Dry Ice

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  Teke gave a one-shoulder shrug and continued. “Now the disasters are custom-designed. The 2004 tsunami reset the political landscape in Aceh and Sri Lanka and even caused peace to break out for a while. Katrina pointed out some glaring issues in our own domestic politics and policies. The earthquake in Sichuan nurtured some much-needed political unrest in China’s interior. All the shit going on in Haiti for decades was reset to zero. And the landslides in Afghanistan gave the guys in the E-ring a hard-on of epic proportions because it neatly and completely trashed the plans of their brand-new female commander in chief.” He walked around to the front of Candy’s desk and sat down in the chair Gianni had recently vacated. Candy twirled around to face him.

  “Come on, Candy, we both know that the homegrown response to any disaster can seriously affect domestic politics and even social and economic stability. It’s also a given that any disaster presents political bodies farther afield with myriad opportunities to ‘get involved’ in the situation. Remember Cuba offering the U.S. assistance after Katrina?” he said.

  “Please go on, professor.”

  He nodded. “Take what Barone said and look at it from the angle of ill-gotten gains. Sure, a half million or so people died because of that tsunami, but that was just the price of progress. That event gave Bonner and Flint—and Simpson—proof they could make the earth release a burst of energy measuring about 32,000 megatons. That’s not small potatoes.”

  “No, it isn’t. And we’re going to make sure that that sort of progress is stopped. Handling Bonner is going to take some delicacy, but Simpson is going to be in our custody the minute he touches down on U.S. soil. In fact—” She leaned forward and depressed the intercom button on her phone. “Joely, honey, I need you to make a few phone calls. I need you to get the tail number of the Flint Gulfstream that’s currently en route from France to the U.S. with Greg Simpson aboard. I want it intercepted by a couple of our whup-ass jets ASAP and escorted to someplace nearby, then I want some of our guys to greet Dr. Simpson as he exits the plane and get him chatting. You let me know what the plan is when it’s all set, sugar.”

  Candy leaned back in her chair. “Everything I’ve heard makes him sound just as nasty and just as crazy as a rabid dog, but I don’t think we can do an Ol’ Yeller on him. Much as that would solve a lot of problems.” She closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “Lord above, Teke, the sun is barely up and I already feel like I’ve been shot at and missed and shit at and hit, if you’ll pardon the expression.” She paused. “You know Tess Beauchamp. What is she capable of?”

  “She’s smart. I mean street smart, and tough enough, for an academic. What do you need her to do?”

  “I don’t know yet. I think the first thing should be to get that array off line somehow. With that off the table—”

  “That’s a lot,” Teke said, interrupting her. “It couldn’t be done surreptitiously or probably even attempted without their full cooperation. I’d guarantee there are fail-safes and trapdoors built into the system architecture precisely as safeguards against accidental or deliberate attempts to pull it down. If Simpson is as nuts as people think he is, he’ll have put logic bombs into the software. Those things are damned hard to find before they trigger, which makes them a narcissist’s weapon of choice. They can be set to execute if an action isn’t taken at a certain time or under certain circumstances, or if a certain action is taken. It’s like laying mines in cyberspace. You only know you’ve found one when—”

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Please don’t give me any gory minefield visuals, Teke. I’ve got enough bad images in my head this morning.” She paused. “I get what you’re saying about the narcissism, but it just doesn’t sound like he’d do anything destructive to the system. I get the impression that he’d sacrifice the planet before the software.”

  Teke raised his eyebrows. “You think he’s that crazy?”

  “I haven’t heard anything to make me think he’s sane.”

  A tense but companionable silence grew.

  “When do you meet with the president?” he asked.

  “Soon.”

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “Damned if I know. I’ll think of something on the way.”

  * * *

  Tess entered the sandbox and said to no one in particular, “Nik just called me. Is he still in the conference room?”

  Lindy nodded. “Hey, Tess, before you go in there, have you seen this footage?”

  Tess walked over to her workstation and set down her laptop. “What footage? I haven’t logged on yet today.”

  “There was a hurricane in the Mediterranean overnight.”

  “In the Mediterranean?” Tess leaned over Lindy’s shoulder to watch the streaming video. The devastation was extensive and heartrending. She felt her stomach drop. “Did we do that?”

  Lindy glanced up at her. “What do you think?”

  Tess shook her head, then straightened up and walked to the conference room. Ron opened the door when she knocked. The expression on his face wasn’t a good one.

  “What’s wrong?” She stepped into the room and immediately closed the door behind her.

  “Ron just found more commands in the queue that don’t mesh with the mission. We don’t know what the hell they are or what they’ll do, and we’re still locked out.” Nik stood up roughly and the chair he was in skittered backward. “Fuck this. We have to hack the array control system.”

  “Oh, pipe down. Can’t you even say ‘good morning’?” Tess snapped, setting her laptop on the table and booting it up. “We haven’t been able to hack the comms system, and the control system is way more dense.” She looked at Ron. “What is everyone out there supposed to be doing other than watching what we did to the Mediterranean last night?”

  “That’s another fucking mess,” Nik muttered.

  Before anyone could comment, there was a short tap on the door, then it opened. Pam stuck her head in. “Got a minute?”

  “Lots of ’em. What do you have?” Ron replied.

  “Bad news.”

  “Come on in,” Nik said, leaning back in his chair. “This is Bad News Central.”

  She came through the door and leaned her slight frame against it, then gave a nervous laugh. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Try me,” Tess suggested.

  “I’ve never done this to myself before, but I was just reviewing the activity log to remind myself of all the things I’ve tried in terms of trying to get the arrays back under our control. I noticed that every time I entered something, small lines of that goofy ‘Greg code’ appeared in the log.” She looked at each one of them. “The array control system has become heuristic. For every thing any of us do, there’s a change made in the system by Greg’s code. And it’s all encrypted. It looks like the same thing has been happening in the comms code.”

  “Holy shit,” Nik muttered.

  “I’m with you on that,” Ron murmured and looked at Tess. “It’s your turn.”

  Tess flashed a look at him, then returned her eyes to Pam’s flushed face. “I’m not sure what there is left to say.”

  “Well, we can’t stop what we’re doing. It won’t help anything. Whatever is in the queue is going to execute. We have to keep hacking at the systems and hope we can break in,” Nik said forcefully, watching Tess.

  “Agreed.” She looked at Pam’s kind, worried face. “It’s critical to get the communications network bright again.”

  “But those commands—”

  “We still need to find out what the commands in the queue are meant to do, but we can’t tell anyone or warn anyone about them until we get the comms up.”

  Pam nodded and left the room. Tess waited until she was gone, then closed the door.

  She looked at Nik. “I want you to check in again with Dan to see if those sensors checked out—”

  “What sensors?” Ron asked.

  “The ones on the storage tanks. The hydrogen storag
e tanks,” Nik said bluntly. Ron’s face paled slightly.

  “And I want you to dust off the ‘In case of emergency, use 110-year-old technology’ radios just in case we need them,” Tess finished.

  “Don’t bother. They won’t work,” Ron said.

  Both Tess and Nik looked at him in surprise. “Why not?”

  “Jamming signals.” Ron looked from one to the other. “They came on when the comms went down. I thought you knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t. How could I have if no one told me?” Tess demanded.

  Ron shrugged. “Sorry.”

  Tess rolled her eyes and paused briefly to log on to the system with the new passwords Nik had given her. “When the arrays fire, those signals would be obliterated.”

  “They go off when the arrays fire and come right back on when the arrays go to ‘down’ mode.”

  Tess snaked her hands through her hair and tugged viciously at the roots.

  “What are you doing?” Nik asked, frowning at her.

  “Getting some blood to my brain,” she ground out. “Ron, is there anything else you thought we knew and clearly don’t?”

  “I don’t know, Tess.”

  She stood up, folded her arms tight to her body, and started to pace. “Seems like we have one card left, and it’s not an ace. We have to shut down the all-clear signal.”

  “That won’t do a damned thing to help us, Tess. Flint will scramble an extraction team, but we don’t need a plane full of guys with guns coming through the door. We need hackers, Tess. Or somebody to meet Greg at the gate in Westchester with a syringe of sodium pentothal.”

  She stopped pacing to look at him. “Nik, if we don’t stop the signal, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that the governments of the countries we’re trashing don’t decide that turnabout is fair play.”

  “Yeah, or keep trying to get into the system and take back control of it,” he snapped.

  She let out a hard breath and was about to reply when the lights flickered for just a fraction of a second. The three of them stared at one another through a suddenly dense silence. Instantly, Tess unclipped the walkie-talkie at her waist and asked everyone to meet in the dining room. By the time she walked in with the gang from the sandbox behind her, the rest of the staff was waiting for them.

  “I don’t have a lot of news, and none of it is what I’d call good,” she began, giving the assembled group a tight smile. “But you need to know what’s going on. In a nutshell, the control system for the arrays has been completely hijacked and a series of commands has been locked in. We don’t know what those commands will do, we can’t change them, and we can’t get access to the system.”

  She paused and let her blunt words sink in as she looked around at the faces in front of her. They were a pretty stoic bunch, but she could see fear in some of their eyes.

  Here goes.

  “Some of you know and some of you may not fully know what we do here at TESLA, so I’m going to tell you. We manipulate the weather and induce some geological activity.” She paused as she saw the admin staff register varying degrees of surprise, shock, and unease. “We can make things happen, and prevent some things from happening, anywhere in the world. The whole reason this installation came into existence was to use the weather for benign and beneficial purposes—mostly to improve Flint’s bottom line by sending good weather to areas where the company has agricultural interests. That mission was changed. The arrays are now beyond our control and TESLA is doing things to punish—” She shrugged, palms up in front of her. “Flint? The world? We don’t quite know. We do know that our arrays, operating under code embedded by Greg before he left, are responsible for the big storms that have happened across America and the Mediterranean, and the earthquake in Mexico.”

  The expressions on the faces before her now reflected disbelief mingled with dread.

  “I want you all to know that I—we—are now operating under the following assumptions: that the outside world has probably realized it’s under attack from our arrays and that there will be a response. I don’t know what kind of response.” She ignored the few soft gasps that followed her words. “I am also assuming that the people at Flint HQ are working very hard on our behalf. There may be Flint people on their way to us already,” she added hurriedly as she saw a few pairs of eyes start to shine with tears.

  “We’re running diagnostics on the power system to determine what caused the blip we just experienced. I’m concerned, but there’s no reason to panic. That being said, we must prepare to face our worst-case scenario: a full power failure. I want everyone to review emergency and survival procedures in case we need to initiate them.”

  One of the women toward the back of the small crowd let out a sob that she quickly stifled.

  “I know this is nerve-wracking. I know you have questions. But I’ve just given you all the information I have. You need to stay focused on what is happening and don’t speculate about what may never happen.” Tess paused. “Okay, that’s all I have. We’ll reconvene at noon for an update. If you need me before then, I’ll be in C4. Thanks.” Tess turned to Nik and Ron. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The installation became a small, buzzing hive feeding off its own fury at Greg’s betrayal and everyone’s fear of the possibilities. Then, shortly after Tess concluded her talk, the arrays re-awakened and sent out their first set of simultaneous bursts. The pulses they emitted caused the atmosphere to bend and writhe with energy it could barely contain. And when it stopped, chaos erupted around the globe.

  * * *

  Lightning strikes were not uncommon in the vast, wet highlands of Roraima, the northernmost and least populated state in Brazil. The region was home to little more than dense tropical rain forest; the strikes were of negligible concern to anyone. Heavy, year-round rains generally eliminated most fires before they could pose serious risk.

  That morning in late April proved different.

  The strikes were abundant and huge, searing the air as they hurtled between earth and sky. The sounds that followed by mere seconds would have made any listener certain that the atmosphere itself was splintering. Each forked sword held tens of thousands degrees of heat; within minutes of the storm’s conception, the ever damp floor of the tropical forest was dry enough to combust.

  And combust it did. Massive balls of fire erupted as trees exploded, the dense moisture in their tissue converting instantly to steam as the bolts of lightning blasted them with temperatures that existed nowhere on earth other than in the deepest pools of subterranean magma.

  Few noticed or cared that the rain forest was burning, sending up billows of heavy black smoke, enough to block out the midday sun, because the eyes of the Americas were turned to places more populated, and more devastated.

  * * *

  It was morning in Los Angeles. The sun was up, and the major arteries snaking through the city and around it were already becoming clogged with cars, trucks, and buses heading in every direction. Although it was a weekend, elevators and escalators across the vast metropolis nevertheless carried workers to their offices in the myriad towers that punctured the skyline at all points of the compass. Beaches were filling with tourists. Malls were coming to life. No one was thinking of the stresses and strains that had been building along the San Andreas Fault since its last really big release just over 150 years ago. The Big One had become little more than a myth to residents and a joke to outsiders.

  But when the precarious balance that kept the Pacific and North American plates pressed against each other shifted, no one was laughing.

  When the first wave, the compression wave, hit the region, the sound was thunderous and heard by everyone who was outdoors and by most who were not. The transverse waves followed almost immediately, making buildings sway and the ground roll. And roll.

  The tallest buildings had no chance of survival; their height overpowered the ability of any stabilizers to counteract the sideways slide of the earth on which they st
ood. Even bridges built to withstand severe torsion were not built to withstand what hit them that morning. They twisted and buckled like cheap toys, crumbling onto the pancaking layers of roadways below. Planes roaring along the runways of the area’s many airports lurched into drunken skids as the tarmac moved beneath them. Others flipped as brand-new gaps in the pavement caught their landing gear. People stampeded out of buildings only to become unwitting targets for the rubble that fell from shattered buildings and billboards and utility poles.

  The shaking went on for what seemed like a small eternity, while across the world other horrors awaited other peoples as one of the planet’s most complex and extensive tectonic plate margins began to roar.

  * * *

  Along the Makran coast of Pakistan and Iran, underneath the northern Arabian Sea, continental plates began to rub against each other. It only took a nudge to the huge transform fault that bordered the world’s largest accretionary prism to set them in motion. Waves of intense energy moved easily through the deep, thick layers of sediment, rocking the seafloor and the land and the cities that bordered that sea, and giving birth to a giant wave.

  Along the entire coast, residents had settled into their late evening routines. No one was prepared for the unspeakable havoc that erupted when the shifting earth pushed the massive wall of water toward land. The wave rushed the steep continental shelf with a speed that left those who saw it awestruck in their final moments. The sea-born monster rose above the cities and broke, slamming buildings to the ground, snapping the hulls of thousands of docked ships waiting to be loaded with the region’s liquid black gold. Water inundated huge petroleum tank farms and luxury high-rises, washing away the dreams and lives of countless souls, sucking every remnant of their existence into its dark depths.