‘Delhi, this is Air India two-three-one. What the hell just happened there?’
‘Sorry, two-three-one, seems we have a major electronics issue down here too. We—’
The voice in Rahman’s earpiece was suddenly drowned out by static.
‘I didn’t catch that, Delhi, say again?’
Still nothing but static.
Joseph Rahman took a deep breath and checked his fuel gauge again. He no longer had enough juice to pull up and climb above the fog and wait for the issue to be resolved. He thought back to his early days of flying twenty years ago when an airport’s instrument landing system would have allowed him to conduct a textbook instrument approach – particularly in this thick fog, which would have been a definite CAT 3. But hardly any airports had ILS systems any more – a technology involving a localizer antenna and a glide slope system that would between them provide the aircraft’s computer with all the information it needed to land safely without the pilot’s intervention. Nowadays, everything was reliant on AI minds and GPS. And neither looked like being of any help to Flight AI-231 right now.
Landing a modern aircraft manually was something of a novelty that he would normally have relished, but this was going to require considerable skill and a bucket-load of luck. He was confident that before they’d lost contact they were on the precise bearing to come in on the south-east runway. He also knew that his air speed was right and the glide slope indicator was still showing that he was approaching the runway at the correct angle: three degrees to the horizontal. That meant trying to land was a far less dangerous option than circling through the fog in the hope that the problem got fixed. For all he knew, the other dozen or so aircraft in the vicinity were also flying blind.
‘OK, here we go,’ he said, more to himself than anyone else. ‘We just have to keep this bearing steady and descend smoothly, then hope to God we see those runway lights in time to tweak our approach.’
He flicked the comms button. ‘Can I have your attention again please, ladies and gentlemen? I am about to adjust your seats to cocoon mode as this might be a bumpy landing.’
He then quickly added, ‘Cabin crew, please confirm all passengers secure then take your seats. Five minutes to landing.’
He could tell his co-pilots were now more than a little scared. They’d been chatting away in Hindi throughout the flight but were now silent. They were both sitting bolt upright in their seats looking out straight ahead, waiting to catch a glimpse of the runway lights through the fog. Rahman kept his eye on the altimeter, which now showed that they had dropped to four hundred metres and slowed to two-fifty knots. If he’d had more time to consider the situation he was in, as a detached observer, he might have remembered something he had been taught all those years ago in training – information that he’d never needed to consider or act upon. So, it never occurred to him that an altimeter can give a false reading of altitude in thick fog because pockets of cold air screw with the pressure reading.
He shot his two co-pilots a quick glance and winked. ‘We’ve got this. Two minutes to landing, guys. Let’s just hope we see those lights s—’
Captain Joseph Rahman wasn’t used to being confronted with his own mortality so unexpectedly.
‘What the fuck?’
Flight AI-231 slammed down into the airport carpark two kilometres short of the runway at a little over three hundred kilometres per hour.
Captain Rahman had just enough time to wonder why the ground had come up to greet his plane so early and to feel the searing heat of the explosion before everything went black.
5
Friday, 1 February – Waiheke Island, New Zealand
The sun had been streaming in through the gaps in the blinds for hours and Marc had been trying, unsuccessfully, to block it out by draping one arm over his eyes. Reluctantly, he rolled over in bed to check the time, squinting and trying to raise his head as little as necessary off the pillow. It was already ten-thirty. He’d not got to bed till just before dawn but knew the way he was feeling had little to do with the lack of sleep. It had been two days since the strange aurora and it had bugged him all day yesterday while he was out on a fishing trip. By early evening, he’d been famished, so he’d returned, moored the boat and headed up to the house. Of course he tried to convince himself that the quickness in his step was nothing more than a combination of hunger and a keen scientific urge to investigate the aurora, but he knew the deeper need was to get back to the unopened bottle of Scotch calling out to him.
The most popular opinion on the various news feeds regarded the strangely displaced aurora as just another crazy consequence of the increasing influence of cosmic rays on an ever more vulnerable planet. However, the beautiful magnetic display in the upper atmosphere above south-east Asia was a sideline to the big news: a plane crash-landing in Delhi and the loss of three hundred and twenty lives. Air disasters were extremely rare these days and this one appeared to have been caused by several communication satellites being fried. By the time he’d dragged himself off the sofa and stumbled to the kitchen to find something to eat it was past midnight and the bottle of Scotch was already more than half empty.
Well, he was most certainly paying the price this morning for his over-indulgence. Not that it bothered him so much any more. The dull ache above his eyes first thing in the morning had become such a familiar friend these past few months that he hardly gave it a second thought; he even welcomed the groggy feeling that did such a good job of numbing the ever-present wretchedness. He rolled out of bed and plodded unsteadily downstairs. Shuffling into the living room, he voice-activated the blinds across the French windows to open, then decided against it and closed them again. Instead, he activated the wall display and headed for the kitchen. But the news report he caught as he was leaving made him turn back to the large screen.
All the networks were reporting the same story: that at least six communication satellites had been damaged by a burst of high-energy particles from space. Authorities in India, China and Malaysia were saying how lucky they were to have escaped so lightly. Apart from the Air India passengers, the only other casualties being reported were three hospital patients on life-support machines in a remote Indian village, where the emergency generator had failed to kick in after a power-grid failure in the region, and a Bangladeshi construction worker who had been electrocuted while replacing components at the top of a transmission tower. It saddened Marc to think that the economies of countries like Bangladesh, still counting the cost of climate change, continued to use humans rather than bots to carry out such dangerous work.
He checked what was currently trending on both the surface and dark web social media. But while most of the chatter was about whether this direct hit from a coronal ejection was just a one-off event or a warning that the Sun would be belching out more of its contents in the Earth’s direction, the cacophony of noise made it hard to pick out anything sensible. Viewpoints ranging from enraged libertarians and conspiracy theorists disputing that anything had happened at all, to the even more vociferous end-of-the-world fanatics convinced this was finally the sign they had been waiting for, all competed for attention. The virtual-assistant system installed in the house, even running its highly sophisticated sorting algorithm, was proving unable to weed out the spam from the ham to build any reliable picture.
Marc sighed. As usual, you had to do a little digging to get to the truth. ‘Select favourites only. Past twenty-four hours. Keywords: magnetic storm, solar flare, threat level.’
One thing he hadn’t done yet was change the VA’s settings, so it still spoke in the voice of the old British natural-history broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, a favourite of his mother’s:
The top hit discussion is whether the current event was due directly to the weakening of the Earth’s magnetosphere – consensus rating 95.2 per cent – and how soon the Flip will happen and restore the planet’s protective magnetic shield – consensus on when this will occur is in the range of six months to five years from now.
None of this was new. For several years now, many scientists had been debating the expected reversal of the Earth’s field, when the north and south magnetic poles would switch over. But unless this was going to have a clear impact on their daily lives, most people were not interested. Now, it seemed, they were finally sitting up and taking notice.
At least he had an answer on the impressive aurora he’d witnessed at the vineyard last night, because this had to be more than coincidence. The solar ejection must have caused an impressive geomagnetic storm, screwing with what was left of the magnetic field and producing the colourful northern sky. Marc grunted and turned away from the wall screen. He wondered whether he should be more concerned about this latest crisis – indeed whether he should be showing more of an interest in the state of the planet generally. But he just found it too difficult to care much about anything these days.
A cool shower and two coffees later and his head began to clear. He popped a couple of painkillers anyway. He knew he could have avoided this hangover entirely if he’d taken an enzypill last night. He knew there was a supply in the house somewhere – and sure, they’d have guaranteed he woke up bright and fresh, thanks to their anti-diuretic hormones, ADH and ALDH enzyme enhancers and sugar-level controllers, but that defeated the object; why bother drinking in the first place if you were going to stop the alcohol from fucking up your brain’s neurotransmitters? Marc sometimes wondered whether a wholesome hangover was penance for his over-indulgence.
Needing something to eat to settle his stomach, he padded barefoot into the kitchen in his boxer shorts and an old CERN T-shirt with its Particle physics gives me a hadron slogan now barely legible. Charlotte, his ex-wife, had always hated that T-shirt. But then, towards the end, it seemed there wasn’t much about Marc that Charlotte hadn’t hated. Not caring about the outside world was, he knew deep down, just another symptom of his illness, but he also knew that she was partly right when she would accuse him of just being selfish. In the Marc-centric universe, stuff happened elsewhere to other people and they would just have to deal with it. If it didn’t impact on him then he preferred to mind his own business. Shaking his head, he wondered when that had started. Did it really coincide with the onset of his depression? He hadn’t always felt like this; there had been a time when, as an idealist and brilliant young scientist, he’d thought he could change the world.
Ah, what the hell. What difference would it make anyway what he thought? Twenty-four hours from now the global media would have moved on to some other story. It had taken the world decades to acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change was a real threat to humanity, so why should this rare threat from space be anything more than a temporary distraction from the constant backdrop of terrorism and global cyber wars?
He took a bowl down from the cupboard – almost everything in the house was just as it was when his parents had died, within four months of each other three years ago, and he’d not got round to having a good clear-out.
He sat down at the breakfast bar with a bowl of cereal and forced himself to think more positively. Yesterday had been a good day out on the boat, with the sea breeze taking the edge off the warm sun. He’d felt physically lighter and the future didn’t seem so dark. Today, he decided, he would be more productive. He’d get started on a few DIY projects around the house. There was plenty to do. He’d spent the past fortnight generally loafing about, but now it was time to get his arse in gear.
He’d just finished eating his breakfast when his wristpad buzzed. It was Charlotte. He did a quick mental calculation. It would be early evening now in New York and she would be just getting home from work. No doubt she would exaggerate how frazzled and tired she was feeling. And to be honest, who could blame her – considering that she was holding down a stressful job that she didn’t particularly enjoy and was bringing up a teenage daughter singlehandedly, while he wallowed in his lazy self-indulgence on the other side of the world? He knew only too well that, like Evie, Charlotte was convinced he’d taken the coward’s way out by escaping to New Zealand instead of continuing to get the professional help he needed in New York.
He tapped his wristpad and Charlotte’s face appeared on the kitchen screen in front of him.
‘You look like shit.’
He ran his fingers absent-mindedly through his drying hair in an attempt to tame it. He immediately regretted not sticking her on audio only. ‘And hello to you too, Charlie. To what do I owe this honour?’ He tried to sound as cheerful as he could manage.
Charlotte sighed. ‘Hard as this might be for you to believe, I genuinely wanted to see how you’re doing.’ She looked tired, but to Marc it was still the same face he’d fallen in love with all those years ago. In fact, she looked more attractive than ever now – now that he’d lost her to someone else. And he had long since come to terms with the fact that he had no one to blame but himself.
‘… and I see from the bags under your eyes that you’re still not sleeping well.’
He chose to ignore the comment. The last thing he wanted was another cycle of pointless argument: No, this time I really will quit / I’ve heard that a thousand times before. They’d been down that road too many times. Anyway, when he did drag himself back from the brink, and he would, it would be on his own terms and for Evie’s sake.
‘So, how’re things? How’s Evie?’ Marc asked. If there was one light that had continued to shine throughout even his very darkest days, it was his daughter. ‘Still mad with me? I’ve tried contacting her every day, but she won’t respond.’
‘What did you expect, Marc? She’s fifteen; she’s had to live with her father struggling with depression since she was ten, then watch her parents tearing their marriage apart; and finally, without any warning or explanation, her father disappears from her life.’
Marc didn’t protest. His mood swings had driven a wedge between him and those he loved. After being kicked out of his faculty position because of the drinking, he knew he’d had to ‘get away’, just when Evie was getting used to the routine of spending weekends with him. He’d hoped she’d be able to understand that he needed, temporarily, to put some distance between himself and his old life. His relationship with his daughter had always been close. Sometimes it felt like she was the only human on Earth who understood his struggle with his inner demons. And despite the hormonal changes she was going through at the moment, it would still melt his heart when she gave him one of her tight, unconditional, almost urgent hugs.
He nodded slowly. ‘I guess I had that coming. And it’s not like I’ve ever had any illusions of winning Father of the Year, right? Anyway, and I was going to let you know, there’s a conference in Princeton on dark-matter physics next week, which I plan to attend. Qiang is going and it would be good to catch up with him too. As soon as it’s over I’ll head up to see Evie. I’ll stay at George Palmer’s place.’
Charlotte raised an eyebrow and gave a wry smile. ‘You mean you were going to let me know once you’d got here. Well, I’m sure Evie will be pleased to see you, I promise. She’s just hurting and needs a bit of time. Try to spend more than a few hours with her, though. It would be good for both of you to try and mend some bridges.’
Marc heard the sound of a door slamming in the background behind Charlotte and detected a sudden stiffening of her features. She turned round and called out, ‘Hi, honey, I’m in here, chatting to Marc.’ Her boyfriend Jeremy had just got in. Jeremy Giles, the successful politician, was in so many ways the exact opposite of Marc. And OK, so ‘boyfriend’ was no longer the right term to use since he’d moved in with Charlie as soon as the ink had dried on the divorce settlement papers. Still, Marc didn’t want to have to face his smarmy smile again any time soon.
Luckily, Charlotte didn’t want to prolong their chat any more than he did. ‘OK. Well, let me know your travel plans as soon as they’re firmed up. And, believe it or not, it would still be good to see you.’
‘You too. Love to Evie.’
The scr
een blinked off.
Maybe it was the thought of a fit and virile Jeremy Giles screwing his ex-wife; or maybe it was just the urge to blow off some of his pent-up frustration, but Marc decided he would go out for a long run – as if an hour’s jog on the beach was all that was needed to put his life back together. For a man of forty-seven, he was in remarkably good health and had at least avoided the expanding waistline of so many of his contemporaries.
Before he went upstairs to change, he decided to take one final look for any serious reporting on the geomagnetic storm and what had caused it. He thought about searching for any announcements from NASA, ESA or CNSA, but he knew the space agencies of America, Europe and China could no longer be relied on to give the whole story – the old secrecy and rivalries of the space race of the 1960s and ’70s were back stronger than ever as the competition for resources on the Moon and Mars became ever fiercer. He sat down in front of his kitchen screen. If anyone knew, it would be the team at the Rio Solar Science Institute. Last year, he’d sat on a US grant-funding committee and reviewed a research proposal from the SSI. His conclusion was that they did solid science and that it would be crazy not to support them in the current climate.
‘Search past twenty-four hours. Filter. Coronal mass ejection. Solar Science Institute. Statement.’ The results came back quickly. There were over two million internet sites reporting on an interview given by a Dr Sarah Maitlin from the SSI on a morning show on Globo in Brazil. A further search on the name returned forty-eight million hits, all in the past ten hours. It seemed that Dr Maitlin was something of a news sensation. Marc was intrigued enough to watch the Globo interview in full, then did a quick search on Maitlin’s scientific work. She was a British solar physicist in her late thirties whose most cited research papers had been over ten years ago, on sunspots. He started watching another interview she’d given, this time with a BBC journalist whom she appeared to know. Her slightly more relaxed demeanour, compared with her somewhat nervous Globo performance, meant that she smiled when he introduced her, revealing just how attractive she was – no wonder the shallow news networks all wanted a piece of her – although in this particular instance her academic credentials spoke for themselves.
Sunfall Page 3