Energized (27 page)

“Phoebe is whipping around the Earth,” Marcus persisted. “Sometimes the signal path will be through the dirt. It won't always be upward through the base.”

Thad permitted himself to believe. “Okay, Judson, we'll give it a try.”

*   *   *

“But how can the beam be so
dangerous
?” Ellen burst out. “Marcus and I traveled the country swearing up and down the system was safe. That the beam just isn't that intense.”

But the powersat dealt with immense power, Valerie thought. A
gigawatt
of power, more than enough to do enormous harm.
How
you beamed that power made all the difference. Perhaps abducting a radio astronomer had not been such a bad idea. Especially a radio astronomer who had spent weeks debating the system end to end with Marcus.

Whoever controlled PS-1 had changed the beaming optimization. Defocused the beam? Refocused it? She would have to commit serious math to figure the best way to intensify localized hotspots. But
could
she wring out hotter—
much
hotter—hotspots, by constructive interference among the thousands of transmitters? Absolutely.

Valerie said, “PS-1 isn't dangerous, not as you built it. The story changes if someone doesn't care about efficiency or beam uniformity or power dribbling out in side lobes. Then parts of the beam can be made very intense.”

“Lethally intense?”

“It'll take me some time to run the numbers, but yeah.” Setting aside that hundreds, maybe thousands, dead already gave them the answer.

Tyler Pope stuck his head into the room. “Ready to dazzle?”

“Give us ten more minutes?” Valerie asked, fingers skimming the datasheet's virtual keyboard.

“That was a rhetorical question. Your presence is required in the war room.”

*   *   *

Valerie did not know what to expect of a war room. Giant wall screens. Lots of men and women, many uniformed, seated around an enormous conference table. Flags. Was that all too
Dr. Strangelove
?

Not really.

Perhaps the resemblance should not have surprised her. On the flight in, Tyler Pope had told her Mount Weather first opened in the depths of the Cold War.

She and Ellen were introduced to forty or so people, about half in the room and the rest netted in because planes remained grounded. Valerie did not try to retain names, struggling just to catch the organizations. In uniform: lots of military, mostly Air Force and NSA. In dark suits: CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the State Department, and White House aides.

And here
she
was wearing blue jeans and a Hard Rock Café T-shirt.

One of the White House aides asked, “What does our brain trust have to suggest?”

Ellen said, “PS-1 is
meant
to beam power. Directing a beam takes only three things. A beacon on the ground target. Lat/long values aboard PS-1 that match the beacon's coordinates. A correctly formatted ‘go' signal from the ground. Someone on PS-1 can update the permissible target list and input the ‘go' code locally. I think the dependency on beacons is the weak link.”

“We've sensed beacons at some of the targets,” a woman in an Air Force uniform said. (A colonel, Valerie was almost certain. Keith had often had her quiz him on rank insignia before weekend call-ups.) “Elint picked up some signals just before attacks. Where we didn't detect a beacon for an attack, it may be because we didn't have a bird in position.”

“Elint?” Valerie asked.

“Electronic intelligence. Nonvoice eavesdropping. A spy satellite, to keep it simple.”

Ellen nibbled on her lower lip, thinking. “We built PS-1 to stop beaming if the beacon went off center. This new, intensified beam must fry the beacon entirely. Does the beam keep going after the beacon stops?”

“It does,” the colonel said. “The elint birds see ongoing backscatter from the ground.”

Ellen squirmed in her chair. “More software bypassed, just like reshaping the beam to make it more intense. Another bypass for which the bad guys would have to be
on
PS-1.”

Someone asked, “But the beacons still serve as initial aiming points. Can we use that?”

The colonel shook her head. “Energy infrastructure is big and distributed and often in the middle of nowhere. Our best guess is that the terrorists remotely activate beacons by cell phone or radio when it's time for a strike. Bottom line: It's not safe to go in after spotting the signal. Two special-ops teams sent to suppress newly spotted beacons got … caught in the downlinks.”

Cooked, the colonel meant.

Ellen shrank into herself. “It wasn't supposed to be a weapon,” she whispered.

“Placing beacons…” Valerie hesitated, her question not yet clear in her mind. “Is that why attacks come only every hour or two? Too few bad guys on the ground to place beacons?”

“Unknown.” Pope turned to a CIA colleague, a petite African-American woman. “Any luck getting patrols to catch the people setting beacons?”

“Every ambassador has been tasked to put out the word. That'll take time. So will deploying patrols.”

“And we could be dealing with offshore wind farms or thousands of miles of pipelines and power cables,” the Air Force colonel reminded them. “It's impossible to guard everything.”

“Or they could change targets,” a White House aide said glumly, “to damn near
anything
. What if they aim at cities?”

“They?” someone else challenged. “Is anyone still up there?”

“Someone is,” an NSA guy answered. “We pick up their helmet chatter, although we have yet to break the encryption. Statistical analysis suggests they're speaking English. If so, another statistical analysis says they're using Russian intel-grade encryption. Which we have never broken.”

“Let's get back to basics.” Pope turned to Valerie and Ellen. “The shuttle and mother ship were moving targets. No fixed lat/long values to target. What does that tell you about how the bad guys compromised the lat/long matching function aboard PS-1? And if we're certain a plane or spaceship is free of beacons, does that make it safe to fly?”

The CIA
hadn't
been crazy to bring in an astronomer. “The warmer the telescope, the more thermal noise it generates. To do infrared astronomy, you want your instrument kept
cold
. Hence, there's an observatory on Phoebe.”

“Meaning?” Pope asked.

“Meaning any bad guys on Phoebe had access to very good infrared sensors.”

Pope said, “Whoever the bad guys are, they
were
on Phoebe. That faked CME brought together everyone in the neighborhood.”

“That tears it,” a two-star general said. “That's how they got the shuttle this morning. Infrared tracking. And if they can track a shuttle launch, they can track an inbound missile, too.”

“You would destroy PS-1?” Ellen said. “We have to
save
it. We have to use it as it was intended. If not, then I've spent years building a horrible weapon.…”

Suddenly Ellen was on her feet, ashen, lurching from the room. Pope whispered to his colleague and she followed.

Smash the damn thing to splinters! Valerie thought. Then we can send help to Phoebe.

Someone—Valerie did not notice who—suggested, “What about launching from out of sight, sometime when PS-1 is over Asia?”

“Just a
great
time to be lobbing a missile in the direction of Russia and China,” a man from Homeland Security said, fidgeting with his necktie.

The general stared down the civilian. “Russian early-warning satellites will spot any launch, and if Pope is correct, I imagine they'll relay the information to PS-1. There's no way we can know. And unless the payload loiters in orbit for a long while, making the intercept that much harder, I suspect it will retain enough heat for this astronomical sensor to lock onto against the cold background of space.”

“For much of every orbit, the sun will warm your payload,” Valerie said.

“I have a question,” a man from the State Department said. “Why did we send up that shuttle in broad daylight? A solar-power satellite can't be much of a threat at night.”

“It's not that simple,” Valerie answered. “Earth's shadow narrows with distance. I can't do precise trigonometry in my head, but PS-1 is in full shadow less than one hour out of every six-hour orbit. Can you get a warhead to that altitude in less than an hour?”

Glowers and murmurs gave Valerie her answer.

“Then what's left?” a White House aide demanded. “Waiting like so many fish in a barrel, while the terrorists render us more dependent by the hour on Russian oil?”

The general shook his head. “If we can blind the IR sensor with ground-based lasers, a missile might get through. If the powersat hasn't already been networked into the Russian early-warning system. If that's the case, our only option may be launching so many missiles we overwhelm it.”

That evoked lots of esoteric discussion about what and how and when to launch, about different payload options whose code names meant nothing to Valerie. Get
on
with it, she thought. Why the hell have missiles, if not for our own defense?

Looking a bit less pale, Ellen returned. She listened, frowning, shaking her head.

“What's the matter, Ellen?” Valerie asked.

“A missile will punch through PS-1 like a bullet through a wet tissue. Aside from the small hole, the structure is going to remain intact. Probably operational.”

Several junior officers spoke at once about explosives, and momentum transfer during a collision, and multiple warheads, and—

Suddenly red in the face, Ellen shouted them down. “Do you not get how
big
PS-1 is? Two million pounds. A wafer-thin square two miles on a side. Every essential component is fault tolerant, and then many times replicated. Most everything is highly distributed. The powersat is
designed
to keep on working past failures, even to repair itself.

“To stop PS-1 you must
obliterate
it. Using lots of missiles or, God help us, a nuke.”

For long seconds after Ellen's outburst, no one spoke.

“Christ,” one of the White House people said. “That's been someone's effing brilliant plan all along. Let America waste years gearing up to mass-produce powersats. Let us commit to powersats as our way out of the post-Crudetastrophe box. Then convince the world we built an illegal WMD. Leave us no choice but to blow PS-1 to bits to stop the mayhem. Two million pounds of shrapnel: it'll be decades, maybe centuries, before anyone uses that region of space or the resources of Phoebe.”

“What about the
people
on Phoebe?” Valerie asked. “If our missiles blast the powersat to space junk, how will we rescue them?”

No one would meet Valerie's eye. Not even Ellen.

 

Friday evening, September 29

At not quite 8
A.M.
, the day was already steamy. New Orleans, at least in the French Quarter, remained mostly asleep. Sitting in the shade of an awning, sipping an iced coffee and nibbling still-sizzling beignets, Dillon was at peace. Apart from indigents and hungover revelers sprawled out on park benches, Jackson Square was deserted. Seagulls and clanging channel buoys made the only sounds.

Crystal sat across the little wrought-iron table, sipping her own iced coffee, looking as content as he felt. They had the café almost to themselves. The breeze over the levee kept toying with her hair. After each gust she tossed her head, just so, to settle her bangs back in place. The maneuver never worked; somehow that made it even more adorable.

Setting down his cup, he reached over to pat her hand. “I could stay here all day.”

Only somehow she was out of reach. Far away. Slipping away. Fading. A speck glimpsed through a reversed telescope. On another world.

He lunged—

Heart thudding in his chest. Dillon snapped awake. His knuckles, although he wore gloves, smarted where he had cracked them against the closed door of the little shelter. He
was
on another world.

He unstrapped his helmet from the side of the shelter. The interior of the helmet glowed, but to read the time from the HUD he had to slip it over his head. Fifteen minutes before he had to stand his next watch. No point in trying to return to sleep. He used the primitive sanitary facilities, ate an energy bar—wallpaper paste would beat the slop from the helmet nipples—before sealing suit and helmet.

He vented oh-two from the shelter so that the hatch would open, and carefully swung himself outside. The splendor that was Earth brought a tear to his eye. Then a black, inchoate blot on that beautiful orb
really
made him want to cry. In his HUD's digital zoom, dark smoke from the refinery in Venezuela blended with smoke billowing from the bigger-than-ever oceanic burn-off. Burst tanks must still spew petroleum into the azure Caribbean.

“Enjoy your nap?” Felipe asked, only there was a ragged hint of strain under the surface cheerfulness. He waved from the open door of a nearby oh-two depot.

“All things considered, I'd rather be in The Space Place,” Dillon said. “What's been happening?” Not that he thought he would like the answer.

“The usual, boss,” Jonas answered. “An ethanol distillery here. A tidal generator there.”

But where was Jonas? Dillon did a slow turn. He spotted the team's true leader at the open hatch to one of the powersat's main computer complexes. Taking aim now at what?

In the heat of the moment, awash in adrenaline, Dillon had struck his share of blows. But overnight—did night apply? In any event, as he had slept fitfully—the enormity of their actions had overwhelmed him. How many more lives must now weigh on his conscience?

“When does it
stop
?” Dillon asked.