Energized (14 page)

As a nightshirt she was wearing one of Dad's old T-shirts. She peeled the damp fabric away from her skin.

Waves gently lapped against the side of the boat. Waves meant wind, didn't they? Maybe she could cool off on deck.

Or not. She was not much of a swimmer, and Grandpa insisted she wear a life vest whenever she was topside. Nervy, really, because he was not much of a swimmer, either. Mom, who swam like a fish, was a pretty good authority on the subject.

“I won't be falling off a boat,” Grandpa had rebutted when Eve brought up the double standard. “On my boat, you follow my rules.” Then he had ruffled her hair, like she was five years old or something, and added, “Captain's orders. You have to obey the captain.”

So I won't fall of the boat, she thought. It was too hot to wear a life vest.

As hot as Eve felt, the doorknob was hotter still. Odd. With a hand wrapped in a hem of the T-shirt, she pulled the door closed behind her. In their cabin, Grandma and Grandpa were both snoring.

Up on deck, air was moving. The wind helped evaporate her sweat and she felt cooler—for a few seconds. Then she was worse than ever. She even felt hot inside, if that made any sense.

By the second, she felt hotter, and hotter, and
hotter
.

She was sweltering, roasting, burning up. The deck seared her feet. It was suddenly more than she could bear and she screamed.

Cool and wet, the ocean beckoned. With a wail of despair, dashing for the side of the boat, she grabbed for a life vest. The metal buckle burnt her hand, and reflexively she let go—

As her momentum carried her over the side.

Cold water jolted her to her senses. The current was carrying her away from the boat. “Grandma! Grandpa!” she shouted. As she treaded water, screaming, a wave surged over her and saltwater ran down her throat.

Somehow, coughing and choking, she stayed afloat. “Grandpa!”

Her head was so
hot
! Only when a wave broke over her, or she dunked her head, did she get a moment of relief.

There! People on deck. Grandma and Grandpa. They were screaming, too.

“Grandpa!”

He threw her a line. It fell far short. Another wave washed over her, and when she came up this time, he was fumbling with a life vest. He screamed even louder trying to buckle it.

She went under again.

Fighting back to the surface she saw Grandpa leap from the boat. The unfastened vest flapped as he fell.

Her head was
so
hot. She couldn't think straight.

Another wave washed over her.…

 

Wednesday morning, August 2

A day into the meeting, Marcus decided, the PS-1 test readiness review would put any three-ring circus to shame.

It was not that more than one presentation, demonstration, or closed-circuit 3-V inspection went on at a time. Ellen and Phil, seated side by side at the front of the Kendricks Aerospace corporate auditorium, in ongoing whispered consultation, kept the TRR on subject. But there was no way to avoid the multitude of viewpoints, offered by everyone from power-grid operators to aerospace engineers to radiation-health specialists from NIH and EPA.

As NASA's program manager, Ellen got the final word whether to proceed with on-orbit testing. But until the review board, the menagerie of outside experts assembled by the National Science Foundation, decreed PS-1 was ready—and safe—go-ahead was simply infeasible.

With almost three days of the review left to go, the notes file on Marcus's datasheet already seemed impossibly long. Still, he was exhilarated. Nothing major had come up. More than a meeting, this was a
milestone
. At the next coffee break, he had to give Phil Majeski full credit. No matter that Phil would take the compliment as sarcasm.

And then, during a presentation on RF noise simulations, an earnest-looking young man came scurrying up the auditorium's center aisle to whisper into Phil Majeski's ear. Phil's expression flashed from irked at the interruption to … what? Marcus could not decide. Nothing good.

Phil leaned over to whisper to Ellen, who nodded. “Keep going, Brad,” Phil said when the engineer behind the podium trailed off. Phil and Ellen strode to one of the side rooms off the main auditorium.

What the hell? With Ellen doing—whatever—Marcus struggled to concentrate on the briefing. Kendricks engineers had come up with a way to detect and disable out-of-spec transmitters. Autonomous maintenance robots would be stationed all around the powersat anyway. With a software tweak and a minor electronics upgrade, the bots would triangulate the position of any malfunctioning transmitter and report it to the beam-control supervisory program. The program would take the failed unit offline, tweaking control parameters from nearby transmitters to compensate. Cheap, clever, and elegant.

If multiple transmitters went out of tolerance at the same time, to the point where triangulation failed, the supervisory software would shut off the beam. Transmitters would then be switched on and off in small groups and varying patterns until the individual failures could be isolated.

Pleased as Marcus was, and as pleased as he imagined Val would be, it was hard to maintain focus while wondering what kept Phil and Ellen away.

Then a real-time window flashed in his datasheet, with an IM from Ellen.
Join us.

Bethany Taylor, folding her own datasheet, stood seconds after Marcus did. Summoned, too? They met outside the little side room.

“Do you know?” he mouthed.

Bethany shook her head.

The engineering presentation faded into an inarticulate murmur as Marcus closed the door. A vid, its audio turned low, hung over a datasheet that lay draped across the table. The Reuters icon glimmered in a corner. Major news, then. Behind the talking head, Marcus saw a rockbound coast and boats bobbing in a light chop.

What could this have to do with PS-1? Somehow it must, to pull Ellen and Phil away from such an important program review.

“Replay bulletin,” Phil said.

“This is Theresa Wallace, in the Santa Barbara Channel.” The camera panned away from the reporter to survey the backdrop. “We are anchored near Santa Cruz Island, off the Southern California coast. You don't see buildings, or roads, or any of the accoutrements of civilization. That's because Santa Cruz, like all the islands of the Channel Islands National Park, has been set aside to preserve irreplaceable natural and cultural resources. Only a few tourists and researchers visit this remote park each year, and the official population of Santa Cruz Island is just two.”

Back to a close-up on Wallace: “And yet, incredibly, high-tech tragedy has struck here.

“Ralph and Mary Moynihan planned to show their granddaughter a bit of nature. They anchored offshore late yesterday afternoon.” The viewpoint shifted, zooming in on one of the boats, its paint scorched. “And then, apparently as they slept, the Moynihan family was
cooked
.”

Cut to a trembling woman in her sixties, her face red and severely blistered. Beside her, the inset image of a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old. “Eve's screaming jolted me awake.” Her voice cracked. The crawl declared
TWO BRUTALLY SLAIN
. “Then I was scr-screaming, and so was Ralph. The pain was unbearable, like I was on fire and—”

“Stop playback.” Ellen shivered. “I can't watch that again. I'm sure you get the idea, and you'll have no problem finding coverage if you want to see more.”

With a tap on the datasheet Phil banished the frozen image. “Once was plenty for me, too.”

“Cooked,” Bethany said. “Microwaves?”

“Uh-huh,” Phil said.

Marcus felt ill. “I remember reading something about beamed microwaves for nonlethal crowd control. The Army tried it in Iraq, I think, years ago, with truck-mounted transmitters. The microwaves induced painful heating in the skin, chasing people away before any permanent damage could occur.” And the parboiled-looking woman on that report? And two—husband and granddaughter?—dead?
That
seemed permanent. “That was the theory, anyway.”

Phil shook his head. “Not the Army. It comes out later in the report that some alternate-energy project in the Santa Barbara Channel was beaming power. Only a few megawatts, but short range. I'd wondered at first if extremists had hacked into the software that aimed the beam, but apparently not. The best guess is that vibrations on the platform loosened mounting bolts on the transmitting antenna.”

Marcus had been wondering about Resetters, too, but carelessness was no more acceptable as an explanation.

“A horrible tragedy.” Bethany shuddered. “This will sound terrible, but I'd bet we're all thinking it. The Resetters will pound us with this accident. If a few megawatts did this, they'll ask, what harm might PS-1 do with a gigawatt?”

Marcus
had
been thinking that, and Bethany's admission made him feel just a bit less callous. “And not only Resetter groups. The oil cartel will be all over this, too.”

“Agreed on all counts.” Phil sighed. “Nor will it be long until someone at our review finds out, whether surfing or getting a call. We need to think about how to break the news—”

The sudden clamor in the auditorium suggested they were already too late.

 

Wednesday evening, August 2

“Sushi?” Marcus said. “Sure.”

He did not care for sushi—the Japanese word for bait?—but he liked even less the idea of eating dinner alone. Ellen had an urgent conference call to take that evening with the NASA administrator. Marcus figured he could guess the topic.

“Excellent,” Savannah Morgan said. “A girlfriend told me about a
great
sushi place nearby. Follow me, gentlemen.”

Marcus had met her and Carlos Ortiz the first day of the review, at which both were observers. She was a civilian cyber-security expert at Space Command headquarters at Peterson AFB in Colorado. Everything about Savannah was exuberant, from bright eyes to grand hand gestures. She wore her hair in a bun pulled so tight Marcus wondered if her forehead ached. Colonel Carlos Ortiz, her uniformed colleague, was short, barrel-chested, and very dark, with a gravelly voice. He was stationed nearby at Vandenberg AFB.

“Lead on,” Carlos said.

They ducked out a back door to avoid Resetter picketers and the media circus at the Kendricks main entrance. Leaving air conditioning felt like stepping into a blast furnace. At a nearby cabstand they grabbed a ride. Savannah keyed in the restaurant's name and the autocab pulled away.

Carlos peered out at the boisterous crowd. “This is
not
a good turn of events.”

“What happened near Santa Cruz seems to have been a freak accident,” Marcus said. “The Resetters already hated PS-1. Won't this blow over?”

Carlos shook his head. “I don't see Resetters as your real problem. The Russians and their lackeys will have a field day with this. Powersats as WMDs.”

“But powersats aren't!” Marcus snapped.

“But they
could
be,” Savannah said. “Yeah, I heard yesterday's briefing about the interlocks and safeties. It's all very multilayered and sophisticated—and, hence, hard to get across to the public. The black hats only have to convey, ‘Think how many pieces have to work right. Because when one of those pieces
doesn't
work or some safety mechanism gets turned off: death rays. Broiled while you sleep.'”

No one had anything to add to that.

Kendricks Aerospace employed thousands, most on government contracts. That made upkeep of the headquarters campus a reimbursable overhead expense, and the management did not skimp. A block away from the immaculately groomed office campus, though, the neighborhood turned seedy. Piles of uncollected trash. Panhandlers at every bus stop. Store doors wedged open, the whirring box fans glimpsed inside the entrances surely unequal to the task. Storefronts boarded up and spray-painted with graffiti.

Too much of the country, of the
world,
was this way, and the downward spiral could not be reversed without cheap, plentiful energy.

Someone was responsible for the Santa Cruz accident. Whoever it was, Marcus silently cursed them.

Their autocab passed a news kiosk scrolling teasers. Between bankruptcies and box scores, blackout reports and brownout schedules, something flashed by about sabotage at the Bay of Fundy tidal power plant. Like
every
energy disruption, the incident meant more money to the Russian cartel. Before Marcus could retrieve his datasheet and buy the download file, they were out of range.

The cab's console chimed to announce their imminent arrival. “Sushi!” Savannah enthused. “That's not something you want to order in Colorado.”

“So at home for seafood you go with the Rocky Mountain oysters?” Marcus asked.

He took her mimed gagging as a no.

Sushirama was three-fourths empty. Marcus told himself it was Wednesday night and unfashionably early, knowing neither was the reason. Washing down every mouthful with beer, unable to shake the day's awful news, Marcus mostly avoided noticing what he ate.

His new friends swapped stories about mutual acquaintances.

“So what do we
do
about this mess?” Marcus interrupted. “The PS-1 project, I mean, and Santa Cruz, and public opinion.”

Savannah shrugged. “What you
are
doing. Test, test, test, then test some more. Make damn sure the safety interlocks work. Involve people like Carlos and me to make sure the system can't be hacked.”

“Because you think it can?”

“You never know,” she said. “Nothing Kendricks presented so far came across as problematical, but that proves nothing. The smallest oversight in implementation can be a security hole. You can be certain unfriendly hackers are looking.”

“Last week's defacing of the White House website?” Marcus asked. “Russians?”