Energized (38 page)

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?

“Behind us,” Thad screamed once more. He fired his coil gun again and again. The bots kept coming, too numerous to stop. Maimed bots, too, trailing shattered limbs.

Now Felipe and Lincoln were firing, too.

Bots swarmed up Felipe's legs.
He
screamed.

Dillon—ironically safe, for the moment, in the latched shelter—shouted to be released, to be told what was happening, and, finally, in inarticulate fear and rage.

Jonas's scream morphed into a burbling, choking death rattle.

The coil gun twitched impotently in Thad's grasp, its ammo spent.

Not only his: Lincoln, cursing, hurled his gun at the bots teeming at his feet. Too late, Lincoln jumped. Tens of bots already crawled over him, their limbs and tools flashing. Red fog spurted from tiny rips and punctures in his suit.

Thad leapt from the powersat.

From twenty feet above the powersat, he saw that bots had avoided Marcus's and Savvy's tethers. To protect the two? Maybe he was safe here, too.

It was a nice thought for the few seconds it lasted.

Whoever controlled the swarming bots had evidently designated only those specific tethers off-limits. Bots clambered up Thad's tether. He brushed them off with the barrel of the coil gun. More bots rushed up the tether, and he brushed them off, too—until one grabbed the gun.

He flung gun and bot away as forcefully as he could, as more bots started up the tether.

Throwing the gun had sent him into a rapid spin. There were bots all around, still inrushing from the farthest reaches of the powersat.

Detouring for a good three feet around Marcus's and Savannah's tethers.

Thad cast off the reels of both his tethers, to drift away from the bot hordes. With a gas pistol, he started jetting to the docking posts. He could take a hopper to Phoebe, grab the remaining escape pod there. Maybe he would be gone before the missiles hit, or the debris would take a while to disperse.

To do what? To go where? He had nothing to live for.

“I'm sorry,” he broadcast on the common channel. “For all the deaths. For the shame I've brought my family. For everything.”

Then he turned off his radio and his heater.

As the cold became all, as his thoughts, like his blood, thickened to syrup, he welcomed blissful oblivion.

*   *   *

“Are you okay?” a tremulous voice asked. It was the last voice Marcus expected to hear just then.
Valerie's
voice.

“Just shaken up,” Marcus radioed back. And still shaking. He kept that to himself. “Do you control the—”

“You look okay.” She had hardly paused, not waiting for his answer. The Earth/comsat/PS-1 latency being, well, whatever it was at this moment, she might not yet have heard him. “I need you to jack into the main computer. It will be a secure link. Oh, and yes. I control the bots. I've sent them the order to stop swarming.”

“On my way,” Marcus said.

He reeled himself in, and saw Savvy doing the same. The bot army dispersed as he and Savvy made their way to the console. On nearby posts, cameras turned to follow their progress.

A body, tethered into place, floated just above the access panel. The helmet visor had cracked. Pain and fear had twisted the dead man's face, and his eyeballs bulged.

An unfamiliar voice, a woman, said, “Keep the bodies.”

Gingerly, Marcus and Savvy moved aside the body, still tethered so it would not float off. They used fiber-optic cables to jack in.

“
Is
this secure?” Marcus asked.

“As secure as is anything up here,” Savvy said. “When I was testing, that seemed secure. Of course four days ago, none of us trusted the network security enough to allow sysadmin access from the ground.”

“We're glad you took the chance,” Valerie said.

“This is General Rodgers, Air Force,” the other woman introduced herself. “We don't have much time. Is the powersat secured?”

How could they be sure? Marcus wondered. “Four terrorists shut us into the shelter on Phoebe. All from The Space Place, and we have three bodies. We saw Stankiewicz jump off; we can, just barely, still see his suit, drifting. I'm not eager to go check him out.”

“Our sensors say the body is cold.” Rodgers paused. “And we see another body floating a little farther away.”

“Poor Dino,” Savvy said.

“That leaves one unaccounted for, possibly armed, and just the two of you,” Rodgers said.

“General, you've
got
to call off the missile strike,” Valerie said.

“It's not my call,” Rodgers answered softly, “but I can't recommend it. Not with a terrorist unaccounted for.”

Savvy said, “General,
we
control the beam. And we control the bots.”

“We've suspended the beam,” Rodgers said.

“If the last terrorist shows up,” Savvy said, “we still have the bots.”

“Maybe there
is
no fourth guy,” Valerie said. “Wherever he is, he's not visible to the surveillance cameras.”

“About those missiles?” Marcus asked. “Any second now Savvy and I will hopper back to Phoebe for the last escape pod.” Because any chance is better than no chance. “We've saved the powersat, General. Dino Agnelli died to save it. Do not waste that sacrifice. Do not surrender the potential to build hundreds more like PS-1.”

The silence stretched awkwardly.

“General, we're leaving,” Marcus said.

“Wait,” Rodgers said. “If I'm not back in two minutes, run for it.”

And for almost two minutes, no one said a word. Marcus scarcely breathed.

“Stay put,” Rodgers said. “If you watch very closely, you may see payloads zipping past. They'll arc by you, then splash down harmlessly in the South Pacific. That said, can you two hold out for a day? Where you are, not going to Phoebe or The Space Place?”

Marcus remembered checking onboard supply depots, killing time while the others inspected. Four days ago, Savvy had said. It felt like a lifetime. Any one depot held more than enough oh-two, water, and batteries. “Yes, General, we can do that.”

“Agreed,” Savvy said.

“Good,” Rodgers said. “Within twenty-four hours, expect company: a shuttle of Special Ops folks. They'll secure the powersat and Phoebe. Their shuttle will bring you down.”

“Thank you, General,” Marcus said.

“No,” Rodgers corrected. “Thank you.”

 

Sunday evening, October 1

“This is a very rushed op,” Charmaine said. “You sure about this?”

“Concur, and yes,” Tyler said.

He could almost appreciate how delicately she hinted that his last field op had been twenty-three years and two heart attacks ago. The action would be all of a five-minute walk from his own front door—and he would be driving to the op.

None of which mattered. To succeed, the op demanded his personal connection, and he damn well meant it to succeed. Anyway, Yakov would be far more rushed than he.

Tyler said, “And not that I'm superstitious or anything”—she snorted—“but things, finally, seem to be breaking our way.”

“That they are.”

Agency phones were as secure as cell phones could be, but that did not keep them both from speaking in circumlocutions. He said of the recaptured powersat, “Still behaving?”

“And still functional.”

“Excellent,” he said.

Not secured, though. To secure PS-1 required putting troops up there and, until less than an hour ago, it had been impossible to safely prep a shuttle launch.