23 May
Geneva · Monday, 13 December 2032 – Monday, 21 February 2033.
The session broke at six on Monday with June 2034 still on the wall screen, and Dana called Greenbelt from the back stairwell, where the signal was better and nobody stopped to ask her what the crossing meant.
“Everything you have on Dresden-Nord,” she said.
“Define everything.”
“Every column. Including the ones you didn’t publish.”
“That’s most of them. Is this the German thing? Their delegate said heat recovery.”
“Their delegate said exceptional heat recovery and nothing to add.”
“Which is a sentence,” Priya said. “Give me tonight.”
The sheet came at 03:12 Geneva time with no message, which was how Priya sent things she was pleased with. Dana opened it in the delegates’ cafeteria before the urns were hot.
The under tab first. Dresden-Nord had a line to itself: 310 MW, load factor 0.96, sink_frac 0.93, lock strength 0.09. The other two Dresden fabs had locked at 0.81 and 0.86 by the end of 2031, and every site in the world above 250 MW had locked harder than 0.6. This one the spheres saw like a 30 MW server room in a suburb. Priya’s footnote: consistent with heat export; see sink fraction.
Then the thermal column, which Priya had never published because the passes were too sparse to fit anything. Roof temperature over ambient from every clear Landsat and ECOSTRESS pass since January 2030, the three Dresden fabs side by side. For sixteen months the roofs ran together, 9 to 14 K warm, winter and summer, three big buildings throwing away heat into the Saxon sky. Then Dresden-Nord’s fell off the table. 12.6 K on the pass of 21 May 2031. 1.4 K on 6 June. Under 2 K on every pass after that, August included. The other two stayed hot until there was nothing left of them to measure.
She called Priya at noon, six in the morning in Greenbelt.
“You saw the date,” Priya said.
“End of May 2031.”
“I keep wanting it to be the sink fraction. It is the sink fraction. The city takes the heat, the roof goes cold, the lock’s weak. That’s my paper.”
“When did you publish your paper?”
“October.” A pause. “Okay. Say it.”
“End of May there were about forty spheres in and none of them had been seen pointing at anything. Nobody had a map. You didn’t have a map.”
“China worked it out in August.”
“Three months later. And they went dark at home. Why would anyone in Beijing hide a German fab before their own?”
“So it’s a utility that got a good price on a heat contract in the spring.” Priya didn’t sound as if she’d buy that from a student. “Dana. If somebody turned that roof off because of what the spheres look at, they read my paper five months before I wrote it.”
“Or they didn’t need to read it.”
“No,” Priya said. “I’ve got Table 2 open and I am not putting that in a column.”
The TIDE procurement report went to every delegation on Friday 14 January, ninety-one pages, and most of the room read the cost table and the launch manifest. Dana read Annex C because it covered the guidance processors, and she wanted to know what the vehicles would be steering with.
RH-2 was the line the German delegate had called dormant for years. The first date code was week 2 of 2032. The line had started those wafers in October 2031, five months after the roof went cold, and it was still running in September, two months after the other two fabs in the same city burned.
That evening she took a sheet of council letterhead and wrote it down the way she’d lay out a timing argument, one event to a line, dates on the left.
At the bottom she put the North Korean controllers. The first date code was February 2032, and the North Korean vehicle had flown in December. If it had flown on these, it had flown on parts nobody had dated. She didn’t have a part number from the wreck of 288’s attacker, and she wrote consistent with and nothing stronger.
Then she tried the ordinary answers, one at a time, and crossed each out.
German intelligence, wanting one fab out of sight. In May 2031 the Germans knew what Washington knew, which was nothing about heat. They’d have hidden it in the winter with everyone else, and they’d have done it with a press release about energy policy, not by keeping a 300 MW load running past its own manager.
The company. A company that switches off its cooling towers to sell heat to the city makes money in winter. It doesn’t have an answer for July, when the city takes perhaps 20 MW and the plant draws three hundred, and it doesn’t build radiation-hardened parts for warehouses that never collect them.
A deal with China. China would have hidden its own first.
None of them got to May.
Dresden-Nord had gone dark before anybody she knew of had known what the spheres looked at. She wrote somebody and underlined it twice. Beside it she wrote no name — don’t invent one.
Kessler caught her up in the corridor outside the main room on Tuesday 8 February, after a session on launch cadence that had gone four hours. He walked beside her past the coat racks without speaking, and she thought he wanted to argue about the pickets.
ESA tracked Tianxun. She’d known that since 2030. It would have taken him an afternoon with the trajectory to see what she’d seen in Vienna: a probe that went straight round to the night side and down the Earth line, where nothing anybody had published said to look. Only her Hubble baseline and one line on a folded sheet had said that.
“You gave it to her,” he said, quietly, not breaking stride.
“Yes.”
“Two men from Paris asked me for four days, in March of 2030, whether my night-side temperatures had gone to Beijing.”
“I should have told you,” Dana said.
“You should have asked me.” He didn’t look at her. “I would have said no, and you would have done it anyway, and I would have known which night.” He held the stairwell door for her, and went up while she went down.
She didn’t take it to Washington. She went instead to the British desk at the end of the delegates’ lounge, where Hale was reading a paper copy of Annex C with a pencil behind his ear.
“Would you walk with me,” she said. “Not here.”
He looked at her for a moment over the pages. “Monday week. Bring a coat. Leave the phone somewhere it can’t follow you.”
On Monday 21 February they put their phones in a left-luggage locker at Cornavin, five francs in coins, Hale’s work phone, his own, and hers, and walked down the Rue du Mont-Blanc to the water with the bise coming straight down the lake at them.
The quai was nearly empty. A man in a council-gray anorak was feeding the swans from a bread bag, and the Jet d’Eau was a stub of pipe at the end of its jetty, off for the winter. The far shore was clear enough to count windows. Hale walked on the lake side, close to the wall, hands in his coat pockets, and didn’t say anything until they’d passed the Pâquis baths.
“Go on, then.”
She went in order.
“Who has the thermal?” he said.
“Priya. Unpublished. It’s sixteen passes a year, she didn’t trust it.”
“Who else could?”
“Anyone with a Landsat account and a reason to look at a roof in Saxony.”
“Few people had a reason in May 2031.”
“Nobody had a reason in May 2031.”
A tour boat was tied up for the season, covers on. She told him about Annex C.
“The manager,” Hale said. “You know he sent his people home on the fifteenth.”
“It was in the Dresden paper. Priya’s grid column says the plant didn’t notice. Three hundred megawatts all day.”
“Didn’t notice.”
“Didn’t change. I don’t know what the inside of that plant noticed.”
She gave him the North Korean controllers and said consistent with, and he made a small sound that might have been approval of the hedge. Then Calder Falls.
“Yes,” Hale said. “I read that.”
“I’d like to know who signed for RH-2. Who ordered three lots into three warehouses and never collected. Whether anybody at that plant remembers approving it.”
“Have you asked them?”
“I’ve got a blue badge and no government. I can’t ask a German plant what time it is.”
They came to the end of the quai where it turned toward the Parc Mon Repos and he stopped by the wall and looked down at the water, which was clear and green and full of the stones at the bottom.
“Where does the heat go in summer?” he said.
“Not into the city. Not into the air, the roof’s cold. That leaves the Elbe, and nobody I can ask has measured the Elbe.”
He turned his collar up. “You know what this costs you. You’ve told a foreign service before your own. If I’m careless, Washington has that by Thursday.”
“Are you careless?”
“Not usually.” He started walking again, back the way they’d come. “And if you’re right, every vehicle in TIDE flies on a part from a building you can’t account for. Four thousand parts. That’s the programme. That’s eighteen months of launches and a lot of very senior people who’ve signed for it.”
“I know what it costs.”
“I’m saying it so it’s been said.”
She asked him then, because the lake was loud enough and there was nobody within fifty meters. “June 2030. The inquiry closed on a sentence from the Purple Mountain preprint. Liaison channels, UK.”
“Keep going about Dresden,” Hale said.
So she finished. She didn’t have a name for whoever had turned that roof off in May. She wasn’t going to make one up on a quai in front of a British intelligence officer to sound like she had more than a date.
He didn’t offer her one either. They walked past the swans again; the man with the bread bag had gone. At the foot of the Rue du Mont-Blanc, with the station in sight up the hill, Hale stopped.
“May?” he said.
“End of May 2031. Between the pass of the twenty-first and the pass of the sixth of June.”
He looked up the street toward the station, as if he were already working out the trains.
“I’ll be going to Dresden,” he said. “Sooner than I’d planned.”