Firstborn

“Be there in half an hour.” Paxton sat there and glowered, visibly irritated.

“I know what’s bugging you, Bob. It’s Professor Carel, isn’t it?”

The muscles in his grizzled cheeks worked, as if he longed to be chewing gum. “I don’t know anything about this old English guy.”

“No doubt you had him vetted.”

“As best we could. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.

Not part of the team.”

“He’s coming at my invitation,” she said firmly. In fact, in a sense, to her this elderly British scientist was part of the team, a deeper and older team-up than anything she was involved in with Paxton.

Professor Bill Carel had once been a graduate student working with Siobhan McGorran, another British astronomer who had become involved in the grand effort to build the sunstorm shield—

and who had, in its aftermath, married Bud Tooke, and then nursed him through his cancer, a cruel legacy of that astounding day. That personal link was in fact the channel through which Carel had contacted her, and had tried to persuade her that he had a contribution to make regarding the presence of the object in the solar system, which he had heard of in whispers and leaks.

She tried to express some of this to Paxton, but he just waved it away. “He’s a cosmologist, for Christ’s sake. He’s spent his life staring into deep space. What use is he going to be today?”

“Let’s keep an open mind, Bob,” she said firmly.

He fell into a silence that lasted all through the rest of the drive.

Bella had raised a child, she was used to sulks, and she just ignored him.

After eighty kilometers they pulled off onto Route 101, a narrow two-lane rural road that clambered up a ridge. At the crest of the ridge they came to a line of razor-wired fencing. A faded sign read: U.S. PROPERTY

NO TRESPASSING

Beyond that Bisesa could make out a few battered aluminum huts, and beyond them, a glassy wall.

They had to wait while their cars interfaced with the base’s security systems. Bella was aware of a faint speckle of laser light as she was probed.

“So, Mount Weather,” she prompted Paxton.

“Five hundred acres of Blue Ridge real estate. In the nineteen-fifties they set up a bunker here, a place to shelter government officials from D.C. in the event of a nuclear exchange. It fell into disuse, but was revived after 9/11 in 2001, and again after 2042. Although now it’s essentially a loan from the U.S. government to the World Space Council.”

Bella tried not to grimace. “A bunker from the Cold War, the War on Terror, and now the War with the Sky. Appropriate, I suppose.”

“Manned by navy officers mostly. Used to confinement and canned air. Mount Weather is a good neighbor, I’m told. They keep up the roads, and send out the snow plows in winter. Not that there’s much snow nowadays…”

She had been expecting the convoy to pass on to a gate in that shining impenetrable wall. She was shocked when, with a rip of fo-liage, the whole chunk of land beneath the car turned into an elevator and dropped her into darkness.

Bob Paxton laughed as they descended. “I feel like I’m coming home.”

As smiling young naval officers security-processed the party and escorted it to its conference room, Bella glimpsed a little of Mount Weather.

The ceilings were low, paneled with grimy tiles, the corridors narrow. But these unprepossessing corridors enclosed a small, old-fashioned town. There were television and radio studios, cafeterias, a tiny civilian police station, even a little row of shops, all underground, all contained within a hum of air conditioning. It was like a museum, she thought, a relic of the mindset of the mid-twentieth century.

At least the conference room was modern, big and bright and fitted with softwalls and table screens.

And here Bill Carel was waiting for her. In a room full of heavy, rumbling figures, mostly men, mostly about Paxton’s age, mostly in one uniform or another, Carel in his shabby old jacket was standing alone beside a coffee percolator.

Bella ignored Paxton’s cronies and made straight for Carel.

“Professor. It’s good of you to come.” She shook his hand; it was flimsy, bony.

He was a little younger than she was, she recalled from his file, somewhere in his fifties, but he looked frail, gaunt, his face liver-spotted, his stance awkward and uncomfortable. The sunstorm had blighted many lives; perhaps he had been battling illness. But the eyes in his cadaverous face were bright. He said, “I hope the contribution I have to make is a valid one, and useful.”

“You’re not sure?” She felt obscurely disappointed at his diffidence. An unworthy part of her had been looking forward to using him to tweak Bob Paxton’s tail.

“Well, how can one be sure? The whole situation is unprecedented. But my colleagues urged me to contact you — to contact somebody. ”

She nodded. “However this turns out, I’m grateful you tried.”

Cradling a coffee, Bella led Carel to a seat. “I’ll make sure you get your say,” she whispered. “And later we must talk of the Tookes.”

After that she made a hasty circuit of the room, meeting and greeting. As well as the Patriots Committee types there were representatives of the various multinational armed forces and governments that supported the World Space Council.

She didn’t get a good first impression of the quality of these delegates. The Council had been engaged in nothing but “preparatory”

and “advisory” activities for decades; since the sunstorm the War with the Sky had been cold. So working for the Council had not been a prized assignment for a career officer. Maybe this was a room full of Bob Paxtons, steely-eyed fanatic types, or else dead-enders.

But she told herself not to rush to judgment; after all if there were a new threat approaching the Earth, these men and women would be her prime resource in dealing with it.

Standing at the head of the table, Bob Paxton, self-appointed chair, flicked his finger against a glass to call the meeting to order.

The rest of the panel, perhaps starstruck to be in the presence of the first man on Mars, submitted their attention immediately.

Paxton said the purpose of the meeting was twofold. “First to give Chair Fingal an overview of the assets she has at her disposal.

Second to focus specifically on the anomaly currently approaching Jovian orbit—”

“And at that point,” Bella put in, “I will invite Professor Carel to make his contribution.”

Paxton rumbled a grudging assent.

They began to speak of the defense of the solar system.

13: Fortress Sol

Paxton’s presentation was a carnival of bullet-points, graphs, and images, some of them three-dimensional and animated; the holograms hovered over the middle of the table like ads for fantastic toys. But the subject matter was grim.

“Since sunstorm day, we have devoted considerable assets on Earth and beyond to watching the skies… ”

Bella got the impression that Earth was plastered with electronic eyes, peering at the sky in all wavelengths. This included NASA assets like the venerable Deep Space Network chain of tracking arrays in Spain, Australia, and the Mojave, a near-Earth asteroid watching facility in New Mexico called LINEAR, and other Spaceguard facilities.