Carter greeted the news of her intent warily. “Won’t the hacker be able to track us here?”
“He can try, but I’m spoofing our location.”
With Fallon’s help, she was able to establish off-site administrator privileges, after which it was a simple matter to begin searching for the Trojan horse that had allowed the unknown hacker to hijack Fallon’s robots and turn them against him. But after employing every anti-virus measure and security subroutine in her arsenal, along with a few that Fallon suggested, she could find no evidence of the incursion.
“What does that mean?” Carter asked.
“It means that the hacker covered his tracks very well,” Fallon said
Dourado thought that was oversimplifying it. “It’s got to be someone already on the inside. Someone with full access to the network.”
Fallon shook his head. “No. That’s a very short list, and everyone on it is above suspicion.” He glanced at Tanaka and received a nod of confirmation. “We’re looking for someone who’s just that good. When we find him, I may have to offer him a job.”
“A job,” Carter murmured, as if thinking aloud. She fixed her gaze on Dourado. “Someone with the skill to do this could pretty much have anything he wanted, right? Why do this?”
Fallon waved a dismissive hand. “He’s just trying to make a statement.”
“You mean like, ‘I can destroy the world if I want to?’ That’s quite a statement.”
“Hackers are ego-driven creatures, prone to delusions of godhood.”
Dourado could not disagree with the sentiment. “If that’s all this is, then the incursion is probably over. He’s made his point. Maybe he’ll try to blackmail you at some point in the future. But if it’s something more, he might be waiting for us to make the next move.”
“Challenge accepted.” Fallon rubbed his hands together in a show of eagerness. He turned to Dourado. “What do you say? Ready to beat him at his own game? When he pops his head up again, we’ll be waiting with a sledgehammer.”
As excited as she was at the thought of testing her skills against the unknown enemy, Dourado also felt a twinge of apprehension. If the hacker was that good, the sledgehammer might come down on her head. Up to this point, all she had done was look in the windows, so to speak. Once she started giving remote commands to the network, the hacker would be alerted to her presence, and he wouldn’t be fooled by her spoofed location. “Maybe we should be ready to move,” she said. “Just in case.”
Carter laid a hand on her shoulder in what seemed to be a gesture of encouragement.
Dourado accessed the robotics interface, which allowed her to interact with all the autonomous machines at Tomorrowland, and began the two-step process of learning how the system was structured, and testing the robots to see if they would respond to her commands. As before, there seemed to be almost no evidence of the cyber-attack. The robots were functioning normally, doing their job without any active oversight. Maintenance robots had already begun repairs on the two construction-bots that had been damaged.
“The storm has passed,” Fallon declared. “I’ll still have to figure out how he cracked my security, but it’s safe to go back in.”
“Safe?” Lazarus, who had, after an understated reunion with Carter, remained in the background, now broke his silence. “It’s an ambush. He wants you to go back. You’ve got something he wants.”
Carter took a swatch of metallic fabric from her pocket. “You mean this?”
Lazarus nodded. “This wasn’t just a data breach. He has plans for that antenna array and the Black Knight. He needs you to get it working again. That’s what he’s waiting for. He’ll wait until you do that to make his move.”
“I’m not sure we have a choice in the matter,” Tanaka countered. “Like it or not, that antenna array is the only way to eliminate the threat of another solar event.”
“Not the only way,” Dourado countered. “There’s the sun chariot.”
Fallon raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Carter told me about your friends’ excursion to the Sinai. I’ll admit, it’s intriguing. It would go a long way toward explaining where the Black Knight came from. But we’re facing a time crunch here. And I believe in cleaning up my own messes. Technology caused this problem, and technology can fix it.”
Lazarus did not back down. “You aren’t in control of the technology. What’s to stop the hacker from turning it against you again? Self-driving cars, drones. There’s a lot of stuff out there with your hardware that could be turned into weapons. If we go in there, we might make the situation a lot worse.” He shook his head. “We have to let Pierce handle this.”
Tanaka gestured to the computer. “May I use that for a moment?”
Dourado regarded him warily. She didn’t like people using her hardware, messing with her settings, downloading God-only-knew what kind of crap off the Internet. “Why?”
“If I can access our surveillance satellite, I should be able to determine how much time we have before another event.”
“I guess that’s a good reason.” She got up from her chair to make room for him, but stayed close, looking over his shoulder as he entered a web address into the browser. A moment later, a three-dimensional map of the Earth appeared, encircled by an orbital tracking line that ran more or less from pole to pole.
Dourado had known about the Black Knight satellite long before she overheard Fallon telling Carter about it. She knew that the authorities had dismissed it as a modern legend, cobbled together from assorted radio anomalies, questionable eyewitness reports, and erroneous scientific interpretations, but she also knew that was exactly what they would say to keep the truth from getting out. Just like with HAARP.
Tanaka stared at the screen for only a few seconds before making a dire announcement. “It’s worse than I feared. The Black Knight will be fully deployed by 1800 UTC.”
Carter shot a glance at her watch. “Eight o’clock local. Forty minutes, give or take. But at least it’s after sunset.”
The physicist shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. The satellite is currently moving above the Western hemisphere. It’s daytime there.”
Dourado knew what that would mean. A solar pause above the Americas would trigger another series of tidal earthquakes along the geologically fragile Ring of Fire. California would be devastated. Tsunamis and abnormally high tides would inundate coastal areas, where most of the population was already concentrated. And if it continued longer than a few minutes… If it went on for hours or days…
“That’s it, then,” Fallon said with grim finality. “We can’t wait for your friends to pull a rabbit out of the hat. We need to go back to Tomorrowland. Right now, if not sooner.”
“Forty minutes,” Carter murmured. “Cintia, can you reach George?”
“I can try.” She tapped Tanaka on the shoulder, and when he had vacated the chair, she sat down in front of the computer again and initiated a call to Pierce’s satellite phone. It took several seconds for her to establish a connection, but instead of Pierce’s voice, the only sound to issue from the speakers was a burst of static, and then silence as the call dropped. Dourado turned to Carter. “I think it’s up to you.”
Carter turned to Lazarus. Dourado couldn’t read the big man’s impassive expression, but Carter seemed to draw strength from him. She faced Fallon. “You think you can shut it down?”