Moonstruck. Part 13

The darker side of Kyle's speculation, if he could substantiate it, would be a whole new reason to fear the possible wrath of the Galactics. Imagine flesh-eating bacteria with att.i.tude . . . .Quit it, Kyle. It seemed he would be getting no hints from Swelk. Alas, her failure to answer these sorts of questions implied nothing about the truth of her story. How many people did he know without a clue

how, say, their TV or refrigerator worked?

Speaking of refrigerators, and probably why he thought of one, he wouldn't mind a cold soda. Retrieving a can would provide a few minutes in which to exorcise his frustrations, since the safehouse was presently without a functioning cooler.

No one had seen a way to tell whether Swelk's bioconverter or computer had undisclosed capabilities . . .

such as communicating with the ship from which she had, or claimed to have, defected. Even if her story were accepted-personally, he believed her-the danger would remain that hostile Krulirim could eavesdrop through her stolen equipment.

One of the few things he truly knew was that F'thk spying devices, the Galactic orbs, used microwaves. That Swelk's gear, if it had a communications mode, also exploited the electromagnetic spectrum, seemed like a good bet to take.

In terms of suppressing radio-based communications, stashing the alien in an existing radiometrics lab would have been ideal-but it would have sacrificed secrecy and discretion. Instead, the isolated one- time farmhouse had been hastily "remodeled" before Swelk was moved in and her debriefing begun in earnest.

The farmhouse's walls were newly spray painted with an electrically conductive pigment. Rolls of fine copper mesh lined the attic floor and cellar ceiling. Copper screens now covered all windows and doors.

Everything was interconnected and grounded. Kyle had personally tested and blessed the finished product: an un.o.btrusive electromagnetic shield.

In the greater scheme of things, it was a small matter: a too casually draped dropcloth had let some of the sprayed conductive paint drift into the guts of the refrigerator. Plugged back in after the alterations were finished, the motor, obviously shorted out, had fried itself. It appeared that the owner previous to the CIA was one of those frugal fools who used pennies as fuses.

"I'm going to the trailer for a soda," Kyle told Swelk. "Can I get you anything?"

"I will stay with water from the kitchen tap."

The back door banged shut behind Kyle. The Airstream trailer to which Kyle now headed sat discreetly

behind the house. Originally deployed as a communications station-the safehouse's shielding also blocked the agents' cell phones-the motor home was now most prized for its tiny refrigerator. He waved at an agent behind the house on a cigarette break, got a c.o.ke, and returned.

"Sorry for the interruption." Blackie and Stripes were still waiting for the "mouse" to emerge from the

closet. "About the bioconverter again, how is it powered?"

Swelk had gotten a gla.s.s of water during his absence. She had to climb to the counter to operate the sink.

Instead of answering, she and her computer traded untranslated squeals. Finally, her computer said, "The translation program does not have the word I want. Maybe your technology does not have this

capability. Some of the material I feed into the bioconverter is used to make the electricity. The energy

is stored in something like a battery."

It sounded like a fuel cell, although a much better and more flexible design than any Kyle knew. That itself was interesting, but another opportunity had just presented itself. "Does your computer have notes about how the bioconverter itself works? Maybe even a design?"

More squeals and whines. "I am sorry. No."

Had he imagined a pregnant pause after "sorry"? Or was Swelk short of breath, as so often happened?

She'd told him that Earth had more CO2 than home. "Why not?"

Swelk's sensor stalks dropped. Body language for regret? Or for evasion? "I was unprepared for my escape." Pause. "I left the Consensus when my spying was discovered. My computer was mostly filled with movies." An even longer pause. "Sorry."

Another plausible explanation . . . for another aggravating roadblock. Britt's skepticism had one more data point of support.

* * * "Cold War II: First Casualties!" screamed the headline. A well-read Washington Post had been left on the table of the NASA conference room in which Kyle waited for Britt Arledge. G.o.ddard s.p.a.ce Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, was a short drive from the White House-and the sprawling, campuslike complex had several electromagnetically shielded labs for the routine a.s.sembly and checkout of scientific satellites. A get-together here offered reasonable a.s.surances against Galactic eavesdropping without drawing alien attention to Kyle or the federal lab at which he officially worked. Proximity to the District was simply a bonus.

Despite the inch-tall banner, details on the clash were spa.r.s.e. There had been a brief but deadly dogfight over the South China Sea between Russian fighters based in Vietnam and carrier-based American fighters. Accounts differed, of course, as to who had fired first. Moscow claimed its planes had been on a routine exercise, and their approach to the carrier task force was no more sinister than hundreds of similar events over the years. Washington said a targeting radar had been detected.

What was clear was that three SU-22s and two F/A-18s had been splashed. Two pilots, one Russian and one American, had failed to eject. Both were missing and presumed dead.

"Dirty business, that." Kyle looked up at the sound of Britt's voice. "That it is." The wonder was that more incidents, and more deaths, had not occurred as the tensions between the United States and Russia kept rising. It was, to the very few who knew, a simulation of a nuclear crisis . . . but that pretense of hostility could turn real enough at a moment's notice. Too many nerves were stretched taut. Too many weapons could be loosed on a moment's notice.

He flung down the newspaper he'd been studying. Given what Swelk had told them, did Earth's nuclear powers need to continue the disaster-p.r.o.ne deception? He was trying to work that through in his own mind. "We'll be meeting down the hall."

Nodding, Britt followed Kyle along a road-stripe-yellow corridor to the shielded privacy of a cavernous, multistory satellite-a.s.sembly lab. Hands clasping the steel-pipe railing of a catwalk, Kyle felt free to speak his mind. "Is the President prepared to tell the Russians about our defector? We need to stop the madness before something even worse happens."

Britt's nostrils flared slightly, as visible a sign as he ever gave of disagreement. "I'm not yet convinced

that she is a defector, and not an agent. Why are you?"It was the debate they kept having. Nothing in Swelk's ongoing CIA debriefings had revealed any inconsistencies in her story, nor had the little ET shared anything irreconcilable with Kyle or Darlene. A large part of that consistent story, unfortunately, was wide-ranging unfamiliarity with her species' science and engineering. That an intelligent member of a modern society could be ignorant of its technologies-Britt cheerfully admitted that he was without a clue how a radio worked and what kept a plane in the air-settled nothing.

The more cynical CIA debriefers went further, speculating that the very absence of minor loose ends in Swelk's story suggested a fabrication. Kyle thought he'd squelched that insinuation, as a groundless extrapolation to the aliens of a human foible. Who was to say all Krulirim didn't have a flawless memory for detail?

This was no trivial difference of opinion; humanity's future teetered on the fulcrum of the choice they must soon make. Kyle's knuckles were white from pressure as he fought to control his emotions. "No amount of contradiction-free interrogation is going to overcome your doubts. Ironclad proof of her story, if Swelk is telling the truth, is on the Consensus . . . which, as you know, the ETs won't allow us aboard." The few attempts to hide bugs on the aliens or their equipment had been met with uniform failure and angry F'thk denunciations. The President himself had banned further attempts as too dangerous.

"And yet," Britt flashed a momentary smile, "you asked that we get together."

"True." Kyle extracted two glossy sheets from the manila envelope that he'd carried tucked under an arm. Each page bore an image of the moon, its cratered landscape unmistakable. "Take a look at these."

Britt's eyes switched back and forth between pictures. The tiny timestamps in the corners of each

differed by only milliseconds. "They're the same scene, right? The left one shows much more detail."

"The higher-resolution shot is an optical image. The other is a computer reconstruction from a reflected microwave pulse." Kyle suppressed an urge to discuss just how much computation had been required to

generate the latter image. "We adopted technology used to predict the stealthiness of airplane designs without having to build them first."

He took back the images before handing over a third. The new picture showed the supposed Galactic

mother ship. Less than half a hemisphere was visible, the rest an inky blackness. A similarly divided lunar landscape provided a dramatic backdrop. "Sunlight is striking from the side, obviously."

Britt tapped the photo. "What's this dark spot?"

"Good eye-it's a shadow."

"Of what? It must be something big."

"A hangar. Their utility s.p.a.cecraft, the ones that never land on the Earth-visible side of the moon, emerge from and return to that bay. Most of the time the door is closed." One of the just-mentioned auxiliary craft was also in the image. Kyle was aware, although the still frame didn't support the knowledge, that the smaller vessel had just exited the hangar.

Britt looked at him shrewdly. "But you claim not to believe in this mother ship. Swelk says it doesn't exist."

"That hangar for the auxiliary craft would be a thousand-plus feet deep. We can calculate that depth

from the geometry of the shadow." The previous microwave observation had shown craters much shallower than that. With a flourish, Kyle offered a final image. "Now look at this." This computer-reconstructed microwave image, its timestamp again well within a second of its optical a.n.a.logue, did not show any auxiliary craft. And the Galactic mother ship appeared only as a featureless sphere.

CHAPTER 20.

The American and Russian navies today separately announced the apparent loss of a submarine in the North Atlantic. Few details, and no official theories as to the cause or causes of the incidents, are available. French and Spanish seismologists recorded events in the region consistent with underwater explosions. Deep submergence rescue vehicles are being rushed to the area by the two navies, but hopes for any survivors are slim.

The frigid state of relationships between these nuclear powers, and the proximity of their lost submarines, suggest that the disasters might in some way be linked. This is an inference about which spokespersons of both sides declined comment.

-BBC News Service * * * They were sounded out, nominated, haggled over, and finally agreed upon in the most casual of contexts: huffed conversations between joggers; "chance" encounters of smokers in the shadow of the Pentagon; a tete-a-tete between parents at a kids' soccer match; walks in the woods surrounding Camp David; a half-dozen other innocent-seeming meetings in venues previously confirmed to be free of Galactic orbs and potentially compromised Earthly comm gear. The disappearance for even a few hours of the princ.i.p.als-the President, the director of the CIA, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the national security advisor-could trigger who knew what response from nervous Russians or inscrutable aliens. The five who were now gathered, in the most rustic of surroundings, would hold the debate their princ.i.p.als could not.

Kyle had volunteered his sister's remote Chesapeake Bay cabin. Darlene had driven from the District with him; the others arrived soon after, two in separate cars and one in the motorboat now bobbing alongside the cabin's rickety pier.

The dragged-indoors picnic table around which they met, a tarp covering the carved doodles of Kyle's young nieces, had never seen such august company. Erin Fitzhugh was a CIA deputy director, the terseness of her official resume implying a long history in covert operations. USAF Lieutenant General Ryan Bauer-former B-52 pilot, Gulf War veteran, ex-director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization-was presently on staff to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Kyle was a widely respected physicist and the director emeritus of Franklin Ridge National Lab; more important, he was the one-time (and still unofficial) science advisor to the President.

Darlene's credentials, she felt, were the least impressive. A long-time foreign-service officer and now a deputy undersecretary of the Department of State, she was here to represent the diplomatic perspective. Britt had a.s.sured her that no one had ever considered holding this summit about the aliens-which was all that the invitees had been told about the gathering's purpose-without the first diplomat to see through the facade of F'thk good intentions.

The President's chief of staff was the final member of the small group, there to direct discussion of the still-undisclosed topic and report back to his boss. Of all the partic.i.p.ants, Britt had the highest public

profile. Official Washington thought he was down and out with this fall's virulent strain of flu.

Kyle was indulging some odd urge to play host before the discussion kicked off. As Darlene gave him a hand in the kitchen with cold sodas and salty snacks, Bauer and Fitzhugh rehashed the North Atlantic incident. The working theory was an undersea collision between the Russian attack sub that had been trailing an American boomer-ballistic-missile sub-and the American attack sub too closely following the unsuspecting Russian.

The details didn't pa.r.s.e at first-Darlene's job at State dealt with human rights and fostering democracy, not arms control and nuclear deterrence. A chill washed over her as, through whispered consultations with Kyle-a presidential science advisor's purview certainly did include nuclear matters-she came up to speed.

Dissolution of the USSR had removed several outward-looking land-based radars from the Russian missile-defense network, gaps that became ever more troubling as the Galactics systematically destroyed early-warning satellites. In predictable parts of every day, the Russians were effectively blind to submarine-launched missiles along two narrow corridors. Attack subs like the one the Russians had just lost sought to find and secretly track the American boomers. In case of hostilities, destroying a boomer before it launched would scratch twenty-four ballistic missiles, each with up to twelve nuclear warheads.

American attack subs, in turn, silently stalked their Russian counterparts, ready to preemptively take out a Russian hunter. The vulnerabilities created by the Russian blind spots made hair-triggers inevitable . . .

and incredibly dangerous.

The doomed subs had followed a boomer into one of the Russian blind spots."We've got to step back from the brink," Darlene blurted from the kitchen. "We're too close to disaster."The national-security pros exchanged a look that said, "amateurs." Erin Fitzhugh cleared her throat. She was more one of the guys than most of the guys. "We and the Russkies have half a century's practice at dancing on the edge. Now, whenever our tensions show signs of leveling off, the F'thk, or Krulirim, or whoever the bug-eyed monsters are, turn their attention to the less experienced nuclear powers. Would you feel any safer if the d.a.m.ned ETs were working their magic on the Pakistanis and the Indians? Israelis and Iranians? I sure as s.h.i.t wouldn't-their command-and-control systems are all bad jokes."

Pretzels flew as the diplomat undiplomatically slammed a tray onto the picnic table. "Are you saying the

Atlantic incident was staged?""All too real," interrupted Britt. "Entirely real, and for the reasons Erin has articulated. We don't dare encourage the aliens to put more effort into manipulating the less seasoned members of the nuclear club. And unless we keep the military in the dark we can't hope to keep secret our knowledge of concealed ET hostility. So the operative question is, when, if ever, do we take on the aliens?

"That, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the purpose of our meeting. The President is considering telling President Chernykov about our alien defector."