Energized (30 page)

*   *   *

“We have no choice but to destroy PS-1,” a White House adviser insisted. She had teleconned into Mount Weather from the District.

Tyler Pope could not retrieve the woman's name. He found these political geeks as interchangeable as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Frick and Frack, the Olsen twins, Eng and Chang, Shemp and Curly Joe—

Stop that, Tyler ordered himself. It was not only that he thought the woman was flat-out wrong. Which she was: As essential as it was to stop the attacks, it had to be done another way. A way that would not plunge the country back into its Day After the Crudetastrophe hopelessness. And, damn it, he did not care how launching missiles played with focus groups in Peoria.

He was not the only one struggling. At the front of the conference room General Rodgers had pressed her lips so thin, the wonder was she hadn't cut someone with them. It was no secret
she
wanted to take out PS-1 with an overwhelming salvo of missiles.

After frantic efforts in a dozen missile silos, finally they
could
launch. ICBM guidance systems had been reprogrammed. Nuclear payloads too heavy to lob up to PS-1's orbit had been swapped out for muscular post-boost vehicles fitted with lighter high-explosive warheads.

Had throwing nukes at PS-1 been doable, they still would not want to. Nukes in space would violate the Outer Space Treaty—as if America was not already living a public-relations disaster. And nukes released electromagnetic pulses. Unlike the recent, imaginary CME, an EMP in space
would
fry satellites.

But the missiles would not launch until President Gibson ordered a launch. And the president had requested another review of his options, because, “We need to be sensitive to world opinion.”

Was world opinion so difficult to read? Death and destruction rained from the skies! If it came to using strategic missiles to end the slaughter, what rational person could object?

But for as long as they debated they were not launching a slit-their-own-throat assault on PS-1. A stupid reprieve remained a reprieve.

As the discussion dragged on—and as new reports of attacks from PS-1 kept trickling in—even Tyler began to waver. Because no one, least of all him, had had an alternative to offer. He was among the most senior analysts in the Agency's Russian section, and his failure stung.

At some point waiting for a new option to turn up became the stupid plan. At some point they would have to cut their losses, even at the cost of destroying the powersat and losing access to Phoebe. And they
had
to act before another government shot down PS-1, making the U.S. look impotent and paralyzed.

“To continue,” Rodgers said. Without raising her voice, some trick of voice quality compelled obedience, and the White House aide then posturing trailed off. “Presume the decision is made to send missiles against the powersat. Our analysts have assembled several attack scenarios.” Rodgers pulled up a PowerHolo chart that summarized a number of options. “In overview first, our launch options include…”

None of the civilians—Pope included—was qualified to make a choice.

A few friendly governments claimed to accept American protestations of innocence in the attacks. No one doubted PS-1 was the instrument of destruction. Everyone blamed America for building the powersat, and blamed her again for not ending the attacks. While Russia sat back and gloated.…

Major Garcia leaned over and whispered, “Where is your brain trust this morning?”

“I let them sleep in,” Tyler whispered back. Because, really, what benefit could have come of them sitting through this bombast?

“Good call,” Garcia said.

*   *   *

A quick walk-through suggested Patrick and Ian were the only people in Jansky Lab. The control room was on the second floor, so Patrick picked a random office on the first. Before touching anything, he put on latex gloves. It would not do for the authorities to find his fingerprints here. The authorities would be here soon, looking.

The workstation came up, as it was meant to, with a log-on screen. He rebooted, this time interrupting the start-up sequence with the keyboard combination that forced the computer to run from a flash drive. He installed a telephony application that would, at the appointed hour, phone out for him.

As of that moment, the clock was ticking.

He opened the window, the better to locate this office from outside. When he found the open window, he trampled the grass beneath it. Then he tossed a rock through the glass. Whoever investigated the bomb-threat call would think a stranger had reached through the broken glass to unlatch the window.

*   *   *

Patrick backed his pickup truck to the testing shed where he had long stored his “SETI” transmitter. The transmitter, a toolbox, a spool of heavy-duty power cable, and a two-wheeled hand truck were on the truck's flatbed, tied and padded for their short trip, by the time his robodialed call went out.

At least he
hoped
the call had gone out. If he had screwed up that, he had already failed.

“I have placed a bomb in the Jansky Lab,” the computer-synth voice would have told the Green Bank 911 operator. “You need to evacuate the building at once.”

There was no bomb, of course, but Patrick needed the control room empty so no one could follow what he was doing. He needed a few hours unsupervised—and searching every nook and cranny of Jansky Lab would take hours. Computer gear, souvenir gadgets, electronics memorabilia, and esoteric paraphernalia littered every office, storeroom, closet, and lab. Boxes and crates lined the hallways, old stuff due to be carted away and new stuff yet to be unpacked.

At the first faint wail of a siren, Patrick sped toward the big dish. When he came to the interior gate he circled around it off-road rather than use his access card. A mile down the road, he backed his truck up to the Green Bank Telescope's ground-level elevator.

The sirens were much louder now.

Ironically, he had never intended, nor expected, his transmitter to be used. But to make the interminable make-believe credible—to convince everyone that he had no idea where the
Verne
probe had gone—he had had to work on the transmitter doggedly and diligently. He had had to convince really smart Ph.D. physicists and radio astronomers that he thought his transmitter would work.

It
would
work.

And that was damned fortunate. He saw no other way to mitigate what he had done.

Patrick stacked everything on his hand truck and rolled it to the elevator. The dish was tipped, tracking … whatever. Leaving the hand truck by the elevator, he let himself into the nearby trailer. With the purloined sysadmin password, he took local control of the GBT. Ian would have evacuated the control room by now.

With the local controls Patrick suspended the observation schedule and ordered the dish into its maintenance mode: stationary, the dish in its birdbath position, one end of the L-shaped instrument arm pointing straight up. He walked back to the GBT itself and rolled his gear into the elevator car.

The car doors opened about two hundred feet above the ground. The wind whistled through his hair. Grateful for the handrails, trying not to look down, he rolled his gear along the walkway in the instrument arm's presently horizontal segment. Another elevator took him straight up the instrument arm's now-vertical segment to the receiver room.

Only when his work was done,
receiver room
would be a misnomer.

The turret on the room's roof could house up to eight modular receivers. Any receiver could be rotated into position at the dish's secondary focus. The modular bays in the turret implemented a common interface, to which all receivers were designed and built. Standardization made it easy to plug in units designed to receive at new wavelengths.

Standardization had let Patrick design a
transmitter
to mate with a bay in the turret.

Climbing a stepladder Patrick poked his head through an access panel on the receiver-room ceiling—almost five hundred feet above the ground. A mile away, vehicles surrounded the Jansky Lab. Emergency lights pulsed red on the fire trucks, blue on the Pocahontas County Sheriff's cruisers.

So far, so good.

He climbed down and started unplugging and removing a receiver module. By the time he had installed his transmitter module and rotated it into focus, he shook from exhaustion and dripped with sweat.

He had to rest before continuing. He unfolded the datasheet in his pocket and used a fiber-optic cable to tap the receiver room's network access. He found the bastards on PS-1 still at it; on their current pass over North America, they were destroying Canadian oil-shale facilities.

There was no time to rest.

The turret's modular bays, for all their general-purpose flexibility, were limited in one respect: they were meant to accommodate receivers. They provided a correspondingly modest amount of electrical power.

He needed to transmit, and with lots and
lots
of power. For that he had to drop power cable down the instrument arm to the telescope's six-hundred-kilowatt, diesel-powered backup generator.

There was no time to rest.

At last he finished. He rode down to the ground and retreated to the ground-level trailer, in the shadow of the big dish.

Marcus had been as good as his word: PS-1's orbital parameters and real-time position as determined by GPS were both available online. Trying not to think about Marcus, Patrick input the data into one of the observatory's smaller dishes.

The powersat was unmistakable. Harmonics, or side lobes of the power beam, or individual transmitters out of tolerance? Patrick wasn't sure and didn't care. Valerie would know. He tried not to think about her, either.

Only Patrick
couldn't
not think about Marcus and Valerie. Not when Valerie was Patrick's best friend, when sometimes she seemed like his only friend. While the big dish slewed into position, Patrick dashed off a mea culpa to Valerie. Just in case …

When the dish settled into position and began to track PS-1, Patrick initiated transmission.

An intense microwave beam, focused by the world's largest fully steerable antenna, blasted skyward.

 

Saturday, midday, September 30

“The beam shut off!” Felipe shouted, from where he sat tethered by a main computer complex.

Dillon twitched. “How can that be?”

“Haven't a clue. Go wake Jonas.”

“I'm awake,” Jonas radioed from one of the tiny shelters. “I'll be out in a minute. And I'll wake Lincoln. The problem could be electrical.”

Earth was at full phase, meaning PS-1 was between Earth and sun. The four of them—the four terrorists—were on the solar-cell side of the satellite, in direct sunlight. Dillon could only see a bit of Earth, glimpsed between his boots through a small view port. Palls of smoke stained western Canada, from the attacks on oil-shale mines.

Only Dillon could not bear to think of himself as a terrorist. Saboteur seemed a nobler way to resist “progress.” The powersat's beam had failed? Great!

Jonas emerged from his shelter and sped hand over hand by guide cable to join Felipe. Studying the console, he muttered under his breath.

“What's the problem?” Dillon asked.

“The controls say damn near every transmitter on the platform went out of tolerance. Some safety system cut the beam.”

“This is a test bed,” Dillon said. “I guess it failed the test.” We've done what we can, so let's get out of here!

“
That's
interesting.” Jonas did not sound as though he was responding to Dillon. “This bears looking into.”

“What's interesting?” Felipe asked.

Jonas pointed at the console. “The uplink monitor. Someone is beaming at
us
.”

Dillon winced. “Is it our turn to be cooked?” He had resigned himself to death, or so he had told himself—but not to dying
that
way. Poetic justice be damned.

“That's the funny thing,” Jonas said. “This new beam carries only a tiny fraction of the power that PS-1 emits.
Could
emit. Still, from the timing, this new beam must have something to do with our beam cutting out.”

“The incoming beam drowns out any beacons?” Dillon guessed. Because if so, maybe they were done up here.

“That's not it,” Jonas said. “Well, okay, an incoming beam
might
prevent us from hearing ground beacons. But the targeting beacon is the first thing to go up in smoke. I had tweaked the beam-control code first thing to capture the exact lat/long of the beacon before we open fire. After the beacon's gone, we keep aiming at the associated lat/long.

“When our beam stopped a few minutes ago, the target beacon was already gone. It'll be trivial, just not quite as accurate, to work entirely by entering target lat/longs up here.”

Lincoln had finally emerged from his shelter. He must have been listening to the conversation. “That's a lot about what's
not
our problem. So what is?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Jonas answered. “Yet.”

*   *   *

In a cacophony of beeps and ring tones, and a dozen aides bursting into telecon rooms across the country, the presidentially ordered strategy review shuddered to a halt. Because:

—The NSA's primary East Coast telecomm eavesdropping station—euphemistically the Navy Information Operations Command—had gone deaf. Or, rather, someone had begun shouting too loud for NIOC to hear anything else. The prelude to an attack? An attack by PS-1?

—Because PS-1's latest assault, on a Saskatchewan oil-shale mine, had stopped abruptly before inflicting any significant damage.

—Elint satellites reported that PS-1 had cut off its power beam! Another, far weaker, power beam appeared to be scattering off and penetrating through the powersat itself. From a hasty analysis of the scattered microwaves, probable beam strength: a half megawatt. Probable origin: West Virginia.