Solstice

'I guess we need to manage things better.'

'No,' he answered swiftly. 'We have to unmanage them. That's the big lesson. We just go back to something like the status quo, then get the hell out of there.'

She watched the big shape of the main block loom up out of the darkness. 'Speaking of wolves…'

Wolfit grinned. 'Please. If they could speak, they'd be offended. Wolves are highly social, team-oriented animals, with a strong sense of what we would call duty and loyalty. They wouldn't flourish here at all. Which is one more reason why I'm thinking of going.'

And that would be a loss, she thought, one she would try to avoid. They needed people with Wolfit's qualities: intelligence and the ability to think outside the box. She'd copied everything they had on Sundog to him for his arrival and he was already up to speed on the situation. His insight was, she knew, going to be vital.

The night was hot and airless. It made her catch her breath as they walked purposefully across the quadrant. The sky was clear, bright with stars, pregnant with some power Helen Wagner could only guess at. She had been racing to catch up on the subject of solar energy these past few hours and felt she had a reasonable brief under the circumstances. But there were so many holes in the subject, so many unfilled doubts, even for someone like Lieberman, who seemed to know it by heart. With the best will in the world, they had to guess their way through this one.

Lights burned throughout the Langley complex but they were alone on the walk. These spaces between the component parts of the Agency could be huge, she thought. They turned into the old block, walked to Levine's first-floor office, entered, saw the acting director waiting there, Barnside next to him, and she wondered how Belinda would have handled this. Only one way: directly. This was, in some sense she did not understand, some kind of struggle, between her and this static, slow-moving traditionalism that Levine and Barnside personified. The difference was generational. Both men failed to realize that the ecosystem around them was changing, the threats were different, and the old, simple, forthright solutions didn't apply any more.

She led Larry Wolfit into Levine's office, breathed in the smoke from his cigarettes, saw them seated at the table, watching her, uncomfortable, almost sullen. Then she sat down, looked at their faces, and said, 'How the hell did they get to know about that poor kid? Where did that come from?'

Barnside sighed, a long low moan, reached for a can of Coke on the table, took a swig. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his face looked lined, older. 'Jesus, Helen. Do you have to be so predictable? No one said Ops was a safe ticket. We're not pushing keyboards. This was a field operation. Everyone knows the risks.'

'Great. Now that that little speech is out of the way, can I have an answer? How the hell did they find out?'

'She'd been out of touch with us for months,' Barnside said, shrugging his big shoulders. 'Something went wrong. The most likely explanation is that they tumbled to her some time ago and waited for the right moment. Maybe she was a bad choice. I wouldn't deny that. The point about these people is that they are from outside. We never put them through much formal training. That's what gives them their value — they don't wear the uniform.'

Helen Wagner took a deep breath and knew that what Barnside said made sense. That didn't stop it from bugging her.

'We got an inquest running on the girl,' Levine said. 'Nothing more to know about that at the moment. Let's talk about some broader issues. These Gaia crazies have got all this equipment in the sky. Like some kind of death ray from outer space, the way these Sundog people talk about it. Why did they do all this hacking to get into the Lone Wolf unit?'

She nodded. 'It's an interesting question. They want to disable the dome — that's the unit that was developed to house the Sundog antennae and control equipment. We know Sundog can disrupt telecommunications and produce some pretty nasty physical side effects. It's got lots of gears. They could have thrown at Lone Wolf what they threw at us.' Helen was thinking on her feet. It didn't come naturally.

'So why didn't they do that?' Barnside asked.

Wolfit looked up from the papers. 'I spent a couple of hours going through the records of what happened during the Sundog trials. The reason the thing got abandoned was that it was so damn hard to control. It had all manner of attack media in there — laser, microwave, particle beam. You could create anything from a sea of white noise to a radio or network blackout. Even real damage on the ground — fire, high magnetic and radiation fields. What they threw at us was something designed to flex a muscle or two, I guess, and it happened to coincide with a peak in the sunspot cycle. Maybe that was lucky. I wouldn't want to rely on it for taking something out entirely, and clearly they wanted to do that with Lone Wolf.'

Helen nodded. 'I agree. We didn't know how to control Sundog with any degree of accuracy and my guess is Charley doesn't either. And this just gets all the more unreliable as we swing up to the zenith. Even without the satellite we could expect some pretty visible effects on the earth in any case. If they can tap into that, then they probably could hope to bring a dome down, but not quite yet, not with any certainty anyway.'

'Makes sense,' Levine said. 'So. Why did they do it?'

'It may have been just a demonstration of their strength,' Helen responded. 'They threatened some signs that would persuade people to prepare when they put up the Web site. Maybe that was a sign. There's no way of knowing. They haven't even claimed responsibility yet.'

'Or?' Levine asked.

Helen grimaced. 'Or it's the start of an all-out war to remove our capability to talk to Sundog in any form. The Children clearly have their own facility somewhere. It would take money to build a replica of a dome, but the equipment is available on the open market and Charley sure knows how. I've got the FBI tracking through contractors to see who's been buying the right sort of installation. They want to take us through the zenith using their own dome, but they have to live with the possibility that we might regain control of the network. If they take out our three control centres, that's impossible. In fact…'

She turned to the monitor and keyed in the La Finca address. After a few moments, Bevan's face came on screen. 'Is Irwin there?'

'A moment.' She waited.

'Hi,' Irwin Schulz said, looking exhausted.

'We need to understand more. Let's say the Children somehow manage to take out the two remaining domes. Then they program the satellite to do its worst through whatever installation they have and destroy that. Is there any way we can get back on it?'

Schulz licked his lips and said, 'Not from the ground.'

'What if we start building a dome right now?' Levine asked. 'As a precaution?'

'No time, sir,' Schulz answered. 'It takes a month or more to bed these systems in.'

Levine stared at Barnside. 'Put some heavy-duty security teams on site in Kyoto and La Finca. And scour everything there, make sure there are no little surprises waiting for us already.'

'Irwin,' Helen asked, 'you think it takes a month to get one of these things working? That's after you get all the equipment.'

'Oh yeah. It's a real pain.'

Levine looked at her. 'Well?'

'Charley Pascal basically had a blueprint for an entire dome in her head, is that right, Irwin?'

'Sure. She designed most of it.'

'So if she wants to do this quickly, surely it makes sense to copy everything right down to the last nut and bolt?'

'The telecom equipment's heavy-duty but standard.'