add anything, just watched Earth as they continued to drift.
“Ready, gentlemen?” Savvy asked.
Even as they agreed, Marcus felt the probe shifting, felt faint vibrations from the attitude jets. The stars seemed to swing. The lights of Phoebe base fell from sight. With renewed trembling, the attitude jets arrested the spacecraft’s turn.
“And, go,” Savvy said.
* * *
Were they accelerating? Maybe. The sensation of weight was so subtle Marcus had to convince himself. Even at full throttle, they would accelerate at less than 1 percent of a standard gravity. But that acceleration would go on, and on, and on.…
The faint glow of the thruster exhaust was unconvincing. But in dimness lay safety: if someone on PS-1 did not know to look, and precisely where to look, Verne should be invisible.
A timer, a simulated speedometer, and a simulated odometer shone in separate corners of his HUD. In a few minutes, they had reached a brisk walking pace. PS-1 glittered ahead, larger than when they had set out. Even with his visor in image-enhancement mode, he could not yet make out the details.
Just four days ago, he had flown a skeletal, compressed gas–propelled hopper from Phoebe to PS-1. That had been exhilarating. That had been fun. Now, his heart pounded. His hands shook. Because this time he rode a hastily salvaged wreck?
Or because murderers with guns were at the other end?
“How are we doing?” Dino asked Savvy, sounding as edgy as Marcus felt.
“You mean, are we lost? No.”
Marcus kept his eye on the virtual instruments. Sixteen minutes. At around seventeen minutes, they reached fifteen miles per hour. They had come almost eighteen miles. Well, they had come thousands of miles—they, and Phoebe, and PS-1 all whipping around Earth at miles per second—but only the rate at which they closed on PS-1 mattered.
“Engine shutdown coming,” Savvy announced. “In ten, nine…”
At zero, the elusive sensation of weight vanished. The faint glow of the thruster exhaust vanished.
“Swinging us around,” she announced.
They had allowed not quite seven minutes, thruster turned off, to flip the spacecraft end for end. In that time, they would coast another fourteen miles.
This time, as the stars swung, it was PS-1 that disappeared from sight. Marcus fixed his eyes on the Earth, seeming near enough to touch. And yet Valerie felt so very far away.
Their trembling, slewing motion abruptly became a tumble.
“Oh, crap,” Savvy said. “Lost an attitude jet. I can compensate with some of the others. Only…”
“Only what?” Thad asked. He had hardly spoken the whole ride.
“Only it may take a little longer than we budgeted to complete the flip.”
Meaning, Marcus translated, too little time to decelerate once the flip was complete. Meaning they would come hurtling into PS-1.
* * *
As soon as he was airborne, Tyler radioed Langley.
“Powell,” Charmaine answered.
“It’s me, inbound. Help me out? Get me onto the director’s schedule, stat.”
“He’s not here,” she said. “He was called into the White House.”
“Good. They’ll both want to hear this.”
* * *
A Sunday afternoon summons to the embassy was out of the ordinary, but these were far from ordinary times. Still, as Yakov drove into the District, he wondered what this was about. When he arrived, he found he must speculate a while longer. The ambassador had been called away.
A secretary brought Yakov to the private office. He found his boss, the FSB station chief, there ahead of him.
“Good day, Dmitrii Federovich,” Yakov said. Were you also summoned?
“I am unconvinced of the day’s goodness, Yakov Nikolayevich.”
Not a very confident attitude, Yakov thought. “If I may ask, where is the ambassador?”
“Called to the White House.”
“That could be good or bad,” Yakov said.
“As may this.” His boss tapped an open but dormant datasheet. A holo popped open: five sparks in a shallow arc. “Titov”—the military’s Chief Center for Testing and Control of Space Assets—“saw escape pods launching from Phoebe. Five successful launches and one explosion.”
Of six pods, total. “Evacuations before a launch against PS-1, perhaps,” Yakov said.
Because people had been ordered to leave, via some comm channel yet to be identified? Or because the people on Phoebe had intercepted news broadcasts and had had the sense to bail out while they could? It did not matter which.
Dmitrii Federovich said, “But also repatriating those who witnessed the seizure of the station. Witnesses to the identity of your agents.”
“Soon to be sacrifices,” Yakov corrected. “Silent sacrifices.”
The door opened. The ambassador, his expression giving away nothing, crossed the room to take the seat behind his desk. “It is good that you have both arrived.”
“Ambassador,” Yakov answered cautiously, although something about Sokolov’s stiffness seemed off. As much as Yakov wanted to hear about the White House meeting, he did not presume to ask.
“I asked you here to express my growing concern,” the ambassador said. “Yesterday’s interruption of activity from PS-1 was most disturbing. So was the attack thereafter on West Virginia. It risked a touch of world sympathy for the Americans.”
Whose plan had it been to further anger the world by leaving American territory unmolested? Yakov answered only, “Our experts surmise it was necessary, for the powersat to continue in its task, that the West Virginia transmissions be disabled.”
Our, meaning FSB experts. Our as a reminder to Dimitrii that they were in this together.
But Dimitrii said nothing.
Yakov assured himself that he had taken every variable into account. The meddlesome radio observatory had delayed the endgame, but success must come, and would come … soon.
The most difficult variable to control was the nerve of his superiors.
“That brings us to another concern,” the ambassador said. “At some point, the powersat’s operations become counterproductive. Economies too weakened will buy less oil. You had assured us, Yakov Nikolayevich, that before we reached that juncture, PS-1 would cease operations—by ceasing to be.”
Suddenly, the ambassador grinned. “But all those misgivings were before, my friends.” He opened his disguised freezer and removed a bottle of vodka.
“Before?” Yakov echoed.
“Before a summons to the White House, so that President Gibson could advise me in person of the imminent missile launches.”
* * *
Four days in vacuum gear, with only short stints in the closet-sized shelters for respite. Four days with only emergency rations to eat. Four days without weight, and with precious little sleep. Four days of murder and mayhem. Fo
ur days of revulsion at the insults to Gaia, and shame for one’s own contribution.
Four days waiting to die.
Dillon had imagined things could not get worse. Once more he had been wrong.
“… NASA confirms reports of escape pods sighted leaving Phoebe. Transmissions from the pods indicate a complete evacuation, including the tourists and staff evacuated from The Space Place earlier in the week. At this time, no more is kno—”
He could switch off the broadcast but not his mind. The last shred of hope keeping him going was for Crystal. And what a sad, forlorn hope: that when he died, his part in this waking nightmare would remain uncertain, unknowable. That Crystal would not suffer for his failures.
Even that last, pitiful hope had now abandoned him. Among the evacuees on their way back to Earth, many knew who had left them to die.
* * *
“One hour,” Charmaine Powell said. “For your grand gesture, in-person plea, you got an entire hour’s delay.”
“And maybe early retirement.” Out the chopper window, Tyler watched the White House recede. He tried not to dwell on the death toll an hour’s postponement would cost. If he was misguided in his trust, it was not the type of mistake a person could easily live with. “‘Only they know the plan, but they’re smart and resourceful,’ is a tough sell.”
“I imagine so,” she said. “Where to next?”
“Home, if I still remember my way.” Also, just minutes from CIA Langley. “How about you? Any update about my neighbor?”
“Tails are in place. And here’s something interesting. When the nukes went off, your friend was posted to the Russian embassy in the Restored Caliphate. He was expelled, persona non grata, right after. Several Russian nationals, in the meanwhile, were torn apart by mobs, blamed for the mess. People he knew, but no one definitively linked with him.”
People loosely linked to Yakov. Sort of like Dillon Russo? “What else you got?”
“A Russian hacker, famous in certain geeky circles. The Guard was looking for Psycho Cyborg at the same time as your future neighbor got himself ejected.”
Psycho Cyborg, who was behind the hack of the space weather center. Hmm. Pope said, “None of that is evidence, Char, but I admit it’s very suggestive. Do you think our guy was involved with the Crudetastrophe?”
“I’m pretty sure the Guard thinks he was involved.” She sighed. “I’ll keep digging. It’s something to do for the next hour.”
* * *
Traffic on the George Washington Parkway was light. Part Sunday afternoon, part overcast with steady drizzle, part ongoing crisis, Yakov thought. For whichever of those reasons, people were staying home, not driving.
It would have been difficult under the circumstances not to notice the boxy gray sedan that stayed a couple hundred feet behind him, slowing when he slowed, alternating lanes but seldom passing. Despite the overcast, the driver and passenger both had sun visors down. As though hiding their faces.
When Yakov invented an errand and exited the parkway early, a white van that had stayed two vehicles behind the sedan sped up to exit, too.
He shook the tail, wondering who the amateurs were and what they wanted, then continued home.
Sunday, midafternoon, October 1
As Verne emerged from shadow, Earth transformed in an instant from a dim presence glimmering by moonlight into a brilliant arc of light. Earth’s crescent, from tip to tip, dwarfed the full moon. Seconds later, the powersat emerged from Earth’s shadow. The expanse of PS-1, less than a mile away, seemed larger even than the Earth.
We couldn’t miss PS-1 now if we tried, Thad thought. And diving out of the sun, no way can Jonas or his people see us coming. If they somehow do see us, we’re barreling straight at the solar cells: the side from which they can’t beam microwaves. The timing could not be better for this mad scheme.
The four of them had shed their blanket, removed their boots from the stirrups, and untethered themselves from the spacecraft. Each held a gas pistol in one hand, and gripped Verne with the other.
“Here’s a vote for dumb luck,” Savannah said cheerily. “I hope our trusty ship hits someone.”
“Amen,” Marcus said. “On zero, gently. In three. Two. One.”
At zero, as they separated, the fiber-optic cables tugged free of helmet jacks.
And Thad, rather than shove off gently, thrust as hard as he could.
* * *
Dillon blinked in the sudden glare as PS-1 emerged into sunlight. His visor darkened.
“Back to work,” Jonas said. His voice sounded ragged. “When will those lame-assed, incompetent, indecisive chickenshits on the ground do something about us?”
What would be their next target? Dillon wondered. A power plant? A transmission line? It hardly mattered.
“Target locked,” Jonas said. “And beaming … begins.”
Would this horror never end? Dillon stared into the distance, across the plain of PS-1—
At a walking pace—missing Jonas and the computer console near which he floated by no more than twenty feet—a slowly turning something crashed through the powersat.
* * *
Marcus’s gas pistol was fully engaged, and squeezing its trigger harder only made his hand ache. Hurtling straight at PS-1, he couldn’t not squeeze for all he was worth.
He was slowing. When, obsessively, he turned his head every few seconds to check on Verne, it was nearer than he to the powersat. But one of the four of them must have dismounted clumsily, because the spacecraft had drifted off course and gone into a slow tumble. The old probe was going to miss the aim point.
It doesn’t matter, Marcus told himself. PS-1 had three other main computing complexes. The crash was a diversion, no more. When Verne crashed through PS-1, maybe the bad guys would think that was the attack.
When the old probe almost brained a terrorist, Marcus cheered himself hoarse.
* * *
“What the hell?” Jonas screamed.
Dillon did not answer. It was part shock, part the ripple racing from the impact point. Before the wave reached him, he had to make sure his tethers were secure! By the time the ripple got to him, bots already swarmed to survey the damage.
Something hopper-sized had hit them. Maybe it was one of the hoppers he and Felipe had flung off Phoebe. The notion vaguely cheered Dillon. Still it had not looked like a hopper.
“Everyone up!” Jonas shouted. “Lincoln. Felipe. We’re under attack. And the beam is down.”
* * *
Marcus glided to a stop no more than fifty feet from a corner of PS-1. That was way too close for comfort. With the briefest of puffs from his gas pistol, he inched across the remaining distance. Someone was chattering on the radio. It was all encrypted, alas.
He was clipping his second safety tether when a faint surface ripple reached him. The wave swept past him, reflected from the powersat’s edges, then returned, bound inward. PS-1 greatly outmassed Verne, but their encounter was not like a fly meeting a windshield. More like a rock hitting a two-mile-square, very thin window. Until the powersat’s anti-trembling system damped out the vibrations, the microwave transmitters would cut themselves off. He had bought Earth a respite, no matter what happened next.
He pulled himself along a guide cable, low to the surface. Glancing across the plain, he saw scattered part and supply depots, hoppers at docking poles, other guide cables, and bots. Toward the center, two spacesuited figures emerged from shelters.
Had Savvy, Thad, and Dino landed safely? If they hugged the surface as Marcus did, he didn’t think he could spot them from miles away. He crept along the cable to a junction and switched tethers to the intersecting cable, this one heading to his destination.
To shape and steer the power beam entailed very specific interactions among the powersat’s transmitters. There must be constructive interference among some transmissions and destructive interference among others—and the solution changed continuously as PS-1 sped along its orbit and Earth spun be
neath. To calculate the required signal phase for every transmission required knowing precisely the relative positions in three dimensions of all the many thousand microwave transmitters. That took real-time control to detect and counteract every twitch and tremor anywhere within the enormous structure. Any of four atomic clocks, one at each corner of the powersat, could synchronize the real-time sensing and controls.
Four visitors, unsuspected, one at each corner, would disable the four clocks. When the last clock failed, the powersat would lose its ability to maintain rigidity—and so, to form beams. And once PS-1 lost its ability to sense and control wobbles and flexures, the accelerometers integral to each transmitter would keep it from emitting.
Flexing would be most pronounced near the edges. Marcus defied the little repair bots to maintain their grips—much less repair or replace broken clock modules—under those conditions. Trained specialists would have to make those repairs.
Marcus bargained with the universe: Let us knock out the clocks. After that, it doesn’t matter how clever the bad guys are. After that, the military can launch a shuttle of troops to retake the powersat.
Let us knock out the clocks and it’s game over.
* * *
Hand over hand, Thad sped along a guide cable toward the powersat’s center. He could have saved precious minutes by landing closer to the middle—but one of the others disembarked from Verne might have noticed. Looking innocent was hard.
When a spacesuited figure ahead seemed to turn Thad’s way, Thad pushed away from the powersat, floating to the end of his tethers and waving his arms. As the stranger approached, Thad reeled himself back to the guide cable and set off to intercept.
As the gap closed, the stranger took out a coil gun. In the direct glare of the sun, his visor, like Thad’s, was all but opaque. The label on the red counterpressure suit read WALKER.
Squeezing the cable, Thad brought himself to a stop. He tapped his own nametag, his helmet antenna, shrugged, then lobbed a fiber-optic cable, one end already jacked into his own helmet.
Keeping the coil gun centered on Thad, the man inched forward. He connected the free end of the cable. “And why are you here?” he asked.
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