Team Blue’s sniper was at the power plant and realized that it was not deserted. With billions of dollars’ worth of technology on the Ames campus, unless there was a severe natural disaster or emergency, there was no way every staff member would leave.
There were two staffers in the power generator, a gas turbine unit with a couple of wind towers recently added. He had been fully prepared to use his two thermobaric explosive grenades, and if that didn’t work he was considering piloting the drone into the place to shut the power down.
He didn’t need to do either. What he did do was point his rifle at the two NASA contractors, who were only too willing to follow his orders to shut down all the power on the base. Within a second of seeing the streets and buildings go dark, he saw the emergency generators kick in, with muffled dim lights springing up here and there. Figuring the worst, he tied up the staffers and ran back toward the super-computing lab.
•
The emergency lighting lit the room at intervals.
Walker was still. He was listening. The sea of tiny blue lights of the servers were on but the sound of the air conditioning had disappeared. He moved two rows over, closer down the hall to where Monica and Paul and Jasper had been. He peered down the row and saw beyond the glass wall that the emergency lighting in the hall had kicked in, and that Jasper, Monica and Paul were there, and that Jasper was herding the other two at gunpoint toward the computer lab.
Walker crept down the alley between the servers, his footfalls still silent on the tiles. The room was already heating up, and he wondered if there was a thermostat that would override the system and shut the computers down once they had reached a peak temperature. But even if this were the case, it was no kind of fallback plan, not in the time frame that was now upon them. He had to get to Jasper and stop what was coming.
•
Jasper sat Paul in a chair at the terminal he’d been using and held the gun to his head.
“Enter your code, and start your RAT,” Jasper said. “Get into the DoE’s server and shut the grid down.”
“I can’t,” Paul said. He looked across to Monica, who had her arms crossed over her chest and was shaking her head.
“You can and you will and you have one minute,” Jasper said.
“Why?” Monica said. “Why are you doing this?”
Jasper pushed the pistol hard into the back of Paul’s head, so that he was stooped closer to the computer screen.
“Just do it.”
Monica said, “It’s not too late to change, Jasper . . .”
•
Walker stayed in the shadows, near the camp cots and the camera on the tripod, watching the scene. Jasper still had the gun to Paul’s head; there was no way to get in there and disarm him without Jasper painting the screen with Paul’s head. But Jasper needed Paul, for his end game, which meant that as long as Paul stalled, Walker had time.
Paul was typing commands.
Walker moved to the camera, flicked it on and pointed it at Jasper, all without making a sound. He zoomed in to capture the scene: the three of them; the gun to the head; the microphone picking up the conversation from ten feet away. Broadcasting the scene to the world.