Dry Ice (28 page)

“That’s not what I meant.”

She sent him a look. “Please tell me you’re not implying that I should keep the staff ignorant, Nik. They need to know what’s going on. I mean, I no sooner arrive and Greg leaves and our comms go dark, and then every scientist and programmer goes into a huddle in the sandbox. I’m sure information has been leaking out to the rest of the staff all day. It’s only right that I tell them what’s going on. I should have done it hours ago.” She paused and sniffed the air. “Am I hallucinating, or do I smell roasted lamb? In the old days on the Ice, wintering over meant canned or frozen everything, and we all shared cooking duties. Everything started to taste the same after about three weeks.”

“Ewan is a phenomenal chef,” he told her as they walked into the dining room, which held scattered tables of various seating capacities. All wore linen tablecloths and proper place settings. Nearly every table was filled with people in various stages of dining. “Food first or The Talk?”

“The Talk. I’m starving, so that will guarantee I’ll keep it brief.” She walked to the center of the room. The chatter died as every eye turned toward her. “Hi. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’d like to give everyone a quick update on our situation.

“We’re still off line as far as our communications uplink goes, as I’m sure you know. Ron’s team is working very hard to determine the problem and—well, no, that’s not completely accurate,” she said and paused, then continued more carefully. “We know what happened. The system didn’t crash by accident or because of anyone’s mistake, and it has nothing to do with the equipment. The communications network was brought down deliberately, probably by a command or executable placed in the code.”

She took a breath. “In addition, the arrays appear to have been placed into an alternate control scenario. The science team and the developers are working very hard to contain and correct that situation as well as restore full communications. That’s about all I can tell you. Or,” she corrected herself with a smile, “rather, that’s about all I know at the moment.

“I’ll keep you updated as things change. In the meantime, I want to assure you that all the systems that sustain the habitat are operating as they should be and we’re not in any sort of danger. We have an emergency backup communication system if we need it, which I don’t think we will. If you have any questions, feel free to sit down and ask me, or stop me in the hall.
Bon appétit.
”

“Tess,” came a voice from the far side of the room. She looked around to see Mick from the greenhouse with a questioning look on his face.

“Yes, Mick?”

“Who put the command in the code that brought down the communications?”

She hesitated for just a minute. “We’re pretty sure Greg did.”

“Greg?”

She nodded. “You might have gathered from his manner this morning that he wasn’t happy about leaving. He fought Flint’s decision to bring me down here and tried to keep the information from you,” she finished with a tight smile.

No one else asked any questions and the buzz in the room resumed and gathered strength. Tess joined Nik at the entrance to the area where the food was set out.

“‘Alternate control scenario’?” he said under his breath. “Did Gianni teach you that one?”

“No, I thought that up on the fly. I realized that I don’t know who on the administrative staff knows what about what we do down here. I didn’t want to give away the farm. Telling them that our multi-million-dollar rainmakers are behaving like a remote-controlled LEGO project didn’t seem like a good idea.”

“Well, that was a good catch. Everything is need-to-know around here, and the powers-that-be decided long ago that the admin and ops people don’t need to know much. I’m not sure even Dan does,” Nik said, making his last statement lighthearted and loud enough for Dan to hear as they came to a stop next to him at the buffet.

“You’re not sure Dan does what?” he said, emptying a small ladle of gravy over the slices of lamb on his plate.

“Nothing. I was just busting your chops,” Nik said easily, reaching for two plates and handing one to Tess, who had closed her eyes and wore an expression that was nothing short of rapture as she breathed in the rich, heady fusion of aromatics and roasted meat.

She murmured, “Oh, who knew you had to head south to get to heaven?” in a voice that Nik had never heard used in regard to food.

*   *   *

Nik sat back in his chair and shifted his torso first one way, then the other. He felt stiff and creaky after sitting in front of his computer nearly without a break for the last four hours. They were working in the conference room and Tess sat nearby, working on her own laptop. Nik found it remarkable that she seemed not to have changed her position in at least the last thirty minutes, or for much of the evening, for that matter. And damned if she still didn’t look good.

She’d been alternating between working in the conference room and the sandbox all day and hadn’t taken any time to install herself in Greg’s old office yet. She’d laughed it off, saying she needed to do a “vibe cleanse” first, but Nik suspected she just wanted to get integrated into the group as quickly as she could. Setting up her work space in the conference room and leaving the door open most of the time—two things Greg had never done—had already impressed the sandbox inhabitants.

“This stuff is amazing. Sick, twisted, and clearly written by a genius,” Tess murmured for what had to be the hundredth time. They were reviewing the monitoring logs of all the data and commands that had been fed to the antenna array in the hours since Greg had been alerted that Tess was on her way to TESLA. She’d already perused Greg’s paper files and the flash drives he’d left for her to see what she could find that related to Nikola Tesla. She hadn’t found much.

“You know, I used to think I’d get turned on by a woman who could read this stuff and like it. But you’re reading code like it was a novel, and I’m getting a bit concerned. That’s not normal,” Nik said bluntly, getting to his feet and stretching, half hoping she’d watch.

Tess glanced up then, a grim look on her face that did nothing to hide the excitement in her eyes. “Greg is a monster, Nik. And my response is normal. This code
does
read like a novel. It doesn’t have any dialogue or adjectives, but action? Insanity? That’s here in spades.”

“It’s machine code, Tess.”

“Come here and look at this.”

He walked to where she was sitting. She scrolled up the screen, then stopped and tapped her finger against it. “Okay, take this burst of activity in mid-March, just about a month ago. Crazy code, much like what Ron’s been talking about. Well, these lines seem to indicate that they had to do with steering—”

Nik squinted at the screen, then looked at her. “No, they don’t.”

“Sure they do. It’s buried and it’s clever, but it’s there. Anyway, just accept it so I can move on—”

“Wait a minute—,” he protested.

Tess rolled her eyes. “No, just hear me out. Here’s this teeny, tiny burst of atmospheric activity down here on the tundra—”

“We’re not on a tundra. It’s an ice sheet,” Nik pointed out.

“I know that. So down here on the ice sheet, there’s this pulse—” She drew her finger along the screen beneath a line of characters. “And here’s the
atmospheric
monitoring data from NOAA,” she said, pulling up a different window. She ran her finger down a column of numbers and stopped about halfway through. “It’s right here. An amalgamation of heightened solar proton events caused an increased polar cap absorption of HF radio signal transmissions and significantly limited Antarctic communication capability.” She looked at him triumphantly. “This is the blip you mentioned. He was testing ways to smack down TESLA, Nik. He was trying to cripple the love of his life and make it look like an accident. How’s that for sick?”

“But he didn’t cripple us then, and that code isn’t what ran today and pulled us down,” Nik pointed out.

“You told me the comms blipped a month ago.” She tapped the screen. “This is what did it. So he knew it worked, and he must have tweaked it. And if he could do that locally with one microburst, imagine what he could do with a bigger one. He could take out every installation on the Ice.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. And this string—” She flipped back to the window displaying the commands for the HF array. “Look at that. A little more bashing around of the solar flux peak absorption differentials and—” She went back to the cached NOAA data and scrolled down several pages. “And a day or so later there’s a beauty of a cyclone in the Central Pacific, in an area a little north of where the usual commotion is at that time of year. No big whoop, right?
Wrong.
I get email news updates from all kinds of people and, wait, let me find it—” She opened her email application as she spoke.

“You save them?” he asked, incredulous.

“I save everything. Here we go,” she replied. “Said storm just happens to coincide with some Russian naval war games, resulting in one seriously pissed-off bear and, no doubt, a bunch of delighted American admirals. Coincidence?”

Nick looked at her, resignation in every cell as he walked back to his chair, sat down, and tilted it to lean against the wall. “Gimme a white flag. I surrender. This is proof that—?”

“That Greg is serving two masters.”

Nik said nothing for a moment, waiting for the icy chill that ran down his back to dissipate as he watched the blue fire crackling in her eyes.

“The second being the U.S. military,” he said at last.

“It makes perfect sense. They kept him fed, housed, and entertained for, what, twenty years? I’m guessing his departure from HAARP wasn’t so much a divorce as the start of an open marriage. Sequestered down here at TESLA, with Flint paying his bills and no one looking over his shoulder, he could keep playing with the Pentagon brass and Flint would never know.”

“So Greg is the Pentagon’s secret whup-ass weapon?”

“Looks like it.”

Nik sighed. “What next?”

“I’d like to shut things down.”

Nik gaped at her and nearly lost his balance as the chair’s front legs landed on the floor and skidded. “Did you just say ‘shut things down’? Are you
insane
?”

Clearly startled, Tess blurted, “Yes! No, sorry, I thought you were going to say ‘serious.’ No, I’m not insane. I’m asking.”

“You want to power down
the whole installation
?”

“Well, no, of course not. Just the arrays,” she replied hastily. “We don’t control them. We can’t even keep them in ‘sleep’ mode. It’s untenable, Nik. We can’t just keep wringing our hands every time they power up. They’re destroying things.
We’re
destroying things.” She let out a frustrated breath. “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but you guys have built up some sort of an emotional distance to what you do. I mean, you’ve seen the footage from the flyovers in Mexico City, you saw what happened to Greenwich. We’re killing people, Nik, and maybe not just strangers.” She let a pause build, then stood up and walked to the door to close it. She turned to face him. “I’m trying not to think about this—I know I need to focus on the situation here—but my parents live on the central Pacific coast of Mexico, Nik. Right on the cliffs. Greg knows that. The epicenter of that earthquake wasn’t far from the coast. They could be hurt or—”

“Don’t think the worst, okay? It doesn’t help anything.”

“My point is, Nik, we need to get rid of that detachment, that sense that we have time to fix this. We don’t. We have big events queued up. We don’t know what they’re going to do or where they’re going to do it, but we know they’re going to be big. We’ve got to make this personal and do something
now.
”

“It’s not like we can flip the big ‘off’ switch down in the basement,” he said, not holding back his sarcasm.

“Sure there is. The power station.”

He stared at her. “You’re serious.”

She nodded. “Why can’t we?”

“Do you have any idea what’s involved with doing something like that? No, Tess. It’s no-go.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tess, it’s a last resort.”

“Let’s ask Dan what’s involved.”

Issuing a heavy sigh, Nik called Dan on the radio and the two switched to a secure frequency. “Tess and I are batting around a few imponderables, Dan,” he said, his gaze hard and fixed on Tess’s face. “What’s involved with powering down the fuel cells?”

“What’s involved for you is primarily just a lot of swearing and arguing on my part. The rest of it would be my problem. But I was just about to track you down. The sensors out there near the hydrogen tanks are showing some readings that aren’t making me feel all warm and cozy. An H
2
release is all we fucking need.”

Nik turned a little pale, then closed his eyes for a minute. “This isn’t one of your jokes, is it?”

“I wish.”

“Keep us posted.” He set the radio on the table and met Tess’s eyes. “A hydrogen release. I don’t even want to go there.”

“You don’t have to. Greg wouldn’t mess with that. He doesn’t know the first thing about chemistry.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I mean, not that kind of chemistry. It’s probably a wonky sensor or a false reading.”

“Yeah, we get a lot of those. You know: all this crappy equipment,” Nik replied, heavily sarcastic.

Tess rolled her eyes. “Oh come on, Nik, a hydrogen release could blow this entire place to smithereens. The explosion would be visible from space, for heaven’s sake. Greg wouldn’t do that.”

“Glad you’re so confident, Tess.” He sighed again. “Assuming we’re not facing a hydrogen-enriched Armageddon scenario and we were able to power down the arrays, we’ll be saying good-bye to our careers. We may never be able to get them back on line.”

She stared at him. “That’s my point, Nik. We can’t think about saving our careers right now. We can’t think about preserving TESLA. We need to stop the pulses before another one is turned loose on the world. Ron discovered an established periodicity. The first three bursts were six hours apart. We’re coming up on the magic number and I’d bet dollars to doughnuts there will be another one. I’d like to postpone it, Nik. Permanently. No matter what it takes.”