Solstice

by David Hewson

  He picked up the glass of water on the desk and drank. It was warm and tasted dusty.

  'Did that bother you?'

  He gazed at her picture on the screen. This woman didn't mind asking the big ones. 'No. Nothing bothered me. I just didn't care after I left the project. Charley did, for sure, and that puzzled me. I couldn't see why she was hanging on. Me, I just let the dice fall wherever they rolled.'

  She watched his pale, still outline on the screen. 'And now you'd like to run away again?'

  'We'll come to that. The important thing you need to know is that Charley is the one person I met in all my life you attach the word "genius" to. When we met, she knew more about just about everything — solar physics, astronomy, even electrical engineering — than anyone I ever encountered. And she had such insight into things. She could visualize a problem, not just see it as some algorithm waiting to be fixed. I became the person who tried to put a few boundaries around the places she was going to. Not easy. That woman would take on anything, work all the hours she had to see it through.'

  She waited; he was struggling for the words.

  'You have to remember,' he went on, 'Charley had all this intellectual capacity and it was packed inside this person who looked like an airhead, who looked like she ought to be posing for the front of some fashion magazine. That made it really tough for her to get taken seriously. The funny thing was it made it tough for her to date too. Poor kid got the worst of both possible worlds. People looked down on her work because they thought she was a bimbo. And out in the real world, where real people live, they just looked at this model-type woman and thought: Hey, let's leave this to the rich kids 'cause I can't afford that kind of dinner date.'

  'She has some sense of separation. They all have. Do you think she was in love with you? For a while maybe?'

  'No. Not at all. But maybe, looking back, I represented some kind of chance of normality for her. Bizarre as that seems. Being close to genius you're close to madness too. Maybe after that it all just went downhill, she retreated into herself, the work. And one day got hooked up with the cult, and the computer thing really took over. Maybe, and this does bother me, she just thought of this all along, and that was why she kept on working for them even when they came out into the light and said: Surprise! I keep trying to think what drives her now. And I just don't know.'

  He stared back from the screen, serious, dark eyes peering at her. 'Does that help?'

  She shrugged. 'I'll run it past our specialists here. I'm really grateful.'

  'Say what you mean.'

  'My God, I am a lousy liar, aren't I?' She smiled and stared at her notes. 'We can't reach her. She's beyond that. She's smart and she's absolutely determined in what she's trying to do. There's no room here for negotiation, talking her into some other path, because we don't have anything she wants. Either we take back Sundog or they're going to do what they say. It's as if we're some kind of beta version of what they believe the planet should be. They think they can throw away a lot of the code in the hope that whatever comes back in its place has to be better than anything that preceded it. Which seems a pretty shaky premise to me, by the way.'

  He nodded. 'That was my feeling too. Charley came from all that European tradition, you know. She went to the Sorbonne. She knows what the prerequisites of revolution are.'

  'Chaos. A word I'm getting to hear a lot.'

  'It's a nice, pat, easy way out of things.'

  'And there's no damn point in wasting any time contemplating it either,' she said. 'So you've looked at the new solar data?'

  'Yeah.'

  'How bad is it?'

  ‘“Bad" is a subjective word.'

  'Not right now,' she said quickly. 'We don't have time for semantics. Maybe I didn't make myself clear, but we've got the makings of a world in crisis out there. This is filtering through to everything, the financial markets, the information infrastructure, everything. This has the potential for real natural disaster, if it deserves the word "natural". And one on a global scale we've never witnessed before.'

  Lieberman peered quizzically at her. 'You're sure about that last point? No. Don't answer. Okay. The forecast is terrible. The way things look I expect that anyone with a piece of coloured glass will be able to see a lot of activity with the naked eye by midday today. After that, it gets hazy. It's easy to predict the trend, hard to say whether we get there slowly or in one big rush. The trend is that there will be some spot-merging, and that will produce one giant beauty. The biggest we've ever recorded, covering maybe half of the surface of the disc. Maybe more, when we get to zenith.'

  'What does that mean for the strength of the emissions?'

  'Not my field. You need to ask Bennett.'

  'Come on.'

  He shrugged. 'Take what you got in Langley and multiply it by ten, twenty, a hundred times. I don't know. And think what it is then, because I'm guessing it may be something different. There's all sorts of crap mixed up in this stuff. It could manifest itself as heat, radiation, high-level electromagnetic fields, pure plasma… hell, I don't know. It could be a heat wave that puts out the TV, it could be a firestorm that wipes out Manhattan. You tell me.'

  'Jesus,' she sighed.

  'And the truth is, I think we could be in trouble even without Charley and your little toy. This thing is so powerful, and the way we've been treating the atmosphere we're so vulnerable. Just out of interest, I looked up some of the times we've had some combination of spot cycle and syzygy to match it. That requires a lot of guesswork. But I'll tell you one thing. We did have something like this between 2600 and 2700 bc. Ring a bell?'

  'I'm not a historian.'

  'Me neither. I just remember it from some of my self-taught classes in atheism. That's thought to be the time of the biblical flood. Noah. The animals went in two by two. That kind of thing.'

  'That's myth, surely, folklore.'

  'Yeah. That's what I told myself too. The trouble is these old guys had learned to write by then. You don't just get the flood story in the Old Testament. It's in the Gilgamesh book as well. That's Sumerian. And there's hard evidence there was flooding in the region around that time. We also had some kind of conjunction around 1650 bc. That was the year the volcano erupted in Santorini, one of the largest eruptions in human times. It changed the face of the Mediterranean. The power structure. Everything.'

  'I remember,' she said.

  'And just one more. If you take things back too far, the dating gets a little ridiculous, of course. But we do have firm fossil evidence that whatever it was that brought the Cretaceous era to an end occurred at a time of intense sunspot activity. It's there in the rings of the cretaceous vegetation.'

  'That was, what… sixty-five million years ago?' she said quietly.

  'Yeah. Which is why I wouldn't rely on my computer alone. And, as I'm sure I don't need to remind you, the end of the Cretaceous marked the extinction of the dinosaurs too, in ways we still argue about. Suddenly. Instantly. Conventional wisdom is starting to say that it was a meteor impact that caused it, and the Yucatan Crater in Mexico is the proof. A ten-kilometre meteor, to be precise. And maybe that's right. Or maybe it was something pretty much like a meteor that the sun spat out, some big ball of plasma. I don't know. There aren't any dinosaurs left to ask.'

  Helen Wagner caught her breath. 'You think Charley's made that calculation too?'.

  'You bet. Hell, I'm amazed it's not all over the Web right now. And you can see how that knowledge would work on Charley too. It makes her feel part of something bigger. But it's disappointing in a way too. If we've really only had three major catastrophes through solar cycle and planetary syzygies over the last sixty-five million years, maybe we ought to come out of this one with little more than an extra suntan. If I can still hope to read Charley right these days, this data is saying to her that she probably needs to give the thing a little push if she wants to be sure the world really can start all over again. Maybe give the ants a chance this time. And don't kid yours
elf. She wants to do more than cause some stock market crash. She really does want to change things for good. This is cataclysm, nothing less.'

  She was quiet. The office suddenly felt lonely and cold.

  'There's a storm on the way,' he said, 'and it's coming whether we take back your little toy or not. Maybe it just scorches us a little. Maybe it passes us by altogether. And maybe we get the Yucatan all over again. I don't know. No one knows.'

  'It's not my toy.'

  'I know,' he said, shaking his head. 'I apologize. It belongs to all of us. We just got greedy. Thought we could tame that big golden ball of fire and make it run our TV sets for free.'

  She looked at his face, half in shadow on the screen, and wondered at the amount of trust that seemed to exist between them. 'So do we have your pleasure for this event, Michael?'

  'I guess, Helen,' he said, unsmiling.

  'I'm glad about that.'

  'Don't be. I mean, where the hell are you supposed to hide when the sun god comes to call?'

  She nodded. Thought twice about this, and said, 'This is really useful. But I need more from you.'

  'I haven't got any more.'

  'But you have. We're working on every way we can to get Sundog back under our control from the ground. We've got any number of teams out there trying to track down Charley. I've got to cover every angle. We're putting up a Shuttle in a few hours. I need you to find us some way to take the power source away from that thing directly, in the sky if we have to.'

  Lieberman couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'Wait a minute. That was the first thing I asked Irwin and he said there's no way we can go near this at all. He made it sound like you've got the Battlestar Galactica up there. If you try to shoot it down, it can intercept the missile. And take out whatever shot it in the first place.'

  She nodded. 'That's true. It's one smart weapon. It could take out the Shuttle if Charley detected it on launch. Then there's an automatic defence system that will attack anything substantial that comes within a half a kilometre of it in space. That still leaves us room. If we can get into orbit and power down the Shuttle before the automatic system comes into play, we could get a couple of astronauts close to the thing. The trouble is, as far as I understand it, they can't touch it, and any weapons they might carry would be detected. And we have to find it. The damn thing is built out of polymer, like you see in stealth devices. We're not even exactly sure where it is right now, though with those huge wings you designed for it I think the Shuttle ought to be able to track it down.'

  'Jesus, Helen. You're just sending these guys to their deaths.'

  She sighed and Lieberman saw the sadness in her face. 'That's a possibility. They know it.'

  'So why?'

  'We need options. We calculate there's a ninety-second window after launch when the Shuttle could come under direct attack from the main weapon systems. If it escapes that and gets into orbit, it can edge in behind Sundog and give us a chance.'

  'To do what?'

  'That's what I need you to figure out. Imagine we do take the ship within half a kilometre of the satellite with all the systems down. And after that, we could place a couple of astronauts in extravehicular activity up to ten metres from the satellite without triggering any automatic self-defence systems.'

  'Then what?'

  She shook her head. 'Any weapon would be detected and, in all likelihood, immobilized immediately. No, we have to shut it down without touching it. That's the only possible solution and you have to know how, you designed that entire power system. I need you to clip those wings, Michael.'

  He was genuinely affronted. 'Nothing else while I'm there? A cure for AIDS, maybe?'

  'You don't mean it when you say that kind of thing.'

  'How the hell do you know?'

  Helen Wagner's eyes held him on the screen. 'You called, Michael. You care. And you can find the answer. You just tell me what you need to get there.'

  CHAPTER 25

  In the Air

  Above New York, 0734 UTC

  Tim Clarke watched the lights of the city recede beneath the fast-rising helicopter and was glad to be gone. The mute, baffled reception he'd received from the Security Council was depressing. Perhaps they recognized the note of desperation in his voice.

  He looked at the close circle of advisers around him. These were people he'd inherited from Rollinson, and when times got back to normal some would change. They knew that. But they were good, solid, dependable men — all men, he thought, something would have to be done about that — fine in a conventional crisis, lost a little in this one. Governments ran on rail lines, Clarke thought, mapping out the future on the basis that it was all predictable within limits. When something came along that wasn't in the contingency plan, suddenly it all fell to pieces.

  'Those guys want some news from the Bureau, Dan,' Clarke said, looking at Fogerty seated opposite him. 'We can try to sweet-talk them into keeping calm right now, but you got the mood in there. They think this is our baby. They think we're the ones who got them into this, and we ought to be the ones who get them out. In their position I guess I'd feel much the same.'

  'Sir.' Fogerty nodded. 'We're pushing every resource we've got into this. But I'm not going to lie to you. These people have no criminal records, no terrorist background. They're not the kind of folks we're likely to follow as a matter of course. If the Agency had kept that damn plant they had inside there, or levelled with us in the first place — '

  'No time for range wars. Don't you people get it? This is a crisis with the clock running. Maybe this is just a storm that will blow over. But we've all seen some of the reports coming in from Wagner. The power these people have in their hands is, as far as I understand it, massive. The odds are that if we don't do something in the next twenty-nine hours or so Bill Rollinson's funeral will be the last thing on our minds. We've got to focus on stopping this thing happening, nothing else. Okay?'

  He watched them nod at him and thought: They still don't get it. 'Dan, do you think Wagner's right when she says there's no negotiating with this woman?'

  'Absolutely, sir. Our psychological profiling people back up everything she says. This woman is resolute. She's not looking to bargain. She sees herself, and the Children, as being part of some inevitable, natural process of rebirth. She's looking forward to this. Nothing's going to stand in her way.'

  'And that stuff about what might happen even if we do get Sundog back?'

  Bryan Jenkins, the White House scientific adviser, coughed and said, 'A lot of this is speculative, Mr President. There's no real way of knowing.'

  Graeme Burnley winced. He didn't like stepping on other people's toes. 'Sir, we have clear indications that other governments are perceiving this as a major threat too, and have no better idea of how to tackle it. Why do you think we got such a relatively easy ride in there over the detail? They're just as much in the dark as we are.'

  'That was easy?' Jenkins asked, incredulous.

  'Maybe easier than we deserve,' Clarke said, staring at his hands.

  The helicopter flew down the security corridor, out into the night, back toward Washington. The rhythmic pumping of the blades and the noise inside the cabin reminded Clarke of the Gulf, a decade before, though it seemed much less than that. There was a lot of time spent inside the bellies of these machines then, and it was easier: You had someone to fight, you had an objective. Now it was like punching shadows and wondering whether you might break your fist on your own face instead.

  'What about the Shuttle?'

  'We can launch, sir,' Jenkins said. 'If we knew what we could do if and when we find the damn thing. Sundog's probably at greater altitude than the Shuttle would normally operate. But we can overcome that. NASA had a high flight modification in the works and it's ready to roll.'

  'You got volunteers to man it?'

  'I could fill it five times over. NASA put it straight on the line how risky this thing was. It didn't stop anyone. We've picked the two best pilots we
know and the guy with the most EVA experience.'

  'Come again?'

  'Extravehicular activity. Spacewalk, in plain language, Mr President. But we still need this Lieberman guy to figure out what these people could do up there. This thing is purpose-built to withstand all forms of attack.'

  'You mean we can't get anywhere near it?' Burnley asked.

  'It can detect other vehicular activity within a kilometre,' Jenkins explained. 'But if we kill all the main systems barring light telecom on the Shuttle, then drift it into the vicinity, we ought to get under the detection system. It's based on engine heat and electrical activity, nothing visual, thank God. The same goes for getting near the satellite through an EVA. We can probably put a guy real close to the thing, provided he isn't using anything it can pick up. Even a blowtorch would trigger a response, and by response I mean something major. The standard would be high-intensity laser, which would kill instantly and could take out the Shuttle too.'

  'So what can we do?' the President asked.

  'Turn off the power generation system. If this Lieberman guy can figure a way. He designed the thing and it's real clever stuff. If that's down, Sundog grinds to a halt in minutes. This thing just eats power. But we've no word on how you can do that without being able to dismantle part of the installation physically.'

  Clarke thought about the queue of astronauts inside NASA waiting for the opportunity to dance around this deadly, poisoned ball of plastic and metal in the sky. 'It has to go. Even if we haven't figured out what to do with it. We have to cover every option.'

  In two hours he would be going on live TV to announce the emergency measures: the suspension of all civil aviation flights and public ground transportation, the closure of all nonessential government buildings, and orders barring the opening of all but vital private sector offices in the major cities. All of these measures would run from noon indefinitely, although the idea in the broadcast was to emphasize that, if everything 'went according to plan', the restrictions would be lifted by late the following day. And most other heads of state were following the same line. Trying to balance caution with the need, the overriding need, to avoid an outbreak of panic.