Energized (31 page)

“Where is NIOC?” Tyler Pope demanded. He had to shout to make himself heard.

“Sugar Grove,” an NSA guy called back.

“And where the hell is that?”

“West Virginia. Middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone.”

In other words, not far from Green Bank. Pope called Valerie's room. No one answered. He called Ellen's room, and no one answered there, either.

His chair crashed as he leapt to his feet. On his way out of the room he caught General Rodger's arm. “Make sure the Pentagon and White House know the attacks have halted. Tell them someone found a way to suppress the beam from PS-1.” Only who the hell
was
that someone? “Make sure they know we can delay a decision on a missile attack.”

“Understood,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“To find an astronomer.”

*   *   *

For long minutes, Dillon basked in the inactivity. Maybe PS-1 had been disabled. Maybe the worst of the horror was past. Maybe—

“Aha!” Jonas said. “PS-1 has sensors to pinpoint out-of-tolerance transmitters. The beam from the ground is saturating the sensors, which misread the situation as lots of our transmitters crapping out. That's why software cut our beam. Once we're over the horizon from the transmitter, we should be able to restart.”

“Three hours later, we'll be back in line of sight of whoever figured out how to jam us. And for all we know,
another
transmitter waits just over the horizon, ready to keep us neutered. What then?” Felipe asked.

“Still reading code,” Jonas said. “I can't answer yet, but this looks useful. The shutoff code is in a recent overlay to the control program, not very integrated. If I can bypass it…”

“We'll be back online, even on this side of the world,” Felipe said. “So then do we ignore this beam from the ground?”

Jonas said, “In the long run, soaking up these microwaves can't be good for us or PS-1.”

Because it's healthier to take a missile down the throat? Dillon thought hysterically. “With no beacon to aim at wherever this signal comes from, I don't see that we have any choice.” Other than taking the hoppers back to Phoebe and grabbing escape pods.

“Oh, we'll have a choice,” Jonas said, “as soon as I tweak some other code. The
beam
will be our beacon.”

*   *   *

Thad stared at a piece of safety apparatus that had always terrified him. The chemical oxygen generator would run 600°F hot, releasing oxygen for as long as it burned. Unless the candle had the least bit of contamination, in which case it was as apt to explode as to burn.

But his head was pounding, and he was exhausted.

So: Light the candle, or in a few minutes they would all slip into comas from the lack of oxygen.

Gritting his teeth, Thad struck the firing pin in the igniter module.

Blessed heat and oxygen began to flow.

They would live a little while longer.…

*   *   *

“What in the world?” Ellen muttered from across the room.

Valerie looked up. Ellen's bot's eye view showed a stretch of dark plain dotted with light-shaded … Valerie could not guess what she saw. In the image reconstructed from lidar scans, light shades denoted surfaces that were comparatively reflective of UV light. Scattered patches of exposed ice?

“Move closer to one of the things,” Valerie suggested.

The bot sidled closer, and the blobby shape in the foreground became, maddeningly, almost recognizable. Other objects came clearer, too, and she recognized a clipboard and, yards away, a pen.

“This looks like a wad of cloth,” Ellen said.

Laid flat, the object was a T-shirt.

“A blowout!” Ellen said. “This is bad.”

Terrified of what she would find, Valerie sent two bots racing toward the base's main air lock—

Where inner and outer hatches gaped, exposing Phoebe base to vacuum.

*   *   *

Through bots' eyes, Valerie stared in dismay.

With Ellen's guidance, Valerie had—somehow—maneuvered two bots into the depths of the base. Rather than figure out how bots could—
if
they could—descend a ladder, she had run them into an open shaft, sending them into slow-motion falls. After a second tumble, she had two bots on the shaft floor outside the radiation-shelter entrance.

Another two bots, one at the top of the shelter's access shaft and the second in the main corridor, daisy-chained toward the ad hoc network that reached across Phoebe back to the bot corral and its high-powered, comsat-linked, radio transceiver. Two more bots waited at the air lock, one inside, one out. The moment the hatches closed, Valerie would lose her tenuous connection.

The bots outside the radiation shelter stared up at a latch jammed with a pry bar. The pry bar did not look heavy, or difficult to remove. Only a bot could not reach the latch …

One bot standing on another
still
could not reach the latch. Could the bots find stuff to drag here, with which to improvise a ramp or staircase? Conceivably—if, first, they did not have to somehow climb the human-scaled ladder to find the stuff. And if the bots' batteries were not almost out of juice. Nor were there more bots to send: she and Ellen had dispatched every bot with any significant charge in its batteries.

In desperation, Valerie jumped a bot. It
had
no jump mode, but by contorting its tentacles and then twitching them, she got a sort-of leap that lifted the bot a few inches above the floor. As it floated like a dandelion puff in Phoebe's insignificant gravity, she wanted to scream. Instead, while the first bot drifted down, she fine-tuned her technique with the second. It leapt perhaps a foot into the air. The first bot landed and she jumped it again—

And landed it on the latch!

“Are you ready to close the air lock?” Valerie asked Ellen.

“Just say when.”

Valerie edged the bot into position. Four limbs coiled around the latch itself. Three grabbed the pry bar. The remaining tentacle pressed against the jamb beside the hatch, for alignment. She heaved.

Nothing.

Loosening her grip she wiggled the bot into another position. The pry bar shifted! She changed her grip and pulled again. And again.

*   *   *

There was nothing left to try.

Here and there, people sipped dregs of oh-two from counterpressure-suit tanks by taking turns with the helmets. Most people hunched over paper or datasheets, recording their last thoughts, wishes, and wills.

Marcus had written notes to his parents and brother. He had written to Ellen, assuring her he had come to Phoebe by his own choice, and thanking her for her many kindnesses. He had written Lindsey, wishing her well, because life really was too short to carry a grudge. And because he really needed the closure, the better to say good-bye to someone truly special.

If Valerie felt as he did—and he thought she did—their brief time together was about to morph into trauma. He was about to become another man who made promises he could not keep and then did not come home.

Marcus shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Was there a noise beyond the pounding in his head? A grating, rasping sound?

He edged through the crowd, toward the noise. Toward the hatch. He was so short of breath, he could hardly walk.

*   *   *

The bot teetered on its perch on the latch, the pry bar removed and still in its grasp.

How could she get the attention of the people inside? On Earth, dropping the pry bar to the floor would raise a clamor. Here? As the tool gently landed, it would scarcely make a sound.

Valerie swung the pry bar against the closed hatch. From the bot's precarious perch on the hatch, she could pull back only a couple inches. How much noise could it even make inside?

She swung it again. Again. Again. Again …

*   *   *

Patrick knew the instant his luck turned: the lesser telescope with which he kept watch on the powersat had just gone blind.

PS-1 had resumed beaming. At Green Bank, it would seem.

He had failed—again.

The safest place for him was in this control trailer. The quarter inch of steel plate all around that shielded the big telescope from the trailer's electronics would shield
him
. But like a metal spoon in a microwave oven, the steel plate could absorb only so much energy without melting or arcing.

He told himself the telescope itself, sixteen million pounds of metal, would absorb most of the beam. He reminded himself that the telescope absorbed lightning strikes several times a year. He told himself that, before long, orbital motion would drop PS-1 behind the horizon.

He might yet survive his latest failure.

Creaking came from the direction of the big dish. He imagined metal softening. Warping. Bending. Sagging.

Then: piercing squeals. The tortured shrieks of Brobdingnagian motors, gears, and bearings seizing up.

He jumped at a tremendous
bang!
Diesel fuel vaporized, the tank exploding? With a crackle and a shower of sparks, power in the trailer died. In utter darkness, he felt … hot. He told himself the sensation was only his imagination.

Renewed creaks and groans, louder and more ominous. Tearing sounds.

Then a rumble like the end of the world. Only it got louder and louder and louder and …

*   *   *

The rasping stopped—or, more likely, had never existed in the first place. Marcus pondered staying where he was. But then, faintly, he heard tapping. He resumed walking. He was gasping by the time he reached the hatch. Definite tapping.

“Hello?” he called.

A few people looked up at him, puzzled. Most did not stir. No one answered, inside the shelter or out.

“Hello?” he called again, louder.

Not quite rhythmic: continued tapping. Like someone torturing a nail.

Everyone was about to die in here. Someone was out there. Although the hatch had
never
budged since Dillon and his people left, Marcus tugged on the inner latch.

The hatch blasted open.

And all the dank and fetid air in the shelter spewed out after it.

 

CONQUEST | 2023

 

Saturday, early afternoon, September 30

The gale blew Marcus from the shelter.

People screamed. Papers, datasheets, emergency-ration wrappers, and drink bulbs pelted Marcus, then whipped past him up the access shaft. As the wind lifted him, too, but more slowly, the hatch rebounded from the shaft wall to slam into his side and send him spinning.

Someone shoved him aside to clamber up the ladder into the station. Someone in a blue counterpressure suit and helmet.

Suddenly air gushed the other way: down the shaft. Toward the shelter.

Marcus crashed into a wall. Debris swirled about. As did an eight-legged something. A silvery tourist bot.

“I knew you would hear me,” he told Valerie. And passed out.

*   *   *

“So what shall it be, hmm?” Jonas floated above a terminal, hands poised. “I see beacons lit for a solar farm in Cuba, a garbage-fueled municipal power plant on Aruba, and a tidal power plant in the Azores. What's your pleasure?”

Dillon shivered. Pleasure? “You know how I feel.”

“I'll take that as a vote for something dramatic, something to get this over quickly.” Jonas studied his terminal. “More than cigars will be smoking in Cuba.”

“You really think that's necessary?”

“I do indeed, boss.” Something changed in Jonas's voice, and his customary mocking tone vanished. “Because if we
don't
get a response soon we'll have to up the ante. None of us want that.”

“Up the ante?”

“Uh-huh,” Jonas said flatly. “Population centers.”

*   *   *

“Shit, shit,
shit!
”

Abandoning a systematic search, Tyler Pope dashed toward the sudden, heartfelt curse. Valerie Clayburn did not strike him as the cussing kind, but these were not ordinary times and the pissed-off voice sure sounded like hers. He found Valerie and Ellen Tanaka in an out-of-the-way meeting room.

“There you are,” he began. Then he noticed—in grayscale, the shading somehow offending his sense of nature—a holo of what must be Phoebe and its base. At the heart of the image, an air-lock hatch ajar. And obstructing much of his view, a white-on-red blinking banner that shouted:
Bots lost. User account frozen pending investigation.
“What's going on?”

The women exchanged anguished glances. Ellen nodded.

“First things first,” Valerie said. She opened another holo to show a hatch in an interior room or shaft, the door latch jammed with a pry bar. “People were trapped inside the Phoebe radiation shelter. Ellen and I had marched tourist bots across Phoebe to see what we could learn. This image was taken a few minutes ago.”

“Were trapped?” Tyler echoed.

Frowning, Valerie opened a third image: a blurry, canted, still shot of someone emerging from the hatch. “This is from maybe a minute before you joined us. I think the bot that took the picture is spinning in midair, knocked off the hatch latch from which it had removed the pry bar. But thin air, because we found the station in vacuum. The shelter hatch exploded open.”

“And what's happening now?” he asked. “How are the people doing? What can they tell us about events on PS-1?”

“I don't
know,
” Valerie said. She gestured at the original holo and its flashing disconnect banner. “Closing the air lock broke the radio connection to the bots inside the base. I've gotten myself blacklisted for seeming to have lost rentals.”

“This I can fix,” Tyler said, squinting at the logo in a corner of the images. “Out of Body Tours.”

As he reached into a coat pocket for his cell, it rang. “Pope.”

“It's hitting the fan again,” Charmaine Powell said. By dashing off in search of Valerie, he had left his protégée doing the honors for the CIA in the war room. “General Rodgers wants you back, pronto.”