'Sir?'
Collins looked at Barnside. He'd had enough questions already. 'Mr Barnside?'
'I'm Operations. I should be with you in the farmhouse.'
'I know your job, Mr Barnside. You can come along behind with the support team if you like. But the same rule applies. You stay out of our hair until we invite you through the door. Plain manners.'
'Hey' — Barnside grinned — 'I'd come just for the pleasure of watching you guys perform.'
They laughed at that. Just good old male camaraderie, Helen guessed, and exchanged knowing glances with Larry Wolfit, who was busy scribbling notes on his pad. Wolfit leaned over and whispered in her ear, 'Look. If these people want to play soldiers, I'd rather Barnside was with them than us. We let the other two guys go on ahead, and we just stay back, wait until it's clear. Okay?'
'Yes,' she said. Then John Collins clapped his hands and the room began to empty.
Ten minutes later they approached the huge, dark shadows of the Sea Knights, like giant crows beached on some faintly lit shoreline. The rotors began to cut through the hot, black air, winding up until they made a noise so deafening it was impossible to talk, impossible, even, to think beyond this brief, urgent slice of time that lay ahead of them, hidden in the vast, all-enveloping folds of the night.
CHAPTER 50
Doubts
Joe Katayama made a spire with his hands. Long, thin fingers, powerful, all-encompassing. Charley Pascal smiled at him and said, 'Be patient, Joe. We have to wait.'
They sat alone at a desk at the end of the big control room, now half-empty. The Children were leaving as planned, climbing into the collection of old cars they'd acquired, slowly heading off down the dry dusty road that linked them to the outside world. She felt happy. Something so large, so cosmic was starting to fill her head. It felt warm, familiar. Full of love and some odd kind of recognition.
The whir of the big network server was just audible, like the distant sound of an army of tiny night insects. There were enough people still left to do what was necessary. Soon they could be safely down to just three — herself, Joe, and young Eve, who knew the system so well now, and would stay right up to the final sequence before she too left to find some new life in a world that would be rebuilt around her.
Eve. Just the thought of the name filled her with joy. This was a rebirth that didn't even need Adam. By the time of the zenith, Charley would be the only one left on the farm. The danger of the group remaining intact was too great to contemplate. There would be some kind of revenge, and it was inevitable that, at some stage, the authorities would find their lair. If that was soon, she would be occupying it alone, with her drugs and her needles, safe in the knowledge of what she had achieved. And the rest of them could, when the time came, spread the word, about Gaia, about the need to nurture the precious planet, preserve it for everything that lived, not just the human species. Not that the world needed it. Charley had faith in her god. What would pass, would pass.
The team had departed according to the roster Katayama had drawn up. There were only eight of them left now, with four more climbing quietly into a car outside. This was a kind of death, she thought. Their absence stole some degree of life from her. Like a string vibrating in sympathy, her own private poison had risen on cue. She could no longer feel her lower limbs. Her hands shook from time to time, and there was a distinct neural tic down the left side of her face, like some tiny stroke.
This was not the work of a god in the conventional, human sense. Not an entity as such at all. Yet Charley Pascal felt sure that her own journey into the long, dark, thoughtless sleep ahead would be timed to perfection. A few hours after the zenith, when it would finally be safe to allow the cycle of the satellite to carry on its work, she could close her eyes, listen to this system dying into nothingness around her, and then let perpetual night engulf her.
Katayama asked, 'What happens if we lose the feed?'
The flat, crass question made her jump, almost annoyed her. 'We won't lose the feed.'
He stopped messing with his hands, placed them flat on the plain yellow pine of the desk. 'But what if? They got the Shuttle damn close to us. We were lucky to get away with that.'
'Luck had nothing to do with it,' she said coldly. 'You still don't understand, do you?'
'I understand you're pushing this right to the end, Charley. We could just program the thing now, destroy the uplink, and then have done with it. There'd be nothing they could do, even if they found us.'
'They won't find us in time. How could they?'
His eyes never really opened, she thought. There was something so masculine in this.
'They're not smart enough, Joe.'
'Maybe not,' he grunted. 'All the same, it's a question that's worth asking. Does the risk balance out the reward? Does what we get by waiting really make it worthwhile?'
Charley Pascal sighed. It had been a long time since anyone had truly questioned her authority, and now that it had happened, she felt affronted. 'That's my call, Joe. You're important to us. What you've done, sorting out the equipment, sorting out our security, that's vital. But you're not an astronomer or a physicist. And I am. So believe me when I say we have to do it like this.'
'Even with the risk they might get here first?'
'Sundog isn't bulletproof,' she replied testily. 'We can wind it up just so much and after that it breaks. Sometime after the zenith, the amount of pure energy that we'll be pushing through that system defies analysis. Even I'd be hard-pressed to put a figure on that. We've got to use it wisely or the whole thing will blow. To do that I need the best, most recent guess we have on how the storm's changing after the zenith, when we can use it to most effect. And I need to see how it responds when we do open up the gates all the way. I've got to do it like that, Joe. Otherwise we could be sending fireballs into the middle of the Atlantic, or making people sweat in Boston when we might be razing Chicago to the ground.'
'Yeah,' he said, shifting restlessly in his seat.
She didn't want an argument just now. 'Look. We've got the best information on the trend of the cycle there is. No one could supply us anything more timely.'
'I know.' A shadow of a smile. It was as close as Katayama could get, she thought, and realized, with a twinge of guilt, that she was glad this forced, close relationship now had so little time to run. 'I just get impatient.'
'Men do. And besides, isn't there something else you're forgetting?'
He stared at her with those heavy-lidded eyes, not understanding.
'We're not alone in this, Joe. We are part of the engine. We are agents of something bigger. If we weren't here helping the cycle along, somebody would be in our place. We can't lose. It's unthinkable.'
'Right.'
Sometimes he could be so impenetrable, so difficult to read. 'I want to see the cycle report,' she said curtly.
'Okay.' He got up, went behind the wheelchair, pushed her over to the terminal. Eve was sweating over the incoming data. She looked little more than eighteen: a thin, flat-chested kid with long dark hair that kept falling in front of her face as she typed. She wore an i love linux T-shirt and cut-off blue jeans. A scrolling window of text and graphics swam across the screen.
'In a nutshell,' Charley said.
'Big,' Eve replied in a flat English accent. 'There was a lull for a while a couple of hours ago, and then it started to build. You can look through the reports. Major seismic events in Asia. A lot of telecom links down too. Confined to the northern hemisphere. There's nothing that seems able to touch anyplace below the equator directly. They'll still get hit by after-effects, of course.'