"You've got fifteen minutes," said Britt Arledge. "Since the world is coming apart at the seams, be happy for that."
The White House office was spartanly furnished and fanatically organized. For once, Kyle appreciated the obsessive order—it made it that much easier to spot the Galactic orb he felt certain would be present. He quickly spotted one on a bookshelf beside the room door.
He sidled to one end of Britt's desk, blocking with his back the line of sight between Britt and the orb, before taking from his pocket a folded sheet of paper. Raising the other hand to his mouth, he made the universal "shh" gesture.
Britt read the note without visible reaction. "You know, I feel like some coffee. Care to join me?"
They went instead, Kyle leading the way, to a previously arranged cubbyhole in the next-door Old Executive Office Building. The room had a table, two chairs, a PC, and no orbs. "Thanks for bearing with me."
"Telling me my office is bugged is a surefire way to get my attention." Britt sat on the edge of the table. "So who's bugging it, and how do you know?"
"The F'thk, that's who. And you won't like the 'how' any better. The orbs are recording devices."
"Which would mean that every officeholder of any significance in this town is bugged, starting with the President."
Kyle didn't care for the skepticism implicit in would mean. Instead of commenting, he popped a CD-ROM into the computer. The PC was Tempest-rated, specially designed to suppress the electromagnetic emissions that—in an ordinary computer—would allow skilled eavesdroppers to recreate the monitor image. On-screen, Hammond Matthews summarized a series of experiments upon orbs.
Every orb that the lab had tested showed the same behaviors. If immersed in an actively changing environment—people moving, music playing—the crystalline depths of an orb also changed quickly. When triggered by the proper microwave interrogation pulse, the stimulated orb had a lengthy response. The same orb, observed by videocam in an empty and silent room, changed its appearance very slowly; when interrogated, it had a short response. The experiment was repeated with consistent results using orbs labeled Washington, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, and London—units that Darlene had had embassy staff obtain overseas and ship home by diplomatic pouch. Everyone was being spied upon, whatever their political school.
Britt tugged an ear thoughtfully. "If I'm following, these devices are usually inert, passively recording the images and sounds that impinge on them. Only when they get this interrogation signal are they active."
"Right. The recording portion, the crystalline globe, needs no power. Think of it as very advanced, electronically readable film. The readout-and-reply portion in the base, beneath the bowl-shaped antenna, is externally powered—it takes its energy from a microwave interrogation signal. Now that we know to look, we've detected such interrogation signals. Orbs are routinely probed in and around all major national capitals—everywhere a 'Friendship Station' was left.
"Better, we can triangulate back to the origins of the triggering signals. Those sources turn out to be satellites. They're radar stealthed, which is why NORAD hadn't noticed them as part of the routine tracking of orbital space junk. They're also very dark, which makes them hard to detect visually even when you know where to look. Still, the satellites soak up a lot of energy from the sun. Infrared instruments on NASA satellites can spot these satellites easily."
"Can we be sure these aren't Russian or Chinese, or other Earth-originated satellites? Someone working with the F'thk?"
Kyle popped the CD from the computer. "There are no stealth launches—when something blasts off from anywhere on Earth our spysats know it. These birds had to have been deposited directly into orbit from space, not launched from this planet."
"Which brings us to more pressing issues, like the escalating mortality rate of our spysats."
"Related issues. We know instantly when our birds get fried, because we're in constant communication. We don't have such immediate knowledge of Russian satellites. It turns out, though, that their spysats are starting to tumble in orbit, as if out of control. More and more of their birds are acting just like our known dead ones."
The tiny room fell silent as Britt struggled to absorb the enormity of these discoveries. At long last, he shook his head sadly. "So the F'thk go from capital to capital spreading suspicions. With bugging devices by the millions spread across the great capitals of the world, they know what buttons to push, and they watch how we all react when our buttons are pushed. They're disabling everyone's spysats, which has us and the Russians escalating our strategic alert status—which keeps feeding the distrust. The Chinese don't trust either of us, and now they're on heightened alert, too."
"Yup, that pretty much sums it up."
Britt gave him a hard look. "So why, exactly, are you smiling?"
"I'm just glad to have friends in high places who share my sense of the danger."
The video, shot from a distance with a telephoto lens, was grainy and jerky. The voice-over, apart from the raw emotion in the narration, was unintelligible. Neither distraction diminished the horror.
The footage of the spectacular launch and even more spectacular explosion of a Russian Proton 2 rocket had been captured by an enterprising Korean journalist. Debris rained down on the sun-baked steppes surrounding the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Kyle could not see the enormous fireball blossom without recalling the Atlantis, without a lump forming in his throat.
At Britt's gesture, Kyle muted the sound on the CNN feed. An aide was whispering into the President's ear, something about President Chernykov. Moments later, the Moscow hotline connection was active and on speakerphone. The pleasantries were perfunctory and abrupt.
"Dmitri Pyetrovich, we had hoped that a joint scientific project would help to diffuse the recent tensions. Needless to say, today's fiasco will not contribute to this aim."
"Fiasco?" The booming accompaniment was probably a hand slapping an unseen desk in emphasis. "An American fiasco, I say. Your shuttle carried the first version of this satellite, and it blew up. Now one of our most reliable rockets carries a hurriedly upgraded lab model of the same observatory—and again there is an explosion. If you look to assign blame, look to your own people."
"My people tell me it was a launcher failure . . . "
"Your spies, you mean." Another background rumble punctuated the Russian's intense voice. "Our experts are still analyzing telemetry, and have released nothing."
President Robeson scowled at the speakerphone. "Calm down, Dmitri."
"Don't tell me to calm down. Judging from past incidents, the Kazakhs are likely to demand some sort of penalty payment from us for supposed environmental damages. The cosmodrome immediately suspended all further launches of the Proton 2 until they complete an investigation, which shuts down our commercial delivery business for heavy comsats." There was whispering in the background. "One of my aides wonders if you wanted this disaster, even arranged it, to favor your own aerospace companies and their launch-service businesses."
Accusations and veiled insults flew. Leaders of the two great nuclear powers growled and fumed. At last, the President had had enough. "I think we can agree continuing this conversation is not to anyone's advantage. But before we end the call, perhaps you will tell me this, Dmitri. Have your experts found anything surprising in the telemetry?"
There was impatient finger tapping, and an unseen Russian sighed. A new voice, that Kyle recognized as Sergei Arbatov, spoke up. "No. Nothing unexpected. It is all a mystery."
"Damned Russians," snapped President Robeson for the benefit of the orb on his desk. "I need to stretch my legs. Walk with me." He stormed from the well-wired Camp David office, followed by Britt, Kyle, and a Secret Service retinue. Without further comment, he led them into the moonlit Catoctin Mountain woods. The house was soon hidden from sight by the trees. "Give us some space," the President told the chief of the protection detail. The agents faded into the woods, their attention turned outward.
"Good show, Kyle."
"Thank you, sir." His mind's eye kept flashing back to cataclysmic fireballs. "I wish I'd been wrong."
"But you weren't," said Britt. "You were right all along the line. The Galactics targeted the Baikonur launch, as you predicted. The arrangements were made by phone and Internet—and surely many of the relevant details were arranged out of range of the damned orbs—so your theory that they can monitor all of our electronic communications is apparently also right."
Kyle retrieved and began to fidget with a pine cone. "When the opportunity arises, thank Sergei." Sergei who had somehow expedited the launch. Sergei whose theatrical tone of resignation disguised the agreed upon code phrase: nothing unexpected.
For the Galactics had no reason to suspect what the conspiring human scientists now expected: microwaves. Steerable microwave beams from stealthy satellites, beams that converged on the Proton's fuel tank. Enormous energies focused onto the metal shell of the rocket, metal that instantly conducted the energy as heat to the liquid hydrogen within. Kyle pictured a sealed metal container of gasoline in a microwave oven. First, the liquid heated, expanding and evaporating, until the pressure burst open the container. The pressure-driven spray rapidly mixed with air, to be exploded by the first spark.
Nothing unexpected . . . but microwave-borne sabotage was expected. That meant the sensors Sergei was to have secreted on the Proton had, before the explosion halted telemetry, reported back in some innocuous guise the presence of strong incident microwave radiation. Russian-placed sensors read out by Russian telemetry equipment—the latest evidence would surely allay any doubts President Chernykov might have had.
"Dr. Gustafson. Sir?"
He shrugged off the reverie into which excited exhaustion had taken him. A Secret Service women had emerged from the woods. "Yes?"
"Call for you, sir." She handed him a cell phone.
"Sorry, sir," he told the President. To the phone, he added, "Gustafson."
"Hello, pardner." The voice was Hammond Matthews's. They exchanged a few pleasantries and touched on some routine business, projects on which they didn't mind the Galactics eavesdropping. "Too bad you missed the barbecue."
"Was it big?"
A chuckle. "We had five grills running hot. You would have loved it."
Translation: five stealthed Galactic satellites with a line of sight to Baikonur at the time of the Proton launch had flared on infrared sensors. Which meant they were generating far more power than usual. Pumping out weapons-grade microwave beams, presumably.
"Sorry I had other commitments. But I need to run." He returned the phone to the agent, who disappeared back into the woods.
He brought his walking companions up to date on the final test and confirmation.
Robeson gave him a hard look. "This must be what happened to the Atlantis."
"Yes, Mr. President." He kept his voice flat. "They appear determined to keep us from making gamma-ray observations."
"I have my own observation to make," said the President. "There's a term for the situation where others attack your national assets, where they kill your citizens.
"We call it a state of war."
It would be a strange war, a conflict unlike any Earth had ever known.
The Galactics had yet to reveal a credible motive for their hostility. Like so much of what the humans thought they had learned about the F'thk, the aliens' behind-the-scenes hints were contradictory and apparently part of their inscrutable plot. Ambassador H'ffl had also confidentially told the Russians of the authoritarian and individualist factions among the Galactics—but in this version, the F'thk were socialists in the authoritarians' camp, worried about an anarchist mole in their midst.
The war against the aliens must also remain hidden, for no one could fathom why, if the Galactics wanted to destroy humanity, they did not simply do it. The gigantic mother ship orbiting the moon, regally indifferent to any direct communication from Earth, was never far from anyone's mind. Perhaps nothing but rationalization or a sense of squeamishness separated Earth from direct annihilation by the aliens—reticence that could give way to resolve if the humans were not seen to be playing their assigned roles. Earth would fight its war for survival as its antagonists had inexplicably begun it: through subterfuge.
And so the F'thk, and the vast majority of the people of Earth, would be encouraged to believe that great and foolish powers were edging ever closer to the nuclear brink . . . while the few human leaders and scientists in the know were riddled with doubts. How dangerously easy it would be for the appearance of imminent global warfare being so realistically maintained to become cataclysmic reality.
Unless and until that catastrophe occurred, Earth's best minds would—when their disappearance from Galactic orbs and compromised global communications could be justified—work to unravel the mysteries and to imagine any possible defense against the Galactic powers already revealed.
Silver light angled through the leafy canopy. As three men reached a small clearing, one paused. He glanced overhead to the full moon, his lips moving silently.
"What's that, Kyle?"
"A bit of poetry, Mr. President." He jammed his hands into his pockets. "I've always known that somehow, someday, I'd go to the moon. It's what drew me to physics in the first place. The day I met Sergei, moments before the Atlantis disaster, I told him I was sure that man would return there. The key to all this is the Galactics' mother ship—out there, circling the moon. If we're to succeed, we must go there."
"So what's the poetry?" asked the President.
Kyle tipped his head back, the better to observe the world that had for so long held his fascination. Feeling strangely like an oracle, he spoke crisply the words he had earlier been moved to whisper. "I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."
" 'The Highwayman'? Unless you're an incurable romantic, that poem doesn't exactly have a happy ending."
Kyle's eyes did not leave the beckoning moon. "I'm an incurable realist. I'll do what I must, go where I must, to achieve a happy ending.
"And that's where I think it will be."