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  NSA? No Such Agency, Keith used to translate that, mockingly. As though a huge federal agency with vast resources could hide in plain sight. Such as the big complex at the north end of the quiet zone: she knew no one who believed the Navy’s claim of ownership. Not a lot of call for naval facilities in the middle of a landlocked state. Or any obvious reason for the Navy to operate antennas to rival Green Bank’s.

  Valerie had met parents at Little League games who did not work at the observatory but asked damned perceptive questions about the telescopes. National Security Agency, surely. It stood to reason the country’s premier eavesdroppers would also have computer whizzes on staff.

  “Which leaves us where?” Valerie asked.

  “It leaves us, as far as world opinion is concerned, with an American weapons platform constructed in space in violation of international treaty. Worse, a weapon the control of which we carelessly lost to terrorists. Or, according to a fair chunk of the blogosphere, the pretense of lost control, there being no proof whatever that the U.S. does not still control PS-1.”

  “Are there terrorists? And are they Resetters?” Ellen asked.

  “Hell, yes, there are terrorists,” Pope said. “But as for who they are, that’s a tougher question.

  “A lot of intel work is looking for patterns. The past few hours, legions at the CIA have been digging into the background of anyone who could have been involved.

  “So here’s a pattern for you. Remember the microwave incident early last month in the Santa Barbara Channel? The company whose beamed power killed that little girl and her grandfather?”

  “All too well,” Ellen said. “The accident generated tons of bad press about beamed power and PS-1.”

  And if that accident had never happened? Marcus would still be on the ground. Valerie couldn’t help thinking that, but kept it to herself. If only wishes helped nobody.

  “The company was a start-up,” Pope said. “Its lead investor was Russo Venture Capital Partners. Reviewing passenger manifests from Cosmic Adventures, guess who showed up? Dillon Russo. Also three of his employees, all engineers. All on The Space Place when it had to evacuate to Phoebe.”

  “Quite the coincidence,” Ellen said.

  “No coincidence,” Pope said. “I just can’t prove it yet. Regardless, people who vacation in space are rich and well connected. Names are already coming out. I won’t be the only one to make the Dillon Russo connection.

  “So what’s your choice, ladies? American terrorists or American agents pretending to be Resetter terrorists? In either scenario, the U.S. becomes competitively stronger as power plants and energy resources go boom in other countries. Of course while all this happens, everyone is being weakened in absolute terms.” Pope grimaced. “Everyone, that is, except the Russians.”

  The universe could be subtle, but it was never devious. The universe didn’t know how to lie. Not only did Valerie have no answers, she did not even know the questions. Except one. “What about everyone else from Phoebe and The Space Place? How do the conspiracy theorists explain that no one can contact them?”

  “Hostages. Coconspirators. Irrelevant. Take your pick.” Pope rubbed his eyes, looking exhausted. “We have experts out the wazoo to analyze the politics, but not for PS-1 itself. So back to work, you two. We don’t have much time to find the powersat’s weak point.”

  * * *

  The air inside the shelter was stuffy and dank, reeking of sweat, urine, and fear. People milled about, murmuring, shivering.

  A fortunate few slept. Thad wondered how they did it. He tried to rouse himself to remember it would not be only himself dying.

  No one could ever have anticipated spending more than a few hours in the shelter, especially not crammed in like commuters on a Tokyo subway. Their air scrubbers were failing under the load. And it was cold; to conserve fuel cells, he had dialed down the thermostat to fifty degrees. For all the densely packed humanity, Phoebe sucked out the heat through the insulated walls. They would asphyxiate or freeze to death before food or water became an issue.

  Thad tried the hatch. Again.

  Still jammed. Whatever Yakov’s team had done to the door, it was stuck but good.

  Marcus pushed through the crowd to make yet another protest. “We have to get word out,” he insisted. “Or else we’re going to die in here.” And in a whisper: “We’ve been out of touch for close to two days. NASA may already think we’re dead.”

  “I’m open to new ideas,” Thad said.

  “All I have is the old idea we have yet to try. Look, we’re stuck inside a Faraday cage. So we cut a hole in the wall. Shove through a radio sending an SOS. Patch the hole.”

  The idea was not only old, but useless. Of course no one but Thad knew the main base radio was fried. It would never relay anything. “It’s wishful thinking that the base radio and computers will have come back up on their own. And a datasheet has a range of what? A couple hundred feet?”

  “I’ve refined the plan a bit. We pull the radio from someone’s helmet. Helmet radios are good for miles, right? I mean we could talk with a helmet radio between PS-1 and Phoebe.”

  “Relayed through big antennas on Phoebe and PS-1,” Thad said.

  “Be realistic! What do we have to lose?”

  “Air! Heat!”

  “For how much longer?” Marcus shook his head. “Here’s something you have no reason to know. The woman I’m seeing is an astronomer. A radio astronomer. Val once said she could hear a cell phone on Titan. So maybe she’ll hear a helmet radio from a few thousand miles.”

  The plan was still daydreams and moonbeams. “The wall panels aren’t made of tin foil. How do you expect to cut through one? And do it leaving a clean cut you can seal over.”

  “I’ve been working on that, too. Savvy still has her tool kit from our PS-1 outing. We’ll start by scraping with the blade of a screwdriver. If that wears out, then other tools, then belt buckles. We’ll make it work.”

  “And to seal the hole once the radio is outside the wall?”

  Marcus rapped on a supply cabinet. “We undo the hinges if possible, break them if not. The door is a flat piece of rigid plastic. We’ll make our hole somewhere the wall is flat. Set the door over the hole, and suction alone assures us a decent seal with the wall. The hotel people are all still in counterpressure suits, so we’ll have plenty of leak patches to tape the edge of the cabinet door. From a datasheet in the shelter, we’ll be able to network through the plastic cabinet door with the radio on the outside. So if it connects to anything…”

  Such misplaced optimism. Thad tried, and failed, to remember the nature of hope. “Suppose you get your scavenged radio outside without killing us all. We’re still beneath the base. Your signal will be absorbed by tons of metal. No one will hear squat.”

  “Phoebe is whipping around the Earth,” Marcus persisted. “Sometimes the signal path will be through the dirt. It won’t always be upward through the base.”

  Thad permitted himself to believe. “Okay, Judson, we’ll give it a try.”

  * * *

  “But how can the beam be so dangerous?” Ellen burst out. “Marcus and I traveled the country swearing up and down the system was safe. That the beam just isn’t that intense.”

  But the powersat dealt with immense power, Valerie thought. A gigawatt of power, more than enough to do enormous harm. How you beamed that power made all the difference. Perhaps abducting a radio astronomer had not been such a bad idea. Especially a radio astronomer who had spent weeks debating the system end to end with Marcus.

  Whoever controlled PS-1 had changed the beaming optimization. Defocused the beam? Refocused it? She would have to commit serious math to figure the best way to intensify localized hotspots. But could she wring out hotter—much hotter—hotspots, by constructive interference among the thousands of transmitters? Absolutely.

  Valerie said, “PS-1 isn’t dangerous, not as you built it. The story changes if someone doesn’t care about efficiency or beam uniformit
y or power dribbling out in side lobes. Then parts of the beam can be made very intense.”

  “Lethally intense?”

  “It’ll take me some time to run the numbers, but yeah.” Setting aside that hundreds, maybe thousands, dead already gave them the answer.

  Tyler Pope stuck his head into the room. “Ready to dazzle?”

  “Give us ten more minutes?” Valerie asked, fingers skimming the datasheet’s virtual keyboard.

  “That was a rhetorical question. Your presence is required in the war room.”

  * * *

  Valerie did not know what to expect of a war room. Giant wall screens. Lots of men and women, many uniformed, seated around an enormous conference table. Flags. Was that all too Dr. Strangelove?

  Not really.

  Perhaps the resemblance should not have surprised her. On the flight in, Tyler Pope had told her Mount Weather first opened in the depths of the Cold War.

  She and Ellen were introduced to forty or so people, about half in the room and the rest netted in because planes remained grounded. Valerie did not try to retain names, struggling just to catch the organizations. In uniform: lots of military, mostly Air Force and NSA. In dark suits: CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the State Department, and White House aides.

  And here she was wearing blue jeans and a Hard Rock Café T-shirt.

  One of the White House aides asked, “What does our brain trust have to suggest?”

  Ellen said, “PS-1 is meant to beam power. Directing a beam takes only three things. A beacon on the ground target. Lat/long values aboard PS-1 that match the beacon’s coordinates. A correctly formatted ‘go’ signal from the ground. Someone on PS-1 can update the permissible target list and input the ‘go’ code locally. I think the dependency on beacons is the weak link.”

  “We’ve sensed beacons at some of the targets,” a woman in an Air Force uniform said. (A colonel, Valerie was almost certain. Keith had often had her quiz him on rank insignia before weekend call-ups.) “Elint picked up some signals just before attacks. Where we didn’t detect a beacon for an attack, it may be because we didn’t have a bird in position.”

  “Elint?” Valerie asked.

  “Electronic intelligence. Nonvoice eavesdropping. A spy satellite, to keep it simple.”

  Ellen nibbled on her lower lip, thinking. “We built PS-1 to stop beaming if the beacon went off center. This new, intensified beam must fry the beacon entirely. Does the beam keep going after the beacon stops?”

  “It does,” the colonel said. “The elint birds see ongoing backscatter from the ground.”

  Ellen squirmed in her chair. “More software bypassed, just like reshaping the beam to make it more intense. Another bypass for which the bad guys would have to be on PS-1.”

  Someone asked, “But the beacons still serve as initial aiming points. Can we use that?”

  The colonel shook her head. “Energy infrastructure is big and distributed and often in the middle of nowhere. Our best guess is that the terrorists remotely activate beacons by cell phone or radio when it’s time for a strike. Bottom line: It’s not safe to go in after spotting the signal. Two special-ops teams sent to suppress newly spotted beacons got … caught in the downlinks.”

  Cooked, the colonel meant.

  Ellen shrank into herself. “It wasn’t supposed to be a weapon,” she whispered.

  “Placing beacons…” Valerie hesitated, her question not yet clear in her mind. “Is that why attacks come only every hour or two? Too few bad guys on the ground to place beacons?”

  “Unknown.” Pope turned to a CIA colleague, a petite African-American woman. “Any luck getting patrols to catch the people setting beacons?”

  “Every ambassador has been tasked to put out the word. That’ll take time. So will deploying patrols.”

  “And we could be dealing with offshore wind farms or thousands of miles of pipelines and power cables,” the Air Force colonel reminded them. “It’s impossible to guard everything.”

  “Or they could change targets,” a White House aide said glumly, “to damn near anything. What if they aim at cities?”

  “They?” someone else challenged. “Is anyone still up there?”

  “Someone is,” an NSA guy answered. “We pick up their helmet chatter, although we have yet to break the encryption. Statistical analysis suggests they’re speaking English. If so, another statistical analysis says they’re using Russian intel-grade encryption. Which we have never broken.”

  “Let’s get back to basics.” Pope turned to Valerie and Ellen. “The shuttle and mother ship were moving targets. No fixed lat/long values to target. What does that tell you about how the bad guys compromised the lat/long matching function aboard PS-1? And if we’re certain a plane or spaceship is free of beacons, does that make it safe to fly?”

  The CIA hadn’t been crazy to bring in an astronomer. “The warmer the telescope, the more thermal noise it generates. To do infrared astronomy, you want your instrument kept cold. Hence, there’s an observatory on Phoebe.”

  “Meaning?” Pope asked.

  “Meaning any bad guys on Phoebe had access to very good infrared sensors.”

  Pope said, “Whoever the bad guys are, they were on Phoebe. That faked CME brought together everyone in the neighborhood.”

  “That tears it,” a two-star general said. “That’s how they got the shuttle this morning. Infrared tracking. And if they can track a shuttle launch, they can track an inbound missile, too.”

  “You would destroy PS-1?” Ellen said. “We have to save it. We have to use it as it was intended. If not, then I’ve spent years building a horrible weapon.…”

  Suddenly Ellen was on her feet, ashen, lurching from the room. Pope whispered to his colleague and she followed.

  Smash the damn thing to splinters! Valerie thought. Then we can send help to Phoebe.

  Someone—Valerie did not notice who—suggested, “What about launching from out of sight, sometime when PS-1 is over Asia?”

  “Just a great time to be lobbing a missile in the direction of Russia and China,” a man from Homeland Security said, fidgeting with his necktie.

  The general stared down the civilian. “Russian early-warning satellites will spot any launch, and if Pope is correct, I imagine they’ll relay the information to PS-1. There’s no way we can know. And unless the payload loiters in orbit for a long while, making the intercept that much harder, I suspect it will retain enough heat for this astronomical sensor to lock onto against the cold background of space.”

  “For much of every orbit, the sun will warm your payload,” Valerie said.

  “I have a question,” a man from the State Department said. “Why did we send up that shuttle in broad daylight? A solar-power satellite can’t be much of a threat at night.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Valerie answered. “Earth’s shadow narrows with distance. I can’t do precise trigonometry in my head, but PS-1 is in full shadow less than one hour out of every six-hour orbit. Can you get a warhead to that altitude in less than an hour?”

  Glowers and murmurs gave Valerie her answer.

  “Then what’s left?” a White House aide demanded. “Waiting like so many fish in a barrel, while the terrorists render us more dependent by the hour on Russian oil?”

  The general shook his head. “If we can blind the IR sensor with ground-based lasers, a missile might get through. If the powersat hasn’t already been networked into the Russian early-warning system. If that’s the case, our only option may be launching so many missiles we overwhelm it.”

  That evoked lots of esoteric discussion about what and how and when to launch, about different payload options whose code names meant nothing to Valerie. Get on with it, she thought. Why the hell have missiles, if not for our own defense?

  Looking a bit less pale, Ellen returned. She listened, frowning, shaking her head.

  “What’s the matter, Ellen?” Valerie asked.

  “A missile will punch through PS-1 like a bu
llet through a wet tissue. Aside from the small hole, the structure is going to remain intact. Probably operational.”

  Several junior officers spoke at once about explosives, and momentum transfer during a collision, and multiple warheads, and—

  Suddenly red in the face, Ellen shouted them down. “Do you not get how big PS-1 is? Two million pounds. A wafer-thin square two miles on a side. Every essential component is fault tolerant, and then many times replicated. Most everything is highly distributed. The powersat is designed to keep on working past failures, even to repair itself.

  “To stop PS-1 you must obliterate it. Using lots of missiles or, God help us, a nuke.”

  For long seconds after Ellen’s outburst, no one spoke.

  “Christ,” one of the White House people said. “That’s been someone’s effing brilliant plan all along. Let America waste years gearing up to mass-produce powersats. Let us commit to powersats as our way out of the post-Crudetastrophe box. Then convince the world we built an illegal WMD. Leave us no choice but to blow PS-1 to bits to stop the mayhem. Two million pounds of shrapnel: it’ll be decades, maybe centuries, before anyone uses that region of space or the resources of Phoebe.”

  “What about the people on Phoebe?” Valerie asked. “If our missiles blast the powersat to space junk, how will we rescue them?”

  No one would meet Valerie’s eye. Not even Ellen.

  Friday evening, September 29

  At not quite 8 A.M., the day was already steamy. New Orleans, at least in the French Quarter, remained mostly asleep. Sitting in the shade of an awning, sipping an iced coffee and nibbling still-sizzling beignets, Dillon was at peace. Apart from indigents and hungover revelers sprawled out on park benches, Jackson Square was deserted. Seagulls and clanging channel buoys made the only sounds.

  Crystal sat across the little wrought-iron table, sipping her own iced coffee, looking as content as he felt. They had the café almost to themselves. The breeze over the levee kept toying with her hair. After each gust she tossed her head, just so, to settle her bangs back in place. The maneuver never worked; somehow that made it even more adorable.