Solstice

'Michael,' Davis said (his voice coming from outside this world they had entered). 'Michael?'

He opened his eyes, looked at Mo Sinclair's prone frame, her colourless face, eyes closed, chest scarcely moving.

'I can't handle this on my own,' Davis said. 'The medics are on their way. There's nothing we can do here.'

'Annie,' he mumbled. She held her mother's hand, eyes closed, softly weeping. 'Annie. She's right.' He scarcely recognized his own voice. 'We've got to do this. You've got to help me try.'

The girl said nothing. He felt like a jerk. Ellis Bevan was over by Joe Katayama's body, searching through the pockets.

'Did you find anything?' Bob Davis asked him.

'No,' Bevan replied, scanning the horizon. 'There could be more of them. We should bear that in mind.'

'I don't think so,' Lieberman said. You could feel, from Katayama's presence, what kind of role he had in this place: one of strength, one of enforcement. 'They're gone. If we're going to do this now, we've just one more person to see.'

Annie watched Davis place his jacket over her mother, watched the small movement of her chest, wiped the tears from her eyes with her arm, not sobbing any more, not trying to avoid this sight. She looked at Michael Lieberman and took his hand.

'I can do it,' she said.

Charley Pascal sat in the wheelchair, eyes unfocused, drugged maybe, Lieberman thought, and said, 'I'm sorry about your mother, Annie. We're creatures of the dark. We all live in agony. You get to know that as you grow older, you get to understand its taste in your mouth.'

Annie tapped away at the keyboard, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes.

'Spare us this, Charley,' Lieberman said. 'You've done enough.'

Davis stood by the door, not letting go of his gun. Bevan was beside Charley, watching her like a hawk. And how much damage can a crippled woman do? Lieberman wondered. Ask someone in Kyoto. Ask those people struggling for life as this wall of heat and poison sweeps across the world with the sun. Ask Annie and Mo.

He propped the videophone on the desk by the side of the monitor, watched Annie typing away, and prayed for the thing to work. Slowly, hesitantly, the system made some contact with the outside. Schulz appeared, a little indistinct, Helen, even more shaky, in an adjoining window.

'Annie?' Schulz said, puzzled. 'Where's Mo?'

Lieberman pushed himself in front of the camera. 'We don't have time, Irwin. Mo's been shot. They're calling for the medics now.'

Schulz looked as pale as a sheet of paper. 'Oh my God — '

'Irwin,' Lieberman said, close to barking. 'We're here. This is your play now. You try and get in through the front door.'

'Sure. I'm sorry. All I need is the IP address. Do you know what that is, Annie? How to get it?'

'I think so,' she said quietly, moving at the keyboard, watching the screen.

'What happened, Michael?' Helen's flickering image asked, the concern obvious on her face, even through this less than perfect picture.

'Later. We're behind. Let's just work on this, okay?'

'You look — '

'Later!'

She was silent.

'Try it now,' Annie said.

Schulz seemed preoccupied for a moment, then beamed back at them. 'I think you did it, Annie.' They could hear the sound of the keyboard clacking down the line. 'Right. We're there. Well done. In a moment, the network's ours.'

Lieberman watched as the girl buried her face in her hands. Then the big monitor cleared, lines of geek commands scrolled up and down too quickly to read, and Schulz and Helen came up again, in separate windows, looking a little less flaky this time.

'What next?' Lieberman asked.

'The key,' Schulz said. 'She's put her own password on it, probably just an ordinary word, except it's encrypted so we can't read it directly from the system. Just give it to us, Charley. We can get it anyway. Save some time here.'

She sat in the wheelchair, not worried about this, Lieberman

thought, just waiting for the celestial dance to do its stuff.

'Don't be ridiculous, Irwin,' Charley said. 'Why should I do that?'

'Because we need it,' Lieberman said. 'Can't you separate what's going on inside your head from what's happening out here? This isn't some dream; these aren't shadows of your imagination. These are real people. This is a real world.'

'I know that,' she said sourly. 'I worked that out a long time ago.'

He shook his head. She looked a little scared, he thought. Maybe there was a chink of light somewhere inside still. 'No you didn't, Charley. You just saw what was happening inside yourself and thought this was some kind of mirror image of what the rest of us deserved. Well, you're wrong, and if you thought about it you'd know.'

'Still letting them fool you, Michael. Such a waste.' 'This isn't Berkeley circa 1971, Charley,' he said. 'Quit dreaming.' 'Go to hell.'

'I'm there already, I don't need directions. Also, I don't need you. Helen?'

Her head nodded on the screen. 'He's right. This is a standard Unix-based password. With the technology we have in Langley, and you're hooked right through to that now, we can blast our way through every one of those in a little under forty-five minutes. So you see we will get it. You won't stop us.'

'Go ahead,' Charley said.

Lieberman looked at Helen on the screen and didn't say a word.

'Why do you fight this, Michael?' Charley asked. 'If it wasn't us, it would have been someone else. This is Gaia working. It has to happen. We can't carry on like this.'

He stopped staring at the computer and wondered if it was worth pleading with her. But there was craziness in her eyes, a dead, fanatic certainty. This illness, and whatever else it brought, put her beyond that kind of appeal.

'Michael,' she said, 'this is crazy. You should be thinking about rebuilding this world after the storm blows over. You could lead them.'

'Jesus,' he yelled. 'Where did you get this from? Peace and love and corpses? Are you really still stuck in that vision? What do you think comes after this? Eden?'

'If that's what we want.'

'Bullshit! Bob? Where the hell is that medical team?'

Davis was going through the door already. 'I'll chase it.'

Lieberman looked at Bevan. All Bevan's confidence had disappeared. He was shocked, and scared. 'You too, Ellis. See what you can do for Mo. I can handle this.'

'Sure,' Bevan said lamely, and was gone.

Lieberman shook his head. There were too many images there. Mo's agonized face. The world winding down, like numbers flicking through the code program on the screen, so quickly you couldn't even recognize them. As this celestial ballet began in the sky, he felt drained and dead.

'We will get that code, Charley. But you could give it to us. You could do that for yourself, as much as anyone else in the world.'

'Just wait…' she said (and closed her eyes, saw the planets wheeling in space, felt this force moving within her).

'No. You're wrong. Sure, you can push those buttons, burn the earth badly right now. But what we all wake up to tomorrow isn't some new age of enlightenment. It's just human beings getting hurt, getting scared. You're worse than the people you hate, Charley. You're the dinosaur. Not us.'

Helen was staring at him from the screen and he didn't need words to understand the message. The monitor wasn't sparking with hits the way it should. Something was wrong.