Sunstorm (30 page)

Next: “Surgeon?”

They had tried to prepare for the hard rain. All the shield’s workers and command crew had been dosed up with medications designed to counter radiation toxicity, such as free radicals to shield molecular lesions in DNA, and chemoprevention agents that might hinder the deadly progression from mutation to cancer. For radiation casualties they had stocks of frozen bone marrow and agents—such as interleukins—to stimulate the production of blood cells. Trauma units were ready to treat injuries caused by crush, pressure, heat, burns—all likely consequences of the physical dangers of working out on the shield. The medical team on the shield was necessarily small, but it was supported by diagnostic and treatment algorithms coded into Athena, and remotely by teams of experts on Earth and the Moon, though nobody was sure how long the links to home might stand up.

For now the doctors and their robotic assistants were as ready as they could be, ready for the casualties they all knew would come; there was nothing more to be done. It would have to do.

Bud moved on. “Weather, Flight.”

Mikhail Martynov’s gloomy voice reached Bud after the usual few seconds’ delay. “Here I am, Colonel.” Bud could see Mikhail’s somber face, with Eugene Mangles in the background, in their lab at Clavius Base. “Weather” meant solar weather; Mikhail was the top of a pyramid of scientists on Earth, Moon, and shield, all monitoring the sun’s behavior as it unfolded. Mikhail said, “Right now the sun is behaving as we predicted it would. For better or worse.”

Eugene Mangles murmured something to him.

Bud snapped, “What was that?”

“Eugene reminds me that the X-ray flux is a little higher than we predicted. Still within the error bars, but the trend is upward. Of course we have to expect some deviance; from the point of view of the energy output of the event, the X-ray spectrum is a sidebar, and we are looking at discrepancies among second-order predictions . . .”

On he talked. Bud tried to control his patience. Martynov, with his ignoring of call-sign protocol and his typical scientist’s tendency to make a lecture rather than to deliver a report, might be a liability later, when the pressure mounted. “Okay, Mikhail. Let me know if—”

But his words cut across a new time-lagged message from Mikhail. “I thought you might . . .” Mikhail hesitated as Bud’s truncated speech reached him. “You might like to see what is going on.”

“Where?”

“On the sun.”

His glum face was replaced by a false-color image compiled from an array of satellites and the shield’s own monitors. It was the sun—but not a sun any human would have recognized even a few hours ago. Its light was no longer yellowish but a ferocious blue-white, and huge glowing clouds drifted across its surface. From the edges of the disk streamers of flame erupted into space, dragged into arches and loops by the sun’s tangled magnetic field. And at the very center of the sun’s face there was a patch of searing light. Foreshortened, it was the most monstrous outpouring of all, and it was aimed directly at the Earth.

“Dear God.”

Bud’s head snapped around. “Who said that?”

“Sorry, Bud—umm, Flight. Flight, this is Comms.” An able young woman called Bella Fingal, whom Bud had placed in overall control of all aspects of communications. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “But—
look at the Earth.
”

All their faces turned to the big softscreen.

At L1 the shield was always positioned over the subsolar point, the place on Earth where the sun was directly overhead. Right now that point was over the western Pacific. And over the water, clouds were gathering in a rough spiral: a massive storm system was brewing. Soon that focus would track westward, passing over lands crowded with people.

“So it’s begun,” Rose Delea murmured.

“It would be a hell of a lot worse if not for us,” Bud snapped. “Just remember that. And
keep your shape.
”

“We’ll get through this together, Bud.”

It was Athena’s voice, spoken softly into his ear. Bud glanced around, unsure if anybody else had been meant to hear.

To hell with it. “Okay,” he said. “Who’s next on the loop?”

0325 (London Time)

On Mars, Helena patiently drove her
Beagle,
waiting for the show to begin. In the space program you got used to waiting.

In the last moment she allowed herself a flicker of hope that the analysts might, after all, have got this wrong, that the whole thing might be some gruesome false alarm. But then, right on cue, the sun blossomed.

The rover’s windows instantly blackened, trying to protect her eyes, and the vehicle rolled to a halt. She spoke softly to the rover’s smart systems. As the windshield cleared she saw a dimmed sun, distorted by a pillar of light pushed out of the sun’s edge, blue-white, like a monstrous tree of fire rooted in its surface.

The light that reached her directly from the sun arrived before light reflected from the inner planets. But now each of the planets lit up like a Christmas light, one by one in a neat sequence: Mercury, Venus—and then Earth, toward which that brutal pillar of fire was unambiguously directed. It was real, then.

And beside Earth a new light in the sky sparked. It was the shield, bright as a star in the sunstorm light, a human-made object visible from the surface of Mars.

She had work to do, and not long to complete it. She overrode the
Beagle
’s safety blocks and drove on.

0431 (London Time)

In London sunrise was due a little before five
A.M
. Half an hour before that, Siobhan McGorran took a ride up the Euro-needle’s elevator shaft.

The shaft rose from the roof of the Needle all the way up through the air to the curving ceiling of the Dome itself. In extremis, this was an escape route, up through the roof of the Dome—though the details of what help would be available beyond that point had always been a bit sketchy. It was one of the few concessions the Prime Minister had made to protect his people.

The shaft was punctured by unglazed windows, and as Siobhan rose up, inner London opened out beneath her.

Street lighting had been cut back to a minimum, and whole areas of the capital lay in darkness. The river was a dark stripe that cut through the city, marked only by a few drifting sparks that could be police or Army patrols. But light blazed from various all-night parties, religious gatherings, and other events. There was plenty of traffic around too, she saw by the streams of headlights washing through the murky dark, despite the Mayor’s admonitions to stay home tonight.

Now the roof closed over her. She caught a last glimpse of girders and struts, maintenance robots hauling themselves about like squat spiders, and a few London pigeons, peacefully roosting under this tremendous ceiling.

The elevator rattled to a halt, and a door slid open.

She stepped out onto a platform. It was just a slab of concrete fixed to the curving outer shell of the Dome—open to the air, and a chill April-small-hours breeze cut through her. But it was quite safe, surrounded by a fine-mesh fence twice as high as she was. Doors out of the cage led to scary-looking ladders down which, she supposed, you could clamber to the ground if all else failed.

Two beefy soldiers stood on guard. They checked her ident chip with handheld scanners. She wondered how often these patient doorkeepers were relieved—and how long they would stay at their post when the worst of the storm hit.

She stepped away from the soldiers and looked up.

The predawn sky was complicated. Broken clouds streamed from east to west. And to the east, a structured crimson glow spread behind the clouds, sheets and curtains rippling languidly. It was obviously three-dimensional, a vast superstructure of light that towered above the night-side Earth. It was an aurora, of course. The high-energy photons from the angry sun were cracking open atoms in the upper atmosphere and sending electrons spiraling around Earth’s magnetic field lines. The aurora was one consequence, and the least harmful.

She stepped to the platform’s edge and looked down. The roof of the Dome was as smooth and reflective as polished chrome, and the aurora light returned complex, shimmering reflections from it. Though the bulk of the Tin Lid obscured her view, she could see the landscape of Greater London sprawled around the foot of the Dome. Whole swaths of the inner suburbs were plunged into darkness, broken by islands of light that might have been hospitals, or military or police posts. But elsewhere, just as inside the Dome, she saw splashes of light in areas where people were still defiantly ripping up the night, and there was a distant pop of gunfire. It was anything but a normal night—but it was hard to believe, gazing down at the familiar, still more or less unblemished landscape, that the other side of the world was already being torched.

One of the soldiers touched her shoulder. “Ma’am, it will be dawn soon. It might be better to get below.” His accent was a soft Scottish. He was very young, she saw, no more than twenty-one, twenty-two.

She smiled. “All right. Thank you. And take care of yourself.”

“I will. Good night, ma’am.”

She turned and made for the elevator. The aurora was actually bright enough to cast a diffuse shadow on the concrete platform before her.

0451 (London Time)

In Bisesa’s flat, another alarm beeped softly. She glanced at its face by the blue light of the useless softwall.

“Nearly five,” she said to Myra. “Time for dawn. I think—”

The beeping stopped abruptly, and the watch face turned black. The wall’s blue glow surged, flickered, died. Now the only light in the room was the dim flickering of the candle on the floor.

Myra’s face was huge in the sudden gloom. “Mum, listen.”

“What?—oh.” Bisesa heard a weary clatter that must be an air-conditioning fan shutting down.

“Do you think the power has gone off?”

“Maybe.” Myra was going to speak again, but Bisesa held up her finger for hush. For a few seconds they both just listened.

Bisesa whispered, “Hear that? Outside the flat. No traffic noise—as if every car stopped at once. No sirens either.”

It was as if somebody had waved a wand and simply turned off London’s electricity—not just the juice that came from the big central power stations, but the independent generators in the hospitals and police stations, and car batteries, and everything else, right down to the cell batteries in the watch on her wrist.

But there was noise, she realized: human voices calling, a scream, a tinkle of glass—and a
crump
that must be an explosion. She stood and made for the window. “I think—”

Electricity crackled. Then the softwall blew in.

Myra screamed as shards of glass rained over her. Bits of electronics, sparking, showered over the carpet, which began to smolder. Bisesa ran to her daughter. “Myra!”

41: The Palace in the Sky

0704 (London Time)

Siobhan had spent the two hours since dawn in the big operations center that had been set up on a middle floor of the Euro-needle. The walls were plastered with giant softscreens, and people worked at rows of desks, their own flickering screens in front of them. Here the Prime Minister of Eurasia tried to keep tabs on what was going on across his vast domains, and around the rest of the planet. There was an air of frantic energy, almost of panic.

Right now the big problem was not the sunstorm’s heat but its electrical energy. It was the EMP, of course: the electromagnetic pulse.

The shield’s design had been optimized to handle the worst threat facing Earth, the storm’s big peak of energy in the visible spectrum. But along with that visible light had come flooding at lightspeed a dose of high-frequency radiation, gamma rays and X-rays, against which the shield could offer no protection. The invisible crud from space was hazardous for an unprotected astronaut; Siobhan knew that Bud and his shield crews were taking shelter where they could. Earth’s atmosphere was opaque to the radiation, and would save the planet’s population from the direct effects. But it was secondary consequences that were causing the problems.

The radiation itself might not reach the ground, but the energy carried by all those vicious little photons had to be dumped somewhere. Each photon smashed into an atom of the Earth’s high atmosphere, knocking free an electron. The electrons, electrically charged, were trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, soaking up more and more energy from the radiation falling from space, and they moved ever faster—and at last gave up their energy as pulses of electromagnetic radiation. So, as the Earth relentlessly turned into the sunstorm’s blast, a thin, high cloud of tortured electrons migrated across the planet, raining energy down onto the land and sea.

The secondary radiation would pass through human flesh as if it weren’t there. But it induced surges of current in long conductors like power lines, or even long aerials. Appliances suffered surges of power that could be enough to destroy them or even make them explode: power failed in every building across London, every stove or electric heater became a potential bomb. It was like June 9, 2037 all over again, even if the root physical cause was subtly different.

The authorities had had years’ warning of this. They had even dug out a set of dusty old military studies. The EMP effect had been discovered by accident, when an atmospheric bomb test had unintentionally knocked over the telephone system in Honolulu, more than a thousand kilometers away. Once it had been seriously suggested that by detonating a massive enough nuclear bomb high above the atmosphere over a likely battlefield, the enemy’s electronics could be fried even before the fighting started. So there were decades of experience of military-hardening equipment to withstand this sort of jolt.

In London, government gear had, where possible, been toughened to military specifications, and had been augmented by backups: optical cables, for instance, were supposedly unaffected. Those Green Goddess fire engines were back in action tonight, and London’s police were out patrolling in very quaint-looking vehicles, some of which had been brought out of retirement in museums. It was easy to fuse modern integrated circuits, full of tiny gaps ready to be breached by sparks, but older, more robust gear, such as antique cars built before about 1980, could handle the worst of it. The final precaution in London had been the “blackout order.” If people just switched their equipment off, there was a better chance it might survive.