“Noted.”
“It is Dinah, isn’t it, Doob?” Markus asked.
Doob nodded. “She’s talking to Sean Probst over an encrypted channel.”
Markus shook his head admiringly. “What a girl! My god, she is trouble.”
Doob and Sal were silent. During their silence, Markus thumbed out a one-word text message to Tekla.
“Sal,” Markus said, “I declare PSAPS.”
“I don’t think we are yet authorized to—”
“Who is going to stop us?”
Doob and Sal, again, were silent on the matter.
“Is Julia—I do not call her the president anymore—going to nuke us?” He was continuing to thumb out messages as he talked.
“She, or the Russians, or the Chinese, might have other ways of removing you from your position—”
“I have thought about this,” Markus said. “About the possibility that there are plants. Military guys with Tasers or whatever. Waiting for such an order. I have talked to Fyodor, to Sheng, to Zeke, trying to sound them out, to get a feel for it.”
“Markus,” Doob said, “with respect, I don’t think that this is what you ought to be focusing on right now.”
“Which is why I am delegating the constitutional side of it to Sal and the operational side of it to her.” Markus nodded toward the door, which had swung open without a knock. Tekla glided through and closed it behind her. “We don’t have to announce to the whole world that we are going to PSAPS. We have five hours in which to begin preparations, quietly. I will contact Moira, and tell her that we must begin preparations to disperse the genetic samples to the arklets. I will tell Ulrika that we must pull the trigger on the Surge.” By this, Markus meant a long-planned burst of launches that was supposed to happen in the few days’ grace period between the White Sky and the onset of the Hard Rain. “We can be working on these things quietly. Five hours from now, it will happen or it will not. If it does not, we go back to as we were and consider this a dress rehearsal.”
The door opened again, this time after a knock, and in came a young man named Steve Lake, preceded by his laptop and followed by his dreadlocks. For Steve, in his year and a half aboard Izzy, had not succumbed to the vacubuzzer’s siren song, but he had gotten tired of messing with his long hair and had allowed it to congeal into red ropes. Formerly employed by a consulting firm in northern Virginia that hired hackers to do secret work for intelligence agencies, he had been yanked and sent up to support Spencer Grindstaff, the networks and communications specialist who’d been one of Izzy’s original crew on Zero. Spencer was an NSA man through and through, recruited straight out of MIT to work on spooky crypto stuff. Steve seemed to be an altogether different sort of character. He looked a bit mystified just now.
“Steve,” Markus said. “It is time for us to have a conversation about power.”
Steve’s brow furrowed. “You mean, electrical power or—”
“The other kind.”
“Okay, and is this going to be, like, an abstract philosophical discussion or—”
“No, it is going to conclude with me telling you, under my PSAPS authority, to change all of the passwords and keys for Izzy’s control systems.”
“Wow!” Steve said. “Shouldn’t you be talking to Spencer then? Because he’s above me in the org chart.”
“I am familiar with the org chart,” Markus said. “Under PSAPS I have the authority to change it.”
“What is this PSAPS thing you keep talking about, Markus?”
“Sal will explain it later. For now, we may set it aside. Fundamentally we speak of your loyalty, your allegiance. I think that Spencer is extremely loyal to powers that be on the ground. I do not wish to put him in an impossible bind. He will later come with us, or he will not. You I believe to be a different kind of fellow. I ask you, in effect, to now become loyal to the Cloud Ark and the Cloud Ark alone. Not to Washington. Not to Houston. And to accept the authority of whoever is the boss of the Cloud Ark. Which for now is me.”
“Okay.”
“You’re supposed to think about it first, Steve. Not just say okay.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. But I have to tell you, there might be back doors. I can change all the codes I know about. The ones I don’t know about are a different matter.”
“Then we shall just have to be vigilant.”
White Sky