screws around the edge.
'Teamwork time,' Ruffin said. Gallagher passed him an electronic, torqueless screwdriver, and took out an identical device herself. Then they turned the tools on and set to work on the screws, three down each vertical side, the same number on the horizontal. It took ten minutes, but this time there was no pressurization problem. The plate just came away in their hands. It revealed a dark, deep hole that wasn't reached by the lighting they had originally jerry-built. Ruffin motioned to Gallagher and she unhooked one of the flashlights, held it in her hand, and pointed it down the hole. Ruffin smiled. This was what he had been praying to see ever since the Shuttle had lifted off from Canaveraclass="underline" a small LCD screen with sixteen places for digits on it, each blank, and beneath a numeric keypad. He pulled the floatcam in farther and listened to Schulz's purr of relief.
'Sixteen numbers and we're there,' Schulz said.
'Know them by heart.'
'I'll read them off all the same.'
Ruffin punched the first one in and couldn't believe it. His hand really was shaking, deep inside the cumbersome glove. It took a couple of tries to get it right. Then he hit the green enter button, watched the number come up in its little window, and moved on to the next.
He was on the seventh when Schulz said somewhat nervously in Ruffin's ear, 'What happened to the sunlight?'
Ruffin fumbled the number again and swore mildly. 'Sorry. You lost me. We're nearly there. Can't it wait?'
'No,' Schulz said firmly. 'We've got a wider view of the area than you from the floatcam. Pull your head out of that hole and take a look around you. The sunlight's changing.'
Something stirred inside Ruffin's head, annoyingly out of reach. Reluctantly, with a sigh that was audible to everyone listening around the world, he pushed himself away from the control panel and blinked in the bright, piercing shaft of sunlight that was now falling on their backs.
'Shit. I jerked the damn satellite when I got thrown back like that. It's moved. It's out of sync with the shades.'
'Bring the floatcam back,' Schulz barked. 'I want to see the wings.'
'No need,' Ruffin said grimly, but moved the camera unit anyway. Up above them he could see the two clover leafs, one attached to Sundog, the other floating free. When he got thrown back by the pressure of the door, his line had shifted the entire satellite out of kilter with the shade above. Ordinarily, he guessed, some adjuster rocket would have fired in and straightened the thing up. But Sundog was down. Just then, anyway.
'No problem,' Schulz yelled, in a voice that said just the opposite. 'I can't risk trying to key in the rest of the sequence. We just need to get you back out of range of the thing, back where you were, then put the shades in place again.'
Ruffin looked at the flimsy silver apparatus they had erected. The four identical wings had now moved close to thirty degrees out of alignment with the satellite. The solar panels had to be getting almost their full entitlement of the sun, and what Schulz had said rang in his ears: This thing stayed down as long as the power was off.
'How soon?' he asked, unhooking his line from the satellite, watching Gallagher do the same, slowly, certainly, making sure she got it right the first time.
'Don't know. Look at the LED.'
Ruffin took hold of Gallagher's arm and pushed both of them away from the hull, back out toward the errant wings. They rounded the back of the satellite. He glanced at the base plate. The light was red. He took a deep breath, and then it was orange.
'She's waking up, Irwin,' Ruffin said slowly. 'Orange now.'
'Get yourself out of there, nice and steady,' Schulz yelled. 'Get out of range. We go back to square one.'
'Yeah.' The light changed again. 'It's green.'
No one spoke. The two suited figures floated out into space, out toward the silver wings. They were ten metres or so from the base plate now, Ruffin guessed. The line was still silent. He watched the metal plate begin to retract, slowly, with a mindless, mechanical certainty, sliding open to reveal a deep, complex pit of equipment. What lay underneath was impossible to recognize, a tangle of spikes and antennae, sensors starting to move sluggishly, like some waking beast sniffing the air, trying to locate its prey.
'The door's open,' Ruffin said. 'It's connecting.'
In the tinny speakers of his helmet someone said, 'Oh my God…'
They were clear of the thing now. Far enough away to have been safe, if Sundog had failed to pick up their presence during their slow flight back from its perimeter. Beneath them, radiant blue and gold, the earth lay like some precious, distant jewel. Bill Ruffin reached out and held Mary Gallagher's hand, and still the picture of the damn beach wouldn't leave his head. The gulls circling, the smell of salt water, the taste of that drink, these things were real.
'Our Father,' he said quietly, 'who art in Heaven, hallowed — '
It looked like something from a kid's game or a prop from a movie set. The thin red beam just came right out of the guts of the beast straight at them, a waving wand of energy slicing through space, slicing through their suits, their bodies, making this last moment seem so strange, so unreal, a writhing, agonizing dance in the airless black vacuum they'd dared to brave, so big, so endless it could swallow them up forever and never leave a trace.
In Bill Ruffin's helmet, now floating through space attached to a dead torso severed in half by a waving wand of light, there was a cacophony of voices, yelling and screaming, all on top of each other, none making sense.
Eighteen hundred metres away, in the cabin of the Shuttle, Dave Sampson, mind reeling, still trying to believe this was happening, listened to the babble of sound, tried to pick out what he recognized, what was foreign. Someone he knew, a NASA voice, not calm now, but still familiar, was yelling at him to get out of there, and damn fast, screaming so loud it covered up completely Schulz yelling the exact opposite. Idly, without thinking, he reached down and flicked the buttons on the start-up sequence, heard the giant machine start to come to life.
There was a sound, familiar and encouraging. Servos coming to life, pumps energizing, the slow rumble of power feeding into the system, electricity running the complex length of the spacecraft. And something else, from way behind. When Dave Sampson looked up from the winking lights of the panel and stared over his shoulder, there was nothing there now except fire, a vast, all-consuming fire, that rolled toward him like some ancient, fearsome weapon from an old and angry god.
CHAPTER 48
In the Waking World
'Not your fault,' Lieberman said gently to Schulz, who looked pale as death. 'It's not anybody's fault.'
Schulz looked devastated. 'I should have thought about it. When he got kicked back and held by the line. I should have realized that would move the satellite out of sync'
'And so should I. Those guys knew the risks. They wouldn't blame you, any of us. They were bigger than that.'
'Yeah.' Schulz sighed miserably.
'So let's get on with the job. This game's not over yet.'
And it wasn't, even though Charley clearly thought otherwise. Schulz guessed she must have known something was wrong when Sundog went off-line. That had to show up on the Children's system. She didn't need to activate the defence mechanisms and blow the Shuttle team out of the sky. The satellite was perfectly capable of doing that for itself. But she could take some kind of revenge. Fifteen minutes after they lost the ship a curt E-mail came through from her, copied to La Finca, the CIA, the Agency, and the main international news wires. It gave a brief, deliberately inaccurate account of the destruction of Arcadia. The last word Charley wrote was: Prepare.