Energized (25 page)

“Thanks.” The pot finished brewing and she filled their mugs. “I was thinking. Suppose the CME fried Phoebe's main base transmitter. Could happen, right? They'd still have low-power stuff. Like spacesuit helmet radios.”

Remember when we met, Marcus? I said I could eavesdrop on a cell phone on Titan.

“And we have a big receiver. Good thinking.”

“Now if I could only find a bit of free time on the big dish.…”

“You know? I seem to recall an anomalous reading the last time I ran diagnostics. I'll be taking the big dish offline real soon, now.”

This time, she hugged him. But as long as they tracked Phoebe, they heard—nothing.

*   *   *

Footsteps in the Jansky Lab corridor were nothing unusual. These footsteps were. Too fast. Too soft. Like people sneaking up …

Valerie twitched as someone shouted, “Clear!”

Turning, she saw two men wearing camo, flak jackets, and helmets. Carrying
guns
! Shuffling noises in the corridor suggested others.

Nodding to the soldiers, a tall, ruddy-faced man in a rumpled blue suit walked into her office. He had thinning, close-cropped brown hair and a bristly mustache gone gray. He could have been the father, maybe even the grandfather, of any of the soldiers.

But the sight of a grandfather did not ordinarily send a chill down her spine.

“Dr. Clayburn?” the older man asked.

Patrick stood. “Someone's serious about giving us the day off.”

Ignoring the gibe, the man in the suit offered his ID. A holo logo shimmered above it. “Valerie Clayburn. May I have a minute?”

“That's me,” she said, although he seemed already to know that. “And what the
hell
is this about?”

“My name is Tyler Pope, and I'm with the CIA. You placed an interesting call yesterday to the Space Weather Prediction Center.”

“I'm an astronomer, Mr. Pope. We're interested in space.”

“Don't talk to him,” Patrick said. “Not without a lawyer.”

“Thank you for your opinion, Dr. Burkhalter. Don't look so surprised. I told you I'm CIA. You're still in the room because you were also on that call.”

“And why is the CIA interested in space weather?” Patrick asked.

Pope said, “Dr. Clayburn, you're in no more trouble than the rest of the country, but unfortunately, that's a great deal. Lawyers can't help us. So will one of you please explain that call?”

“My friend is on Phoebe.” She shivered. “I
hope
he's on Phoebe. The last contact I had, a short e-mail, he was at work on the NASA powersat. But because of adverse space weather, a radiation hazard, he would have been evacuated to Phoebe. The problem is, there's been no communication from Phoebe since just after the weather alert.”

“And your call to the space weather people?”

Patrick gestured at the muted 3-V. “Don't you have a crisis to attend to?”

“Who says I'm not?” Pope turned back to Valerie. “Your call?”

She had made three calls, the first two routine. “You mean when I said that yesterday's CME—sorry, that's coronal mass ejection—wasn't acting like a CME. No auroras. They couldn't explain it.”

“But your question stuck with them,” Pope said. “Here's the thing, Valerie. May I call you Valerie? The thing is, there
was
no CME yesterday.”

“I reviewed their data, and I'm qualified to make sense of it.”

“I'm sure you are, given accurate data.”

“I hardly think you're trained to—”

Pope cut her off. “Because of your questions—for which, thank you—a staffer at the Space Weather Prediction Center took the initiative to double-check their records. I'm told data from the early-warning spacecraft downloads through NASA's Deep Space Network. So this young man went back to the DSN, and in the buffer DSN keeps to diagnose any problems in recent communications they found…”

“No trace of a CME,” Valerie completed. “So what
did
I see in the weather center's database?”

“Except for time stamps, the supposed readings for yesterday's event turn out to duplicate a CME from 2019. When the security folks at the weather center reinstalled their intrusion-detection software, they found they had been hacked by experts. That's when they called the DOD Cyber Command.”

“But how…?” She trailed off in thought. Suppose one wanted—never mind why—to fake a CME. Could it even be done? “People interested in flares and CMEs go to the official repository, and that's the Space Weather Prediction Center. When an alert goes out to subscribers, the hundreds of satellites that a CME might clobber get put immediately into standby mode. When satellites reawaken undamaged, people just think how fortunate they were. Any independent scientist trying to measure the CME's ground-level effects, when she doesn't detect any, is apt to run diagnostics, check calibrations and the like, before questioning the official alert.”

Pope nodded. “You're very sharp, Valerie.”

“Still,” Patrick said, “those ground-based measurements will eventually check out. It can't be a matter of more than days.”

Hiding
a CME to destroy satellites might appeal to the sorts of fanatics who blow stuff up, Valerie supposed. Why do the opposite? Why fake a CME? And why bother if questions were sure to be raised after a day or two?

Then an even stranger question struck her. “The Russians have a space weather system, with independent data sources, run by their Space Research Institute. That weather center also shows a CME. Were they hacked, too?”

“Or,” Pope said, “are the Russians showing bad data on purpose? Do you begin to see why the CIA is interested?”

*   *   *

All very intriguing and bizarre, Patrick thought. But relevant, how? “What does this have to do with Valerie, or our armed guards?”

“Look outside,” Pope suggested.

Opening the window blinds, looking down into the parking lot, Patrick saw a Pocahontas County Sheriff's cruiser.

“I asked the local police to keep an eye on you until I got here,” Pope said. “The people I'm investigating have bigger ambitions than hacking the Space Weather Prediction Center.
I
found out you were asking perceptive questions. Someone else might.”

“I'm in danger?” Valerie asked, incredulous. “If I am, what about my family?”

“I don't think anyone is, but I won't take chances.” Pope gestured at the troops. “I'm leaving these men behind. Your family will be well protected.”

“
They
will. Where will
I
be?”

“With me, I hope. You spotted something important before anyone else. A government crisis team is gathering, and we need your kind of insight.”

“I need to be here, where my friend can reach me.”

“We're working to reestablish communications with Phoebe, too. Trust me, we have resources you cannot begin to imagine.”

With Marcus unaccounted for, she was
so
vulnerable. Patrick could see her wavering. “Do you want to do this? And would you like me to come along?”

“I don't recall inviting you,” Pope said, glowering.

Patrick refused to react. Of
course
Mr. CIA had seen his government files, and judged Patrick unworthy of trust. Bastard.

“Will you keep an eye on Simon and my parents?” she asked.

“Of course.” Patrick hesitated. “So you're going? You're sure.”

“I have to,” she said.

Because if the CME was imaginary, then why had Phoebe base gone silent? And how could any of this, as Pope had hinted, relate to this morning's terrorist attacks? By joining this task force, Valerie might find out—and about Marcus, too.

“I understand,” Patrick told her. “Do what you have to do.”

“I'm glad that's settled,” Pope said. “If we can be going, Valerie, time is of the essence. We have a chopper waiting.”

*   *   *

Wooded, rolling countryside vanished behind the helicopter. Overwhelmed by events, Valerie had scarcely noticed when they took off from Green Bank's tiny and seldom-used airstrip, but from the chopper's shadow their course was east-northeast. Except for the pilot, she and Tyler Pope had the aircraft to themselves.

“Are you all right?” Pope asked her.

“Truthfully? I'm too numb to know.”

“Sorry to whisk you away like this. It
is
urgent. And there are things I couldn't share around your friend.”

“He's a good man!” she protested.

Pope shrugged. “I don't doubt that. Good and well suited to a crisis are very different.”

Such as losing the
Verne
probe by acting in haste. Taking Pope's point did nothing to assuage her pangs of guilt.

“Valerie.”

She turned to look at him.

“Contrary to what you've seen on the Internet and 3-V, the attacks aren't bombings. Governments are sitting on the real story for a little while, so the bad guys don't know we know.”

“Who
are
the bad guys?”

“Unclear.” He sighed. “But I have my suspicions.”

“The Russians, you intimated. Their space weather center could have been hacked, too.”

“Maybe. Russians involvement doesn't mean
all
Russians.”

“If their space weather center isn't complicit,” she said, “then how does any of this involve the Russians?”

“Consider the targets. Most are alternate-energy-based power generation and distribution facilities. The one petro facility to be hit is the main export hub in Venezuela. The Russians haven't been happy with Petróleos de Venezuela shipping way over its cartel-approved quota.

“Did you happen to check the price of oil futures today?”

The Crudetastrophe had taken away Keith. Now another oil-related crisis? She could not
bear
to think about losing Marcus.

“Valerie. Valerie, stay with me.”

“What?” she said, woodenly.

“The nonbombings. The attacks come from space, using a microwave beam from PS-1.
That
is why everyone is suppressing the true nature of the threat. Until the news gets out, no one will question NASA and Cosmic Adventures sending a relief shuttle to Phoebe, to repair whatever has gone wrong with their comm and to bring back anyone needing evacuation.” Pope glanced at his wrist. “They should be taking off right about now.”

Maybe Marcus
wasn't
doomed! “A rescue mission!”

“Indirectly,” Pope said. “The shuttle will carry a squad of special-ops folks, trained for combat in space. At the last minute they'll veer to retake control of PS-1.”

*   *   *

Patrick accompanied the soldiers to Valerie's house. Mr. and Mrs. Yarborough had not struck him as the kind to take well to the military descending on them. Then again, who did?

He settled into Valerie's home office, ready to intervene for her parents if the need should arise. A 3-V droned in the living room. Whenever they cranked up the volume, it meant another terrorist attack.

His impression was of attacks all over the place and he did not see the logic. He hunted around until he found an Ethernet cable with which to net his datasheet. After plotting the attacks on a globe, he
still
saw no pattern.

Maybe another of the day's mysteries would somehow shed light on the situation. A fine idea—except that he had no idea how to plot a counterfeit CME.

There was yet another mystery, the one that had Valerie frantic. Why was there no news from Phoebe? Patrick expanded his plot, draping his holo globe of Earth in a broad sinusoidal band. Little pennants stood here and there within the band.

Every one of the terrorist attacks had happened in view of Phoebe and PS-1. And every attack had taken place while PS-1, if not always the target, had been in sunlight.

“What have I done?” he whispered.

*   *   *

Big Momma
lumbered down the Cape Canaveral runway. The plane lurched—its engines laboring, as always, under the weight of a fully fueled orbital shuttle—off the tarmac into a cloudless blue sky. Glowing gases, 2,700°F hot, streamed from the turbofan exhausts.

High overhead, a sensor once a part of the Phoebe infrared observatory homed in on the heat source. Powersat controls designed to maintain focus on a surface location—despite the powersat's orbital motion and the Earth's rotation—maintained a lock on the target.

At the appointed time and altitude,
Big Momma
released its cargo. Lighting its main engine, spewing 6,000°F exhaust, the shuttle shot skyward. The sensor redirected its attention to the brightest infrared source in its field of vision—

And an intense beam of microwaves lashed out.

Shuttle electronics shut down, overloaded, and arced. Liquid oxygen and hydrogen in the shuttle's fuel tanks flashed into vapor—and vapor pressure burst the tanks.

In an instant, the shuttle became the heart of a fireball.

For a time the fireball was the hottest thing in sight; microwaves continued to pour down on it. But the fireball burnt out. The debris dispersed and cooled.

And the distant sensor redirected the ravening microwave beam onto the blazing exhausts of the fleeing aircraft,
Big Momma
.

 

Friday afternoon, September 29

By the West Virginia standards to which Valerie had grown accustomed, Mount Weather was not much of a mountain. Not that she had gotten much of a look: the chopper had swooped in low to the ground, skirting the little town Tyler Pope had identified as Berryville, Virginia. Hustled from the helipad into a sprawling underground tunnel complex, she had been left waiting, all alone, in a small, sparsely furnished meeting room.