Solstice

by David Hewson

  Helen looked at Barnside and thought she'd never in her life seen a man so frightened.

  Choose your moment, Belinda taught her. Always pick your time.

  'They've got it, Dave,' she said quietly, getting up from the table, trying to keep her equilibrium. 'They took it from you and just delivered the proof. Now you just sit there while I get a doctor. And try not to bleed too much on this nice new carpet.'

  CHAPTER 15

  Reunion

  La Finca, 1856 UTC

  They were in the control room, looking flustered, sweating, and when Lieberman saw them he just knew. Mo Sinclair was at his back and he was glad of that. He wanted a witness.

  He walked over to Irwin Schulz, whose face was bobbing in and out of the glow of a screen, grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt, and said, very slowly, very deliberately into his face, 'You built it, goddamn you, Irwin. You built that damn thing and that's what's going wrong here, that's killed those people.'

  Schulz stopped what he was doing and looked at Lieberman with cold, scared eyes.

  'They built it, Michael. I just get to come in and try to sweep up the mess. Ask Simon. We're all in the same boat.'

  'Bennett?'

  The Englishman looked sick. His skin was pallid and clung to his cheekbones. Behind him, Bevan was barking down the videophone at a sea of faces on the screen.

  'Irwin's right,' Bennett said. "We're just the caretakers. They did all that work in the late eighties, Michael. They thought it would be a shame not to see if any of it worked in practice. I'd hoped we wouldn't reach the stage where we'd have to broach this with you. There are security considerations. But obviously that's a little late now.'

  'So why doesn't it work?'

  Bennett bristled. 'It does work, actually. As far as we know. It's just that we don't seem to have the keys any more.'

  'Not yet,' Bevan grunted, his face still stuck in the machine. 'We'll be there, with or without you, Lieberman.'

  'Yeah,' Schulz said sourly, and hit the keyboard. 'Sure thing. I wish I felt that confident. Take a look for yourself, Michael.'

  Lieberman pulled up a seat and rolled it around so that he was sitting next to Schulz. What he saw on the terminal chilled him: It was the original SPS design, four big hundred-metre-wide wings trailing in its wake, a cluster of antennae and dishes sprouting out of the front.

  'What is it?'

  Schulz squirmed. 'Imagine the SDI deterrence thing, but with the idea of deterrence sort of put to one side and replaced with some kind of full attack capability. Basically everything you got in the original SDI design — laser, microwave, particle beams — but upped somewhat.'

  'Somewhat?' Lieberman asked.

  'The SDI units were supposed to be able to take out missiles, planes, that kind of thing. This can do all that and a whole lot more too, right down to ground attack, the sort of impact you might get from a tactical nuke. Versatile little weapon. Shame it's a touch temperamental.'

  'It doesn't work?' Mo Sinclair asked hopefully.

  'Not reliably,' Schulz replied. 'I guess we just upped your security clearance, Mo. You do know what that means now, don't you?'

  'Cross my heart,' she said, not smiling.

  'A little more than that,' Bevan added.

  'Yeah,' Schulz said. 'And maybe we all hope to die. Just might happen too. Sundog is true to its name, Michael. A real dog, and a rabid one at that. When they came around to trying out the systems, it was as unstable as hell. Not your part of the thing, that worked beautifully, I might say. Just the rest. Like trying to light a cigarette with a flame gun. Except it could come at you any which way it liked, depending which particular gear you selected.'

  'This is your business,' Lieberman said. 'Not mine. If you'd wanted my help, you should have come clean to begin with.'

  'And you'd have joined us?' Bennett asked.

  'Maybe.'

  'I don't think so,' Schulz said, smiling. 'We know how you responded when you found this thing wasn't designed to save the world. Besides, we do need that weather report of yours. On an ordinary day, Sundog is just a nasty piece of metal in the sky. With all the crap we have out there right now, and that getting worse by the day, it turns into something else.'

  'Something that can down Air Force One?' Mo Sinclair asked.

  'And maybe a lot worse too.' Schulz grimaced.

  Lieberman shook his head and wished he were somewhere else, where the room wasn't full of the whirring sound of computers and the heavy weight of despair.

  'It's your toy that got broken,' he said. 'You fix it.'

  'It's not broken,' Schulz said. 'That's the point. Three weeks ago we lost the system for an entire day. Completely without warning. One minute we have everything, everything working so smoothly you wouldn't believe it. The next we lose contact and it's as if it's not even there, as if every damn circuit has blown. A day later, it comes back. We scratch our heads, hope this is just some temporary blip.'

  Bennett sat down and took a sip of water. 'Well, it isn't. Six days ago we lost the satellite again. And nothing we can do seems to bring it back.'

  'Maybe it's a fuse,' Lieberman suggested.

  Schulz said very firmly, 'No, sir! I know that security system inside out, I designed most of it. It's got more failsafes in it than you've got in most nuclear warheads. Nothing could put it out completely. And besides, we've monitored traffic on some of the discrete frequencies we set up for the project. We can't decipher it. Someone must have double-programmed the satellite to accept two different kinds of encoding systems. Sundog is working. It is in place. God knows where this thing's being run from — you need a pretty powerful space antenna to cover that distance — but it's active, of that I can assure you.'

  Lieberman felt giddy. He didn't want to be here, with these people, who were probably a damn sight more desperate than they were letting on.

  'Let me get this clear. You mean you think someone's got control of this thing?'

  Schulz looked at Bennett, who stared, in turn, at Bevan.

  'We think so,' Bevan said.

  'Don't you goddamn people take precautions? You're playing with monster toys here, folks. They make nuclear energy look like a box of matches. How the hell can this happen?'

  'We don't know, Michael,' Schulz said quietly. 'But we have some ideas. And we think you can help there too.'

  Lieberman laughed, and the sound nearly choked him. 'Help? You want to sucker me twice? Aren't you people making some assumptions here?'

  'No,' Bevan said, looking at his watch, then at Schulz.

  'At least let Mo and the kid go,' Lieberman said. 'If this thing can burn a hole in Air Force One, God knows what it could do to us here.'

  'I can't do that,' Schulz replied, shaking his head. 'You are one good Unix jockey, Mo, and you're here. This came up out of the blue, and like I said, the project was pretty much on ice when it did. I need you. We can't afford to lose anything on the network we do have working. This thing is coming to a climax one way or another over the next couple of days. I can't ship someone else in. I'm sorry. I really don't think we are in any danger here, but we have to keep what we've got up and running.'

  'Hey, Mo,' Lieberman objected. 'Don't rush into this. How do you know you can believe a word these guys are telling you?'

  'I don't,' she said quietly. 'But to be honest, Michael, just now we really don't have anywhere else to go.'

  Some people bring their own pain with them, carry it around in a little pack on their back, he thought. He wondered what had happened to this woman to make her think that life was just like that: You walked around waiting for the next bombshell to drop on your head, shrugging your shoulders when it came, smiling wanly and muttering, 'Okay.'

  'Well, that's your choice, but as far as I'm concerned you guys can take a hike. I'm out of here in the morning. If you'd had the decency to tell me some of this before I arrived, maybe I would have given it a second thought. But since you spared me that, I am out of this.'

&n
bsp; In the corner, Bevan smiled and simply said, 'No.'

  'We need you,' Schulz pleaded. 'We need you more than you can even begin to guess.'

  'Tough,' Lieberman said. He heaved himself upright, feeling old and stiff and cross. He felt a touch faint, and the room was shifting a little.

  In the corner Bevan was still smiling. And checking his watch.

  'One other reason, Lieberman. It's about time. Someone made an appointment and we ought to keep it.'

  'What appointment?'

  'Two more minutes,' Schulz said, his face pleading. 'That's all, Michael.'

  The computers blinked and whirred constantly.

  'No more.'

  Schulz beckoned him to the biggest workstation. A video camera sat on the top. It was just like the rig in the bedroom, except larger, large enough to take in all of them if they wanted to have a video-conferencing party.

  Lieberman sat down, nursed a glass of water, then turned to Bevan and said, 'Gimme a clue.'

  'Someone you know,' Bevan said. 'We think there's someone in this you know pretty damn well.'

  'We have packets,' Schulz said, staring at the screen. 'We have packet activity and I think that means something's coming through and… oh boy.'

  They looked at the screen. Something had gone wrong. The picture was too big, too much of it was occupied by this leering, dominating face, and there was nothing Schulz could do about it, however hard he slapped the keyboard.

  'Oh boy,' Lieberman echoed, and thought to himself: Sometimes your past does catch up with you in the most unexpected of ways.

  Charley Pascal had cut her long dark hair savagely, so that it hung off her head in a ragged urchin crop, and it was hard to decide whether it was the kind of thing that cost you a fortune from some fashionable new salon off the Champs-Elysees or the sort of mess you ran up at home with a cutthroat razor, a cheap mirror, and a bad mood. Her eyes were the same, big and open and perfect, looking right into you, laughing all the time. There were creases at the edge of her mouth. She looked like some fashion model running a little past her time, and straight to seed with it.

  'Why, gentlemen,' Charley said. 'Mr Bennett, Irwin, a couple of you I don't recognize. And Michael Lieberman. Dear Michael. They have you too? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.'

  'No one more surprised than me,' Lieberman said, trying to think this one through.

  'Fooled again, huh? They just keep doing that to you, don't they? Never mind. It's all going to change. Everything is going to change, in ways you can't even dream of.'

  'Oh,' he said. And thought how odd it was to feel your life jumping between two discrete, distinctive periods in time, each with its own particular reality.

  'This some kind of a payback thing? Aren't we a little old for that stuff? You stole the toy you gave them, Charley. Haven't you proved your point?'

  'Oh Michael. You know so little,' she said, laughing, and the French accent was still there. 'Have you people been following what's happening in the world? Do you think I'm talking about payback?'

  Simon Bennett said, 'So what are we talking about, Miss Pascal? If what you say is true, you have caused us some concern these last few weeks and no small amount of expense. I'd very much like to know why.'

  She was grinning so close to the camera it couldn't quite focus. Maybe that was deliberate, Lieberman thought. Maybe she was trying to block out the background, hide any clue as to where she might be broadcasting from in that wonderfully indistinct place they called cyberspace.

  'Are you happy, Mr Bennett?'

  'My happiness is irrelevant, Miss Pascal. Could we kindly come to the point?'

  'Happiness is the point, Mr Bennett. You don't understand that now but you will. Very soon too.'

  'Hey, Charley,' Lieberman said, 'what's the problem here? Because this sounds crazy to me. We got all this shit stuff coming from the sky, we got bright people here. We can think this thing through. We can learn things, for chrissake.'

  Charley Pascal's face loomed down at him from the wall, a good five feet high, and Lieberman really thought he'd cracked it then. She didn't look crazy at that moment. Her face relaxed, almost as if she were relieved about something, and he could remember what she was like when she first walked through the doors of the research lab in Berkeley almost twenty years before.

  'Poor Michael,' she said in the end. 'Still as lost as ever.'

  Lieberman looked at her and felt this moment hanging in the balance.

  'Please, Charley. I don't give a damn what's gone under the bridge here. We can work this out. You give me a chance. You trust me. What do you want us to do?'

  She laughed. It wasn't a sound he liked. Then she picked up a cigarette, lit it in front of the camera, blew smoke into the lens.

  'The same thing I want everyone to do, Michael. Prepare. Everything comes around in its own good time. Life. Death. The cycle of nature. Sometimes you have to burn the corn to the ground to make sure the crop that follows prospers. Think of it that way.'

  Charley Pascal did that laugh again, the one that made Michael Lieberman feel cold, then said, 'Oh, really, Irwin. You never give up. You have any luck?'

  Schulz went red.

  'Charley?'

  'With all that low-grade snooping you're doing. Oh hell.. '

  She reached forward, her face disappeared, and they heard the sound of a keyboard getting hit. Then she came back on screen and said, 'Irwin, you ever hear of the ping of death?'

  He nodded. 'Surely. They had that when I was at college. That stuff is old. You could ping someone, anyone, out on the Net, provided you had their IP address.'

  'That's right, Irwin. And what happened when you got pinged?'

  'Well' — he couldn't understand where this was leading — 'someone took your system down. But all that's impossible now, 'cause we don't let any executables past the firewall, and even if we did — '

  'Irwin?'

  'Yeah?'

  Lieberman watched Schulz's face. He was puzzled. Something was coming through on the monitor he didn't understand.

  'Welcome to the new world,' Charley Pascal said, and then the screen went blank, her face dwindling into a fast-vanishing dot, there was a popping sound, and, one by one, every terminal in the room died, slowly, mechanically, on the hot, fetid air.

  'Fuck,' Schulz muttered, in a way that made Lieberman think this was a word that didn't pass through his lips that often. 'Holy fucking fuck.'

  And then, from a far corner, a sound. One of the terminals came back to life, lines of zeros and ones scrawling across its screen, and from the speaker the tinny sound of a guitar and a female voice. It was Sheryl Crow, and the mysterious way Charley had sent this thing unbidden to them, from God knows where out on the Net, meant that only the first line came through, just looped around itself continuously.

  Singing, 'Every day is a winding road…'

  Bevan came over to him, stood so close that Lieberman could smell the sweat on his body.

  'We need your expertise. We need your insight. You knew the Pascal woman. Pretty well, huh? And now she wants to screw the world. Who knows? Maybe these two things are connected.'

  'Bullshit,' Lieberman said, and went back to the briefing room, picked up a bottle of red wine.

  'Bullshit,' he said again, then headed for the door, left them there, staring at his back for all he cared, thinking about how he'd get out in the morning. Walk if need be.

  Outside it was a glorious Mediterranean night, the air hot and aromatic with the scent of wild herbs. The sun was dying out to the west, a gorgeous sphere of gold and red embedded in the velvet sky. The stars were out, so clear in the sky, alive, sparkling. The evening hummed with the skittering of insects on the hot, dry breeze. It would be another airless, sweat-filled night.

  He half-walked, half-stumbled over to the clifftop, sat on the wall, drank from the neck of the bottle.

  'Don't want company,' he said out to the sea when he heard her footsteps.

  Mo Sinclair sat down
next to him on the wall, looked at him with that accusing feminine expression he felt had probably accompanied his birth.

  'We can't go, Michael. You heard what they said.'

  'Watch me.'

  'You don't have to like them. They need us.'

  'Really?' he grumbled, wheeling round to face her. 'Now they do. But not when they were setting up this stupid piece of shit. Who do these people think they are, putting their fingers into a pile of stuff like this? Perry goddamn Como singing "Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket"? Jesus, they set out to do this kind of thing and they show no respect. And when it all goes wrong, they turn around to the likes of you and me and say, hey, this is your responsibility, you're the one to blame.'

  'I heard what Bevan said. That was a stupid and thoughtless thing. I told you he was an unpleasant man.'

  'Hell, I didn't mean that.'

  'Then what did you mean?'

  'Doesn't matter. Will you leave me alone? Can't a man even get drunk around here if he wants?'

  She glared at him.

  'Hey,' Lieberman said, 'I don't get it. We only met today. And there you are giving me that contempt thing just like we've known each other for years.'

  'I thought you were different,' Mo Sinclair said, and turned on her heels, headed back to the mansion.

  'To hell with "different"!' Lieberman yelled at her disappearing back. 'You know what they do to different people in this world?'

  She didn't answer. Pretty soon she was gone, inside the mansion.

  'Turn them into Charley Pascal,' he said quietly to no one, watching some distant lights bob up and down on the sea, now glittering under the brilliance of a nearly full moon. 'That's what.'

  Then slowly poured the remains of the bottle of wine over the rocky wall.

  CHAPTER 16

  Colourpoint Shorthair