Starfire (49 page)

"Yeah. 'Bout time. But I'm not goin' near no mirror so you can sit there laughin' at me."

His ranking of concerns might be, as that final comment suggested, in some part posturing. But perhaps not all, since I felt a curious sympathy of outlook. My own worry lay not with the fate of the world and its varied billions. It centered on the personal safety and long-term future of my darlings. As the particle storm moved to its crescendo, they would retreat to the deep sanctuary below Otranto Castle.

And they would return, a day or a week later, to—what?

That was my question. Talk to me not of global escape from devastation and planetary blight. Rather, guarantee the survival of a small part of western Ireland, where my darlings and a few others could comfortably survive, and I would ask for nothing more.

It occurs to me that such an attitude may be prerequisite to the continuation of our species. Nature admits no welfare programs, and although we may die in multitudes we must struggle for survival one by one.

And so, as word spread of a curious and possibly fatal convergence of the particle storm on the solar system, the news media eschewed discussion of universal death in favor of personal survival schemes.

Many plans featured that old standby, prayer. Its historical record of effectiveness apparently discouraged few people, although I, regrettably, am among the skeptics. All the churches were full. It is not clear to me exactly what prayers were being offered by their occupants. A temporary suspension, perhaps, of the laws of physics? The art galleries and theaters also reported record crowds. If religion is an opiate, art is an anodyne.

Some other notions seemed equally unlikely to succeed. An American group, the Trust In Government coalition, displayed matching ignorance of biology and geology by intensifying their frenzied efforts on Project Way Down, the continuation of a wide-bore mine deep in the Anadarko Basin. The natural geothermal temperature gradient would make human life impossible at their projected twenty-mile end depth, without help from Alpha C, but—sublimely indifferent to both logic and cost—the TIG coalition dug and dug. They would have done well to remember the tragical history of Dr. Faustus:
"Then will I headlong run into the Earth. Earth gape. Oh, no, it will not harbor me."

More radical was the scheme, conceived in haste and executed at panic speed, of a European group, Earth Will Provide (
La Terre Suffira
). Its three hundred members, all among the world's richest individuals, had rightly concluded that if Earth's surface provided some protection, then the whole of Earth should offer more.

They had ascended to high orbit three days ago. There they would hover on their mirror-matter engines at Alpha Centauri's antipodean point, two thousand kilometers above the surface, while Earth turned below them and the particle storm attained its maximum. The vast bulk of the planet would shield them until the storm blew past. When all was over they would return.

It was tempting to ask, return to what?

A logical mind might offer two alternatives. Either they would find a world that had survived the particle storm, in which case their flight was unnecessary; or they would return to a dying planet, where the old definition of wealth had lost its meaning and their own quietus, unhindered by privilege, could not be long delayed.

But who am I to mock the dreams and prayers of others? Their hope, like mine, is that the prevailing scientific view lacks validity. God knows, humans have been wrong often enough. We may be wrong again.

Meanwhile, business continues, though it is difficult to justify the customary added phrase "as usual." Seth and I prepare ourselves, mentally and physically, for a meeting with a murderer. That encounter, unlike Earth's rendezvous with the particle storm, will be decided by human actions alone.

32

The geometry had been set in place six days ago and fine-tuned every hour. The hollow tip of the conical shield pointed its arrow toward Alpha Centauri and maintained a fixed distance of half a light-second from Earth. Cusp Station hovered thirty thousand kilometers behind, precisely on the axis of the cone. Sky City in turn was locked in position one kilometer behind Cusp Station, whose newly installed field generators bathed the shield in a low-intensity glow mediated and diffused by the shield's fine network of superconducting fibers.

Each particle bundle impinging on the shield would generate a burst of radiation, whose direction and signal frequency shift contained enough information for a precise trajectory to be computed. But to be useful, the calculation—like every other action—had to be made
fast.
Within seconds of hitting the shield, a free-flying particle bundle would reach Earth. Before then the detection data must be received on Sky City, necessary calculations completed, a loop field generated and sent on an interception trajectory, and the particle bundle caught and diverted safely away.

It was all possible—just. Maddy had watched the first tests, when the flux of particle bundles was still limited to a few thousand arrivals per second. Before the human eye could detect anything at all, each bundle was intercepted, netted, and curved away to miss Earth by thousands of kilometers. After a few hundred successful encounters, the conversation in the engineering control center became casual and upbeat. What no one mentioned—what Maddy wondered if most people knew—was the projected change in the situation as the storm approached its height. If the convergence of the beam was as strong as expected and the maximum arrival rate of particle bundles came even close to the projected value, the field generators would be unable to produce enough loop fields to handle the entire flood. At that point some of the bundles would begin to get through. Cusp Station and Sky City would have to be preferentially protected, since if their systems failed all defenses would be lost. But the consequence of that would be weaker protection at the edges of the shield, and thus of the parts of Earth that lay behind them.

One thing was certain: The team on Sky City would know the worst before very long. The flux counters had begun their final climb. Storm maximum would occur in less than three hours, and long before that the defense system would be tested to the limit.

Maddy stared around the room, with its score of working engineers and data analysts. She wondered again: How far had the word spread of Wilmer Oldfield and Star Vjansander's worst-case prediction? Did they all know?

She herself had told no one—but news, especially bad news, leaked out no matter how you tried to contain it. Yet she had seen no small groups closely-knit in conversation, and she had overheard not a dropped word.

On the other hand, she
knew
that John had heard Wilmer's worst-case assessment—she had been with him at the time. And he now showed no hint of interest in anything beyond the task at hand. In fact, she was beginning to wonder if he had forgotten to make a promised announcement on a quite different subject. In the circumstances, that would be more than reasonable. A dozen murders must seem like nothing in the face of billions of deaths.

But John had not forgotten. When he finally spoke he was terse, almost casual. He addressed the room at large, his gaze intent on the displays. "We're at zero minus two hours forty-one minutes, and are approaching one-tenth flux maximum. By the way, the particle storm seems to have produced an unexpected result. Because of it, they've found Doris Wu's body."

He seemed ready to leave it at that, leaning over the control panel and monitoring the final countdown, but Will Davis whistled loud through his front teeth and said, "You can't stop there, boyo. Where, and how?"

"One of the last up-leg shuttles to Sky City. A million-to-one chance. If we hadn't moved to our present position, the body might never have been found. The shuttle passed within forty meters, and a passenger made visual contact. They took her body on board and brought it here. It's sitting in Cargo Bay Fourteen."

Maddy was standing inconspicuously at the back. She said under her breath,
Go on, go on.
But John seemed intent on the controls.

"Did they find anything that might tell who killed her?" Torrance Harbish asked. Engineers from all around the center, their tasks for the moment ignored, looked up or moved closer.

"I don't know," John said. "I doubt it. Until this is all over, the security staff must have other things on their mind." He looked up. "And so do we. Lauren, do you have those capture rates? Wilmer Oldfield is panting for them."

"Right here. Shall I transmit?"

"Waste of time. Wilmer won't look at the feed. Do you have time to take it to him?"

"I'll find time. Where is he?"

"At the back of the water buffer. He and Star want to compare the bundles they get now with what they caught during the blip storm."

"I hope the results they're getting make more sense than mine do," Amanda Corrigan said. She had three separate displays running in front of her. "We have a set of quickie Sniffers a few light-days out, and they're showing a stronger storm convergence toward Sol than we've ever seen. But the counts I'm making locally fail to confirm. Both sets of data can't be right. Take a look. Where are the bundles?"

The first display was a simple two-axis graph. The horizontal axis showed distance from Sol in astronomical units. The vertical axis was estimated beam area. As the storm approached the solar system, the area decreased dramatically. The Alpha C storm was homing in on the solar system.

The second display was a table of total beam area versus predicted particle count per second at Sky City. The third display was another graph, with time as the horizontal axis and particle count as vertical axis. Both predicted and observed counts were shown. The predicted count rose rapidly at the time of maximum flux, and fell away as fast beyond it; the observed count went only up to the present time, but at the moment it was close to constant over time and looked nothing like the predicted peak.

John Hyslop gave the curves and tables in front of Amanda a cursory glance. "I've no time to look at them now. Get them to Wilmer and Star, let them figure it out. Matching predictions and observations isn't our business. Our job is to deal with whatever arrives."

He caught Maddy's eye. She wondered if he could possibly be as calm as he looked. She surveyed the whole information center, with people constantly hurrying in and out, and found everyone busy and preoccupied. But she saw no sign of nervousness. The only nervous one was Maddy herself—maybe because she had too little to do.

She waited a few more moments, then quietly slipped out of the room. She was no help here, an engineering nonentity surrounded by the pick of the solar system's engineers. But somewhere on Sky City there must be someone who needed assistance. If it was not true now, it would be when the storm arrived.

33

When the storm hit Earth, regardless of intensity and duration, one thing seemed sure: The sky would seethe with electromagnetic energy, and during the final few minutes all forms of radio communication might be lost.

Temporarily
lost? Celine had posed that question to Benedict Mertok. He shrugged and gave a less-than-useful reply: "Madam President, we need to define temporary. Nothing lasts forever."

But some things seemed to. Pressure on a President to hide away from every form of danger was one of them. Celine had refused all suggestions that she retreat to a deep underground refuge.

"Didn't you tell me that there is no chance of direct bundle impact this far north?" It was early morning on what she secretly thought of as doomsday, and she was sitting in her specially designed padded chair in the Oval Office.

Ben Mertok frowned. "Well, yes, I did . . ."

"Then that's good enough for me. I'll wait out the particle storm right here. You can go now."

"I think maybe I should—"

"I said you can go now, Ben. I need privacy."

It was wrong to take even a mild pleasure in Mertok's discomfort. But at times like this pleasures were few and far between, and you took them wherever you found them. As soon as she was alone Celine tilted her chair back and stared up at the ceiling. She had displays all around her, hooked up through ground-based fiber-optic feeds to every country on the planet, but the one link she wanted might be blacked out. The front line of battle was nowhere on Earth; it was up on Sky City and Cusp Station. Already the view of the shield seemed grainy, and the speckling of random points of light that she saw might be transmission noise, nothing to do with the detection of particle bundles. On the other hand, there was a good chance it was all her imagination, and the image of the shield looked exactly as usual.

"The Honorable Nicholas Lopez is on line eight," said the calm voice of the autocom. Celine sighed and returned her chair to its upright position.

"Nick? Where are you?"

"At the airfield in New Rio. Waiting for takeoff."

Celine glanced at the clock. Two and a quarter hours to flux maximum. "You're cutting it fine."

"Not from choice. The space defense can't stop a hundred percent of the bundles, and a few are already getting through. At our longitude they are coming in close to horizontal, but they're still coming in. Nothing like the way they will be in another couple of hours, but we already lost a suborbital to an unlucky hit on the flight control box. This is the last flight out, then everybody who's left here heads for the deep shelters."

"I thought that was your plan."

"I thought so, too." The visual feed finally kicked in, and Nick's face appeared on the display. He was smiling ruefully and smoothing his gray hair back with one hand. "The trouble is, the shelters have only energy-sensor contact with the surface. When it comes right down to it, I'm too curious to know what's going on."

"You remember what curiosity killed."

"I know. I comfort myself with the thought that only the good die young. But I expected you'd be in the underground Washington refuge. What's your excuse?"

"I'm here because it's second-best. What I really wish is that I were
up there
." Celine pointed her thumb toward the ceiling.