Energized

by Edward M. Lerner

  Thad knew no one named Walker, but he recognized the voice. It was Cousin Jonas.

  “I came with three others,” Thad said quickly. “We’re each to disable one of the atomic clocks. If that happens—”

  “I know,” Jonas said. “Where are the others?”

  Thad pointed back the way he had come. “That was my corner, and I didn’t touch its clock. So every other corner. But we all planned to make the circuit in case someone had a problem.”

  * * *

  Dillon goggled as Jonas returned from an unexplained errand—with a newcomer. From Phoebe, to judge from the stranger’s blue counterpressure suit. Another of Yakov’s agents, somehow.

  As reluctant an agent as me? Dillon wondered. Not that it mattered.

  Then Jonas had his coil gun in hand. “Sorry, boss,” he said. “Too busy to chance mixed loyalties. Handgrip first, give our visitor your weapon.”

  Gingerly, Dillon complied.

  Jonas gestured with his gun. “Now into a shelter.”

  They were all going to die here. Why not die in the open, with Earth resplendent? Dillon considered refusing.

  But to die by gunshot and explosive decompression? Dillon was not prepared for that. He grabbed a guide cable and pulled himself to the nearest cluster of shelters.

  Felipe, just emerging from one unit, shut Dillon inside.

  * * *

  Unexplained, accused the text on Yakov’s cell.

  The single word, out of context, would mean nothing to anyone intercepting it.

  But from the moments-ago news bulletin on his car radio, Yakov could guess the context: the abrupt halt, without destroying its target, of PS-1’s latest attack.

  No explanation for the cessation. So: no radio waves scattering from PS-1, as in the radio-observatory incident. Military satellites would have detected that. Not breakup of the powersat—that, too, would have been seen.

  Hence: the second unanticipated countermeasure in two days.

  Ambassador Sokolov had been advised of an imminent missile launch. Had the American president lied?

  Something fluttered in Yakov’s gut. He needed a moment, and some unwonted introspection, to put a name to the odd feeling.

  The stirrings of doubt.

  * * *

  “Ride with me, Thad,” Jonas said as the four of them went for the hoppers.

  “Okay.” Thad pulled back from reaching for the fourth hopper, and swung himself into the saddle behind Jonas. They had three raiders to handle; taking three hoppers was not unreasonable. Jonas had given him a gun and uploaded encryption software for his helmet computer. That would not have happened if there had been any trust issues.

  As opposed to control issues. Thad had far more experience flying hoppers than any of these men possibly could. He should be piloting.

  Jonas pointed over the bow of their hopper. “We’ll take this corner. Felipe, the corner to my left. Lincoln, my right. Keep me posted.”

  With an unsteady takeoff, Jonas lifted the hopper off the powersat. Squads of maintenance bots, carrying solar panels and maser arrays, already scuttled toward the hole punched by Verne.

  With some altitude, Thad quickly spotted the raiders, one each at every corner but the one assigned to him. No one yet had headed for that corner.

  Jonas had spotted them, too. Opening the throttle, he called, “Tally-ho.”

  * * *

  With a grunt, Marcus ripped the atomic clock from its housing and flung it into space. The recoil sent him flying backward over PS-1. Tethers pulled him up short.

  He reeled himself in, clipped his tethers to a guide cable running in a useful direction, then set out for the next corner clockwise just in case Dino had had a problem. As Dino, hopefully, was already on his way to another corner, to backstop Thad. As Thad should be on his way to backstop Savvy, and she on her way to check on Marcus’s assigned clock.

  Motion above PS-1 caught his eye. A hopper! Racing straight toward him. He had been spotted; almost certainly, the others had been, too.

  He tapped his forearm keypad, reactivating his mike. “Company coming. Mine’s done. Be quick.” He unclipped his tethers and his gas pistol, hoping to avoid capture for a little while.

  The hopper kept accelerating. Planning to ram him? Knock him into space? With a squirt from the gas pistol, he dodged.

  The pistol barely sputtered enough to waft Marcus off the powersat. Hurling away the empty, useless gas pistol reversed his drift, sending him slowly back toward PS-1. He raised his hands in surrender.

  * * *

  “Company coming. Mine’s done. Be quick.”

  “Damn,” Savannah Morgan muttered at Marcus’s warning. She had destroyed her assigned atomic clock by snapping its circuit boards in half, but scarcely started toward the nearest main computing complex. Just possibly, she had had a bright idea.

  Speeding hand over hand along a guide cable, she glanced up. A hopper was heading her way, tiny with distance, bearing two colorful dots. Red counterpressure suit in front, piloting. Behind—a blue suit.

  Thad or Dino? That either man helped the terrorists made her ill. And whichever had betrayed them would not have disabled his assigned atomic clock.

  She had to get to the computer.

  From the hopper’s vantage point, they could not miss seeing her bright green suit. A tarantula on a dinner plate would have had a better chance of hiding. Her only hope was speed.

  Unclipping her tethers, she jetted ahead. Thad or Dino, whoever was on that hopper, had had enough propellant to land. Massing less than either man, her gas pistol should have propellant left. Ideally enough for her to start and stop.

  The hopper veered: they had spotted her.

  She slammed on the brakes with a long blast of gas. As she drifted over the computer complex’s access hatch, she managed to grab the handle.

  Her body kept going. Damn momentum. She screamed as her entire mass wrenched her arm and shoulder—but she did not let go.

  The hopper was perhaps a quarter mile away and closing fast.

  She popped the access panel, clipped tethers to the metal rings inside, and reeled her lines tight. The upright hatch seemed a flimsy shield. Back on Phoebe the bad guys had had guns!

  Did they suspect she had a sysadmin login? Some among the Phoebe crew had to know the inspection team had gotten privileged access. Thad definitely knew.

  “Be careful. We don’t know who we can trust,” Marcus had whispered to her, radios off, helmet touching helmet, just before the four of them leapt off Phoebe. “Someone from the base may have armed the terrorists.”

  “After I clobber my clock, I have an idea,” was all she had dared to say. If someone on Phoebe had helped the terrorists, that someone might be … anyone. Even one of the men watching, wondering what she and Marcus were discussing in private.

  As, it turned out, it was.

  Peeking over the hatch, the hopper was maybe a tenth of a mile away. It was not slowing down, either. Planning to run her over? To shoot her as they passed? She had a minute, maybe, to do what needed doing. On an open radio channel she hoped still linked back to Phoebe, she shouted, “Look sharp.” She did not dare to hint any more clearly. If the bad guys understood, they would undo what she was attempting. “Either Thad or Dino is helping the terrorists.”

  She logged on, found the screen she needed—

  Sparks from the top edge of the panel. They were shooting at her!

  Hunkering down, she typed frantically.

  * * *

  “What’s he doing?” Jonas asked.

  “She,” Thad said. That would be Savannah, if everyone had landed at their assigned corners. “And I don’t know.”

  A fine time to remember he had given the inspectors sysadmin access. Thad wracked his brain, trying to imagine what she might do.

  Seconds later, she was shouting on the Phoebe-and-powersat common channel, in the clear, denouncing him for the entire world to hear. Spysats would be listening.

  �
�Look sharp,” Jonas repeated. “What’s that about?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  Jonas fired a couple of rounds. One must have struck near her, because she scrunched lower behind the hatch. “I can’t run her down without plowing through the surface and setting off more waves, or without slowing way down,” he muttered.

  “Do you have a full gas pistol?” Thad asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “No time,” Thad said. “Hand it over.”

  “If you can reach it, take it.”

  Leaning forward, Thad managed to unclip it. “Brace yourself.”

  As they shot past the open hatch Thad reached backward to pull on the hopper; with his other hand, he shoved off against one of Jonas’s oh-two tanks.

  The push-pull somersaulted Thad down the back of the hopper, into the hopper’s aft gas jets. The spewing jets kicked him in the chest, killing most of his momentum. With a short blast from the gas pistol, he brought himself to a halt.

  Savannah worked too close to the screen for him to see what she was doing. She might not even have seen him dismount. He clipped the gas pistol and took out his coil gun.

  On the common channel, he said, “Hands off the keyboard. Move away from the computer.”

  Her helmet, like his, was opaque, but he felt her eyes burning into his nametag. “Why, Stankiewicz? Why betray your country?”

  For family: the purest of reasons. And yet at the end of the day, he had just made things incomparably worse. For Robin, too, now that Savannah had exposed him. “Get away, now.”

  “Give me a minute to finish, Thad, and this nightmare will be over.”

  Only the nightmare would never be over. Trying to hate Savannah, but only hating himself, he said, “Hands off the keyboard this second, or I shoot.”

  Moving slowly, she unreeled tether and pushed off.

  The screen listed PS-1 computer accounts and their authorization levels—and very few names still showed sysadmin access. Working down the list alphabetically, she had not yet reached Stankiewicz—the account Jonas and his cronies used.

  Keeping an eye on her as she drifted at the end of her tethers, Thad revoked sysadmin privileges for both her and Marcus. Dino had never had sysadmin access.

  Thad closed the access panel, waiting for Jonas to come back.

  * * *

  As much as Valerie had come to hate the Mount Weather war room, she could not bring herself to leave. Not while everything hung in the balance. Not while Marcus and a few others attempted—

  She had no idea what they imagined they could do.

  PS-1 filled one of the wall screens, the image crisp. Adaptive optics, she thought, inanely. Real-time adjustment for atmospheric distortions. She could not tear her eyes away. Here and there people talked in hushed, purposeful tones.

  Valerie had cheered with everyone else when something—the Verne probe?—burst through the powersat, and louder when Major Garcia announced, “Beaming has stopped.”

  If the beam stays off, the White House would have to abort the missile strike. Wouldn’t they?

  She would feel more confident of that if Pope were here.

  Ellen gave Valerie’s hand a comforting squeeze. Valerie squeezed back, too choked up to speak. Be safe, Marcus, she thought.

  Minutes later, in a far more sober voice, Garcia announced, “Beaming has resumed.”

  Be safe, Marcus. With every passing moment, her hope seemed more futile. Until, relayed from an NSA satellite—

  “Company coming. Mine’s done. Be quick.”

  Valerie shivered at Marcus’s calm but hurried warning. So much for a walk in the park. So much for the notion he had found someplace vulnerable to crash through, and was already on his way to The Space Place and its escape pods. PS-1 might have had a design flaw, a failure of replication, something that everyone else had overlooked.

  From his warning, it did not sound that way.

  But Marcus had finished his task—of whatever it was that the four of them intended. If he could finish his part, maybe they all would. Maybe the beam would stop for good. Maybe—

  “Look sharp.” That was Savannah Morgan’s voice. “Either Thad or Dino is helping the terrorists.”

  While others listened on, Valerie had to turn away.

  “Look sharp?” Ellen whispered. “Do you understand that?”

  If only they could look more closely at things happening up there! Valerie froze. “He told Savannah to move away from the computer. What would she be doing on PS-1 at a computer?”

  “I wonder…?” Ellen tapped at her datasheet, and a close-up video of the powersat popped up. “Look at this!” she shouted.

  “Where is that feed coming from?” General Rodgers demanded.

  “PS-1’s onboard safety system.” The view cycled from one panning camera to another to another, as Ellen kept keying. “To give me access, my PS-1 account has been upgraded to sysadmin privileges, and the code restricting sysadmin access to onboard terminals has been bypassed. It has to be Savannah Morgan’s doing.”

  “As sysadmin, can you kill the beam?” Rodgers asked.

  “Sure, but they’ll see. They’ll just restore the beam, and they’ll know to look for whoever gained access. They’ll revoke my authorization.”

  “Not if you revoke their authorizations first,” Valerie said. “Cancel everyone’s privileges but your own. Can you do that?”

  “Yes!” Ellen grimaced. “No, damn it. Not to make it stick. Stankiewicz can reboot from an onsite backup, with his sysadmin log-on still valid.”

  “Why bother giving us access?” someone snapped. “Just so we can watch?”

  And as they did watch, two people in green suits were herded toward the center of the powersat, and relieved of tool kits, gas pistols, everything.

  “I don’t know why,” Ellen admitted.

  “Revoke their privileges and shut down PS-1,” Rodgers ordered. “For as long as it remains offline, someone on the ground isn’t getting cooked.”

  “No,” Valerie insisted. “There’s a better way to use our access.”

  Sunday, late afternoon, October 1

  Turning off Chain Bridge Road, nearly home, Yakov saw another gray sedan in his rearview mirror. No, the same gray sedan. The driver and passenger had traded seats.

  Coming up to a yellow traffic light, Yakov floored it; the sedan came through the intersection on red.

  Running red lights was not unusual in the city, even without diplomatic license plates. But drivers and passengers did not usually exchange worried looks.

  Persistent, Yakov thought. And inept. He wondered who they were.

  The sedan did not follow him into his neighborhood—as though his tails knew the neighborhood had only two entrances, and a white van waited near the other. Likely, then, this was not the first time he had been followed, and he had been too preoccupied to notice.

  Yakov arrived home to find Valentina’s car gone from the garage. He had just found her fussily neat note, Gone shopping, when his cell rang.

  An embassy number. “Brodsky,” he answered.

  “Good afternoon, Yakov Nikolayevich,” the ambassador said jovially.

  Never mind unexplained. Something had changed again. Something must have gone right this time.

  “Anatoly Vladimirovich, you honor me by your call. How may I be of service?”

  “I called to pass along kind words about your recent wheat purchase. President Khristenko himself is very pleased.”

  “The president is too kind,” Yakov said. “I hope sometime to have the opportunity to thank him.”

  “Oh, I believe that is quite likely, Yakov Nikolayevich. Until tomorrow, then.”

  “Until tomorrow.”

  Kind words about wheat meant nothing of the sort. Not as soon as Yakov would have expected, to be sure, but the Americans had launched.

  * * *

  Marcus floated at the end of his tether. At the end of his rope. Savvy floated nearby. Dino, apparently, had not made it
. Damn it.

  Three men hung nearby, all holding guns. The fourth was at a computer console. Visors darkened against the sun rendered all of them faceless.

  “Sorry I got you into this,” Marcus radioed.

  “We had to try,” Savvy said.

  “You failed,” a terrorist declared. “PS-1 remains operational, and while it does, we will continue to use it. Sooner or later, someone will cram missiles down our throats, but until then, we’re too busy to watch you.

  “So choose how you want to die. You can simply unclip and float away. Who knows? That might be very peaceful. Or go quietly into one of the radiation shelters, and we’ll lock you inside. You’ll survive just as long as we do.”

  “I don’t care for either choice,” Savvy said.

  “Or I can shoot you,” the talkative terrorist said. “Honestly, I’d rather not.”

  Behind the three terrorists, along the plane of the powersat, something stirred. Something? Or many somethings? It was as though the surface … writhed. Facing into the glare of Earth swollen to quarter phase, Marcus could not decide what he was seeing.

  But he had a guess …

  “Or you could surrender to us,” Marcus said, “and maybe we can all forego getting killed.”

  “Funny man,” the talkative terrorist said.

  * * *

  You can do this, Valerie lectured herself.

  Too bad she could not believe herself. Engineering was the contact sport, not astronomy. But if not she, then who?

  Then three terrorists raised their guns.

  “Die, damn you!” Valerie screamed.

  * * *

  A soft gasp. From Savannah?

  That was all Thad heard, but it made him glance over his shoulder.

  Hundreds—no, thousands!—of bots, charging out of the earthlight. They sparkled, the light glittering not only from silvery carapaces, but from the tools in their grasps. As he stared, hundreds of bots swarmed Jonas at the computer console.

  “Behind us,” Thad shouted.

  But Jonas shrieked louder. Tentacles built to grip guide cables now clutched arms and legs and helmet instead. The bots pounded. And tore. And stabbed.

  Suddenly, over the radio: air whistling. From Jonas’s helmet?