Sunstorm (34 page)

Myra pointed to the west. “Mum. Look. There’s the sun.”

Bisesa turned. But it was not the sun she saw, of course, but the shield, still holding its place after all these hours, still protecting the Earth. It was a dish-shaped rainbow, actually brighter away from the center, blue-violet at the bull’s-eye heart and an angry burnt orange at the rim. Beyond the edge of the shield itself a bright corona flared, laced with threads and sparks, prominences easily visible to the naked eye.

But that terrible sun was sinking toward the western horizon, and the smoke of England’s fires rose up to obscure it.

“Nearly sunset,” somebody said. “Another twenty minutes and that’s the last we’ll see of that bastard.”

There was motion at the edge of Bisesa’s vision. She saw small shapes squirming past the legs of the people. There were dogs, foxes, cats, even what looked like rats, swarming silently out of the failing Dome and dispersing into the scorched streets beyond.

A warm, salty rain began to fall, heavy enough to sting Bisesa’s bare head. She wrapped her arm around Myra. “Come on. We need to find shelter.”

They hurried forward, with a thousand others, through the ruins of London.

45: Martian Spring

2105 (London Time)

Helena Umfraville stumbled across an ocher plain.

She came to a slight rise. She climbed it, but it led to nothing but more broken, rock-littered ground. Resentfully she made her way forward.

She was dog-tired, and her EVA suit had never felt so heavy. She had no real idea how long she had been walking—hours, anyhow. And yet she walked on. There was nothing else to do.

Now she found herself on the lip of a canyon. She stopped, breathing hard. It was a complex of ravines and cliffs, their slopes pocked with small craters. In the thin air of the Martian afternoon the spectacle was clear all the way to the horizon. That diminished its scale, of course; there was none of the mist-softening that gave Earth’s Grand Canyon its sense of three-dimensional immensity. She might as well have been looking at a beautiful painting, done in Mars’s constrained palette of ocher and red and burnt orange.

It wasn’t interesting. Mars was full of canyons. In fact Helena felt pissed at the canyon. It was quite unreasonable of her. After all, none of it was
its
fault. She sucked at the last of her suit’s water supply.

During the worst of the storm she had hidden in the
Beagle,
huddling under rock overhangs. It was the only shelter she had. The rover’s hull had screened her, and her suit had labored to keep her cool. So she had survived—although for all she knew she had shipped a radiation dose enough to kill her.

Which of course was now entirely academic.

And, driving on, she had tracked down the source of the signal she had come out to find.

In the end it had been just a beacon, a little unmanned three-legged lander no taller than she was, bleeping forlornly. Perhaps it had been intended to mark a landing site for a ship that had never followed. But there was no mystery about who had sent it: the markings on its equipment covers were undoubtedly Chinese.

She had made the trip for nothing. And the cost turned out to be unexpectedly high. When she had walked back to her faithful
Beagle
she found it had packed up, just like that. Its supposedly milspec electronics had presumably succumbed to the onslaught from the sun, leaving its essential systems, including life support, as dead as Mars.

So that was that. Without the rover, she couldn’t get back to
Aurora.
Her suit reserves would last only a few more hours, which wouldn’t be long enough to get another rover out to her. She was living, breathing, as healthy as she had been a sol before. But she was doomed by the cruel equations of survival on Mars.

Of course she wouldn’t be the solar system’s only casualty today.

At least she was special, she told herself. Though she hadn’t been the first person to set foot on Mars, she would become the first human being to die here. Perhaps that was a memorial worth having.

And she would do her duty to the last. The space agencies had always had procedures for such eventualities. If she had died in space—as had been discussed by NASA planners decades ago when the International Space Station had first been occupied—her body would have been zipped into a bag and tied to a truss until it could be returned to Earth. Here on Mars, her first duty was to the planet and its putative biosphere; she mustn’t contaminate it with her own decaying corpse. All she had to do was stand here, in fact. When her suit’s heaters failed she would quickly freeze solid, thus sealing in any rogue bugs she had brought from Earth, until her body could be retrieved. Probably the suit wouldn’t even topple over. She would be a statue, she thought, a monument to herself, and her own dumb luck.

She couldn’t bear the thought of dying beside her poor, failed rover, though. So she had decided to walk on into the Martian wilderness, just so she could see a bit more of the planet that was killing her.

Even then her luck was all bad. She had trudged across a dull plain, to this dull canyon. Here she was in the midst of the greatest catastrophe the solar system had endured since its formation, and everybody else had a better view than she had.

Something stirred at her feet. On the ground little pits were forming—craters, she thought, but none wider than her thumbnail. Could she be caught in some peculiar micrometeorite shower? But now she heard a pattering on her helmet.

She looked up. She could see the drops falling out of the sky, big fat low-gravity drops drifting slowly down all around her. When they hit, they smeared the patina of dust on her faceplate.

It was rain, the first rain on Mars in a billion years.

The sun breathed fire into the faces of all its circling children.

On Mercury the sun-side face had melted, craters as old as the planet dissolving into magma palimpsests. Venus had been stripped of much of its crushing atmosphere—the fate that might have become of Earth, if not for the shield. The ice moons of Jupiter were melted to depths of kilometers. In a strange and exquisite tragedy, the rings of Saturn, fragile bands of ice, had evaporated.

And on Mars volcanoes dormant for a hundred million years had begun to stir. The polar ice caps, thin smears of carbon dioxide and water ice, had quickly sublimed. And now rain was falling. Helena walked forward a few more steps, and watched the Martian rain falling deep into the shadows of the canyon.

One of her colleagues, excitedly, began to report on his own discoveries. “I found a ship! And what a ship; it looks like the carcass of a beached whale. And it’s covered in Mandarin lettering. But it has a hull rip the size of Mariner Valley. It came down hard . . .”

Helena had listened to her comrades’ communications all this long sol. She had reported in at routine intervals, but she had decided against telling them what had become of her—not just yet, anyhow. Now she stood and listened to the voice of a colleague she would never see again.

“Wait a minute. I’m climbing inside the ship, taking care to avoid
all
sharp edges . . . Oh. Oh, dear God.”

There had been more than a hundred people on the ship. They were all young men and women—all breeding age, including the pilots. Their cargo had included inflatable shelters, mechanical diggers, hydroponic seed beds. The intention was clear. This was what the Chinese had been planning for the last five years: this was what had used up all their heavy-lift capacity, instead of contributing to the shield. And this was how the Chinese had planned to ensure that something of their culture would survive the sunstorm.

“But the Chinese invasion of Mars failed . . . They came so close. I wonder what kind of neighbors they would have been?”

Helena suspected everybody would have got along. From here, China was very far away, just as far as Eurasia and America. Here, you were just a human—or rather, a Martian.

She looked up at the sun. Close to setting, it was smeared out in a ragged ellipse by air laden with dust and unaccustomed rain clouds. She knew the predicted schedule; the sunstorm should be abating by now—and yet something about that setting sun troubled her, as if there was still a nasty surprise to come.

The dust at her feet stirred. She looked down.

Amid the pattering raindrops, something was pushing out of the soil. No bigger than her thumb, it was like a leather-skinned cactus. It had translucent sections, windows to catch the sunlight, she thought, without losing a precious drop of moisture. And it was green: the first native green she had seen on Mars.

Her heart hammered.

The
Aurora
crew, during their long exile, had searched in vain for life on Mars. They had even risked a hazardous journey to the South Pole, where they had sought out the oldest, coldest, undisturbed permafrost on all of Mars, hoping to find Martian microorganisms trapped and preserved. Even there they’d found zilch. That epochal discovery would surely have made their years away from home worthwhile; it had been a crashing disappointment to find nothing.

And now here it was, just bubbling up out of the ground before her.

She felt a painful pull at her chest. She didn’t need to check her monitors to know her suit was failing. To hell with her suit; she was going to report her discovery. Hastily she turned on her helmet camera, and bent over the little plant. “
Aurora,
Helena. You won’t believe this . . .”

Its roots were buried deep in the cold rock of Mars. It didn’t need oxygen, but fueled its glacial metabolism with hydrogen released by the slow reaction of the volcanic rocks with traces of water ice. Thus it had survived a billion years. Like a spore waiting under a desert on Earth for the brief rains of spring, this patient little plant had waited out an eon for the Martian rains to return, so it could live again.

46: Aftershock

A chain of events stretching back millennia was almost complete. The sunstorm had been wasteful of energy, of course—but not nearly so wasteful as humankind might one day have become, if allowed to infect the stars.

The sunstorm was ending. Though the sun’s relatively orderly cycles of activity would be disturbed for decades to come, the great release of energy had been cathartic, and the destabilization of the core was resolved. All this was just as Eugene Mangles’s remarkably successful mathematical models of the sun’s behavior had predicted.

But those models had not been, could never be, perfect. And before this long day was done, the sun had one more surprise for its weary children.

The sun’s tremendously strong magnetic field shapes the star’s atmosphere, in a way that has no analogies on Earth. The corona, the outer atmosphere, is full of long sheets of gas, like the petals of a flower, that can extend many radii from the sun. The elegant curves of these “streamers” are sculpted by the magnetic fields that control them. The streamers are bright—it is these plasma sheets that are visible around the blocked-out sun during a solar eclipse—but they are so hot, pumped full of energy by the magnetic field, that their spectral peak is not in visible light but in X-rays.

All this in normal times.

As the sunstorm subsided, one such streamer formed over the active region that had been the epicenter of the storm. In keeping with the giant instability that had spawned it, the streamer was an immense structure, its base spreading over thousands of kilometers, and extending so far out in space that its feathery outer edge reached the orbit of Mercury.

At the base of the streamer, flux tubes rooted in the sun’s deep interior arched to enclose a cavity. Inside the cavity, contained by the magnetic field’s arches, were trapped billions of tonnes of ferociously hot plasma: it was a cathedral of magnetism and plasma. And as the storm died, this cathedral began to collapse.

As the “roof” gave way, immense rivers of magnetic energy flowed into the trapped plasma mass. The mass was raised up from the sun’s surface, slowly at first. But then as the magnetic field unwound the plasma was hurled away ever more rapidly, as a stone is hurled from a catapult. The ejected cloud, a tangle of plasma and magnetic field lines, was very rarefied, less dense than most “pure” vacuums manufactured on Earth. But it was not its density but its energy that counted. Some of its particles had been accelerated almost to the speed of light. Energetically it was a hammer blow.

And, just as had been planned by cool minds millennia ago and sixteen light-years away, it was aimed squarely at the suffering Earth.

47: Bad News

When Mikhail came online with the news, for a moment Bud couldn’t bear it. He escaped the control room, hauled himself to his cabin, and shut the door.

On a battered softscreen spread out on his bunk, he scrolled slowly through the names of the lost. They were mostly maintenance engineers who had been out there on the shield in the thick of the storm—and volunteers, like Mario and Rose, who had gone out to take their places as they fell. Bud knew them all.

In the five years of its existence the community on the shield had evolved its own culture, which Bud had done his best to foster. There had been zero-gravity sports tournaments, and music and theater, and parties and dances, and big public celebrations at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Ramadan, Passover, and every other excuse they could come up with. There had been the usual human tangle too, of love affairs illicit and otherwise, marriages, divorces—and one murder, a crime summarily dealt with. Despite all precautions, two babies had been born, apparently with no ill effects from their gestation without gravity, hastily shipped to Earth with their parents.

But now fully a quarter of this community had died, another quarter lay seriously ill, and the rest had taken a battering, including Bud himself. They all had a hugely increased chance of contracting cancer in the future, or of having their irradiated systems fail in some other way. For what they had done today they had all paid with their life expectancy, or their very lives—and not one had demurred, even when called on to make that final sacrifice.