Energized (26 page)

Her mind clung to irrelevancies because she could not bear to think about the worldwide terror, or the disastrous rescue attempt, or Marcus's uncertain fate.
She
was supposed to help the CIA? The idea was ludicrous. She couldn't help herself.

Other than a table and six chairs, the room offered only a 3-V and some rolled-up datasheets. Cans of tepid soda, forlorn, waited on the table. The institutional gray walls were windowless and bare.

She searched in vain for an Ethernet cable, then laughed at herself. She was beyond the quiet zone. This shelter must have wireless service.

For a while she watched the news, much of it dealing with aircraft worldwide diverting to the nearest airfield lest they, too, be swatted from the sky. But since the destruction of the shuttle and its mother ship, the terrorists had returned their attention to stationary targets. She turned off the 3-V when coverage cut to the Philippines. Something about a geothermal power plant being reduced to slag.…

By shoving chairs against the table, she cleared space to circle the room. What kind of people would do such terrible things? Had killed … how many? By now, perhaps thousands. What would such people care for the lives of a few score civilians in orbit?

She did not notice the door opening.

“Excuse me,” a woman said, closing the door behind herself. She was tall, clearly Asian, maybe Japanese, and wore thick, round glasses.

“Yes?”

“I'm told we're the red team.” The woman laughed nervously. “Let me back up. My name is Ellen Tanaka. I'm with NASA, from the powersat project.”

Marcus's boss! “Valerie Clayburn. I'm a radio astronomer. I questioned the CME alert, and for that lapse in judgment the CIA brought me here.”

Ellen cleared her throat. “Shall we acknowledge the obvious? You're seeing Marcus, and I'm the one who sent him up. I hope you don't hate me for that.”

Did she? Valerie thought of the last time she had seen Marcus,
so
eager to begin his adventure. “Had you sent anyone else, he would have been disappointed. And if you don't know it, he likes and respects you. A lot. So, no, I don't hate you. I don't blame you, either.”

Ellen pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I wish I could say the same.”

Valerie did
not
want to dwell on Marcus going away. “What's a red team?”

“Surrogate bad guys. We're to try to think as the people controlling PS-1 would, with luck anticipating what they'll do before they do it. I think the term comes from Cold War war games, when red teams stood in for the Russians.”

“And still do?” Valerie asked.

“So I'm told. Right or wrong about who, though, PS-1 is the problem. Where shall we start? With how the bad guys are doing what they're doing?” Ellen popped the tab on one of the warm sodas. “Mind you, the person we
really
need is Bethany Taylor, the contractor's chief engineer. She was in the air, though, and her flight got diverted to Fargo. So far no one's been able to set her up with a secure enough connection to link into this facility. Bethany knows way more about the powersat than, well, anyone.”

“If also something of a bitch on wheels.”

Ellen grinned, and the mood lightened. “I can guess where
that
comes from.”

Not that Ellen had disagreed, Valerie noted. She grabbed a datasheet and handed Ellen another. “Okay. Let's get to it.”

*   *   *

They worked.

Ellen, despite her modest disclaimer, knew a great deal about PS-1. Valerie had retained more than she would have thought possible from Marcus's enthusiastic descriptions.

An orderly delivered food and coffee. They must have eaten, because sandwiches disappeared and the carafe went empty, but Valerie could not have said how or when it happened.

Checking e-mail, she found nothing from Patrick. Adages be damned: no news meant only no news. She hoped. She sent a note, asking him to hug Simon for her, how Mom and Dad were coping, and would he keep listening in on Phoebe?

Ellen kept trying to access security cameras on PS-1. The subsystem rejected her reactivation requests:
Unauthorized command
. “I should be able to do this,” Ellen muttered. “Viewing is not a sysadmin function. Not supposed to be, anyway.”

“Can you contact a sysadmin to do it for you?” Valerie asked.

“Any I can reach, the ones on rotation to the ground, can't help. As a matter of security, sysadmin functions can only be executed from hardwired terminals on PS-1 itself.”

“What access do you still have?”

“None.” Ellen sighed. “Someone up there must have changed authorizations to require sysadmin access to do
anything
.”

The more attacks, the better their chance of spotting patterns. They turned on the 3-V for any breaking stories that might be instructive.

Instead they got the Russian president, in full-throated, lectern-thumping rage. In translation he condemned the U.S. for building a powersat. “This so-called power satellite must always have been intended as a weapon of mass destruction. Or are we to believe that within hours an innocent electrical power plant can be converted into a terrible weapon? The world is not so naïve. Nor do we fail to notice that the facility that all were told would hang stationary in the skies over the Americas instead threatens our entire planet four times each day. And to compound its earlier deceptions, America now claims to have ‘lost control' of its illegal weapons platform to Resetter fanatics. It is a matter of criminal negligence at best, a matter of—”

Ellen hit mute and set down the remote. “This isn't helping us.”

“Why blame Resetters?” Valerie asked. “Have the terrorists identified themselves?”

“From the selection of targets, I would guess. Most are alternate-energy projects, the sort the most extreme Resetters oppose.”

“Only it took Russian connivance to get the terrorists, Resetters or not, where they are.”

Faster than either of them could react to a quick double knock, the door swung open. “How's it coming in here?” Tyler Pope asked.

“I don't get the point of these attacks,” Ellen said.

“Me, either,” Valerie admitted. “Or why whoever controls PS-1 hasn't—apart from the shuttle—touched the U.S.”

“Was that a question?” Tyler waggled the coffee carafe, deemed it empty, and set it back down. “Oh, the U.S. has been hit, and it's insidiously clever. The anger from around the world comes right back at us. Powersats are fast becoming more untenable than the alternate-energy systems being so openly targeted.”

“The Russians took over PS-1!” Valerie shouted. “That's what you said.”

“I believe that more than ever,” Pope said. “NSA wizards have looked over the computers at the Space Weather Prediction Center. I'm told that the intrusion and the code left behind have all the earmarks of a Russian pro hacker who goes by Psycho Cyborg. Still, the evidence for Russian government involvement is entirely circumstantial.”

NSA?
No Such Agency,
Keith used to translate that, mockingly. As though a huge federal agency with vast resources could hide in plain sight. Such as the big complex at the north end of the quiet zone: she knew no one who believed the Navy's claim of ownership. Not a lot of call for naval facilities in the middle of a landlocked state. Or any obvious reason for the Navy to operate antennas to rival Green Bank's.

Valerie had met parents at Little League games who did not work at the observatory but asked
damned
perceptive questions about the telescopes. National Security Agency, surely. It stood to reason the country's premier eavesdroppers would also have computer whizzes on staff.

“Which leaves us where?” Valerie asked.

“It leaves us, as far as world opinion is concerned, with an American weapons platform constructed in space in violation of international treaty. Worse, a weapon the control of which we carelessly lost to terrorists. Or, according to a fair chunk of the blogosphere, the pretense of lost control, there being no proof whatever that the U.S. does not still control PS-1.”

“
Are
there terrorists? And are they Resetters?” Ellen asked.

“Hell, yes, there are terrorists,” Pope said. “But as for who they are, that's a tougher question.

“A lot of intel work is looking for patterns. The past few hours,
legions
at the CIA have been digging into the background of anyone who could have been involved.

“So here's a pattern for you. Remember the microwave incident early last month in the Santa Barbara Channel? The company whose beamed power killed that little girl and her grandfather?”

“All too well,” Ellen said. “The accident generated tons of bad press about beamed power and PS-1.”

And if that accident had never happened? Marcus would still be on the ground. Valerie couldn't help thinking that, but kept it to herself.
If only
wishes helped nobody.

“The company was a start-up,” Pope said. “Its lead investor was Russo Venture Capital Partners. Reviewing passenger manifests from Cosmic Adventures, guess who showed up? Dillon Russo. Also three of his employees, all engineers. All on The Space Place when it had to evacuate to Phoebe.”

“Quite the coincidence,” Ellen said.

“No coincidence,” Pope said. “I just can't prove it yet. Regardless, people who vacation in space are rich and well connected. Names are already coming out. I won't be the only one to make the Dillon Russo connection.

“So what's your choice, ladies? American terrorists or American agents pretending to be Resetter terrorists? In either scenario, the U.S. becomes competitively stronger as power plants and energy resources go boom in other countries. Of course while all this happens,
everyone
is being weakened in absolute terms.” Pope grimaced. “Everyone, that is, except the Russians.”

The universe could be subtle, but it was never devious. The universe didn't know how to lie. Not only did Valerie have no answers, she did not even know the questions. Except one. “What about everyone else from Phoebe and The Space Place? How do the conspiracy theorists explain that no one can contact them?”

“Hostages. Coconspirators. Irrelevant. Take your pick.” Pope rubbed his eyes, looking exhausted. “We have experts out the wazoo to analyze the politics, but not for PS-1 itself. So back to work, you two. We don't have much time to find the powersat's weak point.”

*   *   *

The air inside the shelter was stuffy and dank, reeking of sweat, urine, and fear. People milled about, murmuring, shivering.

A fortunate few slept. Thad wondered how they did it. He tried to rouse himself to remember it would not be only himself dying.

No one could ever have anticipated spending more than a few hours in the shelter, especially not crammed in like commuters on a Tokyo subway. Their air scrubbers were failing under the load. And it was
cold
; to conserve fuel cells, he had dialed down the thermostat to fifty degrees. For all the densely packed humanity, Phoebe sucked out the heat through the insulated walls. They would asphyxiate or freeze to death before food or water became an issue.

Thad tried the hatch. Again.

Still jammed. Whatever Yakov's team had done to the door, it was stuck but good.

Marcus pushed through the crowd to make yet another protest. “We have to get word out,” he insisted. “Or else we're going to die in here.” And in a whisper: “We've been out of touch for close to two days. NASA may already think we're dead.”

“I'm open to new ideas,” Thad said.

“All I have is the old idea we have yet to try. Look, we're stuck inside a Faraday cage. So we cut a hole in the wall. Shove through a radio sending an SOS. Patch the hole.”

The idea was not only old, but useless. Of course no one but Thad knew the main base radio was fried. It would never relay anything. “It's wishful thinking that the base radio and computers will have come back up on their own. And a datasheet has a range of what? A couple hundred feet?”

“I've refined the plan a bit. We pull the radio from someone's helmet. Helmet radios are good for miles, right? I mean we could talk with a helmet radio between PS-1 and Phoebe.”

“Relayed through big antennas on Phoebe and PS-1,” Thad said.

“Be realistic! What do we have to lose?”

“Air! Heat!”

“For how much longer?” Marcus shook his head. “Here's something you have no reason to know. The woman I'm seeing is an astronomer. A
radio
astronomer. Val once said she could hear a cell phone on Titan. So maybe she'll hear a helmet radio from a few thousand miles.”

The plan was still daydreams and moonbeams. “The wall panels aren't made of tin foil. How do you expect to cut through one? And do it leaving a clean cut you can seal over.”

“I've been working on that, too. Savvy still has her tool kit from our PS-1 outing. We'll start by scraping with the blade of a screwdriver. If that wears out, then other tools, then belt buckles. We'll
make
it work.”

“And to seal the hole once the radio is outside the wall?”

Marcus rapped on a supply cabinet. “We undo the hinges if possible, break them if not. The door is a flat piece of rigid plastic. We'll make our hole somewhere the wall is flat. Set the door over the hole, and suction alone assures us a decent seal with the wall. The hotel people are all still in counterpressure suits, so we'll have plenty of leak patches to tape the edge of the cabinet door. From a datasheet in the shelter, we'll be able to network through the plastic cabinet door with the radio on the outside. So if
it
connects to anything…”

Such misplaced optimism. Thad tried, and failed, to remember the nature of hope. “Suppose you get your scavenged radio outside without killing us all. We're still beneath the base. Your signal will be absorbed by tons of metal. No one will hear squat.”