Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  “I know this isn’t how you wanted the array to make its first big splash,” Marcus said. “Me neither. But even if the microflares stop, this could be an important discovery. And if the flares don’t stop…”

  Earth’s sun was a remarkably mild G-class yellow star. Life had flourished on their planet because of the sun’s benevolence, although the most tranquil star was still a star, a ball of hydrogen gas so massive it was collapsing under its own weight.

  As the sun burned, it crumpled and pulsed. Beneath its erratic surface violence, it maintained a slower, deeper cycle from stormy to simmering and back again, a cycle from solar maximum to solar minimum. The process took roughly eleven years—but eleven years ago, everyone had been astonished. The solar maximum hadn’t happened. Instead, they’d borne witness to the calmest period in recorded history.

  Given the abnormally long minimum, experts predicted the oncoming max could be severe. During a solar max, the sun was more likely to produce sunspots. From these spots came solar flares. Some were bursts of X-rays and radio noise. More lethal were coronal mass ejections, clouds of charged particles much larger than Earth. Fortunately, most CMEs spun off away from their planet. Others brushed by or collided head-on, overloading electrical grids and telecommunications systems. In 2009, the crash of Air France 447 was thought to have been caused by a fluctuation in Earth’s magnetic field above South America, killing two hundred passengers and crew.

  Marcus gestured for Steve to take his place at the computer. “I’m sending our files to SWPC,” he said. “If you want to correct anything, now’s your chance.”

  “Okay, okay.” Steve rolled his eyes, defeated.

  Marcus scooted back in his chair. Steve slid over. He began studying the plots in detail while Marcus reexamined the data himself, searching for errors. There were none.

  As he worked, Steve changed the subject. “How’s it going with Roell?”

  Marcus’s son had been visiting for his summer trade-off between Marcus and Janet, so he’d come to the array with his father. But their relationship was… complicated.

  “He’s mad at me,” Marcus said. “I should have left him at home.”

  “Sometimes you want to strangle ’em.” Steve had two children himself, although they were younger than Roell, aged thirteen and eleven. “Try not to be too hard on him or yourself,” he said. “I read somewhere teenage minds are different than ours. I mean physically different. Their frontal lobes haven’t developed. They’re more impulsive.”

  Marcus nodded.

  At seventeen, Roell was interested in two things, girls and balls, which sounded like a bad joke, but it was an honest assessment of his son, who lived for basketball and football. Marcus couldn’t help feeling exasperated. That he hadn’t been more involved with Roell’s school activities or Boy Scouts was a constant regret.

  “Christ,” Steve said, reacting to the computer screen.

  Marcus felt his insides flip-flop. “You think I’m right.”

  Steve hesitated. He gazed at Marcus with a troubled expression. “I’m going to call my family,” he said. “Then let’s wake everyone up and get ’em back at the computers. We need to figure out what’s going on.”

  Minutes later, Marcus hurried through the station’s hallway. The building consisted of two prefabs joined in a T. The control room and a small lounge formed the extremities. The hallway led down the spine of the T to four compact offices and storage closets. Marcus had arranged two cots in one office, planning to bunk with Roell until Roell asked to move. A ranch house stood near the station, but Marcus and Steve hadn’t wanted to impose on the site staff by evicting anyone from a real bed.

  The office Roell had chosen stank of athletic shoes. He kept the window shut and his Air Jordans off, yet it wasn’t necessarily a bad smell when Marcus knocked on the door and leaned in. The room smelled like a healthy young animal.

  Roell sat in his sleeping bag with his iPhone, his lean body folded around the gadget as his thumb worked at its screen. In the dim room, with the blinds drawn, the phone illuminated Roell’s face like a spotlight. That must have been part of the appeal. Marcus had seen enough of his son’s texts to know his conversations amounted to What up and Nuthin. Nevertheless, texting seemed to fulfill the boy’s need for attention.

  “Come to the control room with me,” Marcus said.

  “I want to go home. To Mom’s.”

  “You like computers,” Marcus said. “We’re networking with some of the greatest technology in astrophysics. IBEX. Hubble. Let me show you.”

  “Have you seen what’s happening in the real world? The Chinese are bracketing our guys.”

  “Right.”

  Most of the news lately had been focused on the Marines, who’d returned to Vietnamese soil after forty years, this time in support of the communist government. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan were all potential flashpoints in America’s standoff with China, but Marcus wished Roell wasn’t so attracted to the drama. The boy’s fascination was strange. He played at being involved in gangsta rap, imitating those self-centered posers, and yet Roell was equally excited by the new, loud, patriotic tone sweeping the country. Was that because the soldiers had body armor and guns? Or did he enjoy the primal feeling of us-against-them?

  The media had created fan clubs for the war, which wasn’t a war, although it made great material for TV, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook! The relentless updates were motivated by ad revenue and subscription rates, which Roell was too naive to realize despite wanting to be so streetwise.

  More important, Roell’s dyslexia didn’t slow him on the net. The boy’s ability to bang through his favorite sites and half-coherent text messages were proof to Marcus that he should apply himself harder in school, but they’d butted heads on the topic too many times, so Marcus tried again.

  “Something’s happening with our sun that we can’t explain,” he said. “If our data’s correct, the solar wind is accelerating—”

  “Nobody cares, Dad.”

  “They should. If the sun—”

  “Check it out.” Roell held up his phone to display a photo of a plucky U.S. sailor gazing at an ocean. “Our guys are in trouble, and all you care about is outer space.”

  Marcus stopped himself from barking a response. When he was younger, Roell had loved Star Wars and Bionicles. He’d read the books with his father, watched the movies, and papered his bulletin board with drawings of Jango Fett and LEGO robots.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” Marcus said, trying to scare him, “but the sun shouldn’t radiate like this unless it’s pre-nova. Do you know what I’m talking about? The sun gives off a lot more than visible light. Among other things, it emits an outgassing of charged particles called the solar wind.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Here’s the spooky part. The surface of the sun averages ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit—but above it, the corona runs as hot as five million. That’s like a lightbulb making the air around it hotter than the glass. It violates the second law of thermodynamics. The sun’s gravity is so extreme, it should pull the solar wind back into itself, but the corona superheats the wind beyond the point where gravity can hold it.”

  Marcus didn’t add that no one fully comprehended how. Science also couldn’t explain why the solar wind hit its topmost speeds. One model proposed co-rotating regions within the solar wind where expanding rings of charged particles smashed into each other, creating shock waves as fast as twenty-five hundred kilometers per second.

  Even in normal conditions, the levels of ionizing radiation striking Earth could rise or fall by a factor of thousands. What would happen if the sun’s magnetic field was entering a phase in which it relaxed or stiffened? Either phenomenon would allow larger, more frequent blasts of charged particles to escape…

  “Come with me,” Marcus implored his son. “At the very least, you can get your messages, okay?”

  Cell transmissions weren’t permitted in the area. The array was so sensitive,
it registered the tiny electrical pulse generated by starting a car. Roell was free to access his social networks on their computers, which used landlines, but Marcus had insisted Roell turn off the wireless functions on his iPhone.

  “Fine.” The boy pulled himself from the sleeping bag.

  Marcus pretended not to watch as he dressed. Jeans. Sports jersey. Roell was a great-looking kid. They’d done that much right. Roell had Janet’s cheekbones, which gave him a regal look despite the loose jersey, as if he was too good for any clothes.

  He had deep black skin unlike his father’s. Marcus had three white ancestors in his family. They were Roell’s ancestors, too, but no one would ever guess. The difference was another unspoken source of tension between them. Skin color was important among Roell’s classmates and on the street.

  The street was where Roell had learned his slouch. Walking through the hall, he scuffed his ninety-dollar basketball shoes on the cheap carpet. ES2’s money had gone into the array. Roell grunted in disapproval at the cramped lounge with its faded couch, but he lingered in front of three Coke and snack machines rigged to dispense their goods for free. Janet had allowed him to develop a craving for sugar and caffeine loaded with chemicals that would rot his bones.

  “Take two,” Marcus said generously.

  Roell was caught off guard. He’d expected an argument. Instead, he grinned and selected two cans of Mountain Dew.

  Marcus led him into the control room, where Steve had been joined by the postdoctoral astronomers who worked on site. The four of them were gathered around one computer, murmuring together. To Marcus, their nervous energy was palpable.

  “S’up,” Roell asked Kym Vang, a round Laotian girl in her twenties.

  Marcus intervened before Roell could embarrass them further. He sat at another computer and Roell took the chair beside him. “We’re sharing our feeds with Space Command,” Marcus said. “Last night I talked with an Air Force general.”

  “That’d be a cool job,” Roell said, allowing the faintest glimpse of the wide-eyed little boy Marcus remembered. He bumped Marcus’s leg with his knee, leaving Marcus pleased by the casual contact. Those few seconds were a victory. It was progress. Roell might be poking fun, but he was also proud of his awkward old genius dad.

  One of ES2’s primary investors was AFSPC, the United States Air Force Space Command. AFSPC and NORAD were interested in phased array technology for tracking foreign satellites. Military involvement was off-putting to some of their other supporters, like academics, but they needed the funding and gleaned new expertise from the arrangement.

  To Roell, this meant Marcus was working with the most awesome of the awesome—the guys with missiles and laser beams.

  “What are they saying?” Roell asked.

  “Nothing yet. No one knows how to classify some of the activity we’re recording. Gamma radiation is up, X-rays, ultraviolet.”

  “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this?”

  “It depends who you ask,” Marcus said, downplaying his concern. “When I was your age, everyone would have said G-class stars were quiet and stable. Then twenty years ago, they found nine that regularly produce superflares.”

  “Like how big?”

  “Like as much as a hundred million times larger than the worst flares we’ve seen, which is good.”

  “What would happen?”

  “It won’t. If superflares had occurred in our solar system, we’d see flood plains on Jupiter’s moons where the ice melted and refroze again.”

  Marcus didn’t add that closer to the sun, Earth’s atmosphere would have been ripped away. No one believed there was life more complex than microbes on the planets orbiting S Fornacis or Groombridge 1830, two of the main sequence yellow stars known to produce superflares. Something had gone wrong inside those stars—something Marcus was afraid was occurring to a lesser degree within Earth’s sun—yet he pretended he wasn’t worried.

  “This is just a particularly bad solar max. It will alter a lot of our assumptions, but let me tell you a secret. We don’t know as much as we like to think we do.”

  “That’s for sure,” Roell said, never missing an opportunity to assert himself.

  Marcus smiled ruefully. People had been counting sunspots since Kepler’s and Galileo’s first observations in 1607 and 1612. Since then, nearly forty cycles from solar max to solar min had been well-documented, and yet their oldest records barely established a pattern over four centuries.

  Four centuries were a blink in the lifespan of a sun. Increases in the velocity and particle density of the solar wind might be normal occurrences.

  “Right now our array is working double-time,” Marcus said. “We’re listening to the sun, too. We can’t avoid it. But if we can confirm the same activity in other G-class stars, we’ll have a better idea what to expect. Tweaking our software to listen to their solar winds was easy. It’s combing through each signature for microflares that takes an hour or two.”

  “This is all you see?” Roell asked, pointing at the waterfall plots on the computer.

  “Yes. That’s a star system called Xi Ursae Majoris. It’s not a good candidate, but it’s in the sky right now, and we’re being thorough.”

  Xi was twenty-seven light-years away, so everything they heard was twenty-seven years old, which was how long it took electromagnetic radiation to travel so far. In many ways, astronomers were like archeologists, always reaching into the past. For Marcus, that was the appeal, the patience required, the concentration and skill.

  The wait was too much for Roell. He drummed his fingers on the desk, no doubt re-creating some popular new song. The noise was a distraction, but Marcus said nothing until he noticed a disapproving glance from Kym.

  “Roell, stop,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The banging. Stop.”

  Across the room, Steve said, “Marcus?” His voice held a note of surprise.

  We’ve got a hit! Marcus thought. He couldn’t help flashing Roell a look of triumph before he turned to Steve—but his friend pointed at the window. Fat dust tails had lifted from the dirt road leading to the array.

  A car drove into the field. Another followed it. The array had no gate or security features. The cost of running several kilometers of fence around the dishes had seemed excessive, not to mention contradictory to the open, public stance of the ES2 Program.

  “I didn’t think anyone else was coming,” Kym said.

  “No,” Marcus said.

  “They’re moving too fast.”

  Anyone associated with ES2 would have slowed to fifteen miles per hour. The few roads inside the array were asphalted, but twenty dishes stood along the entrance. ES2 employees knew better than to throw rocks from their tires. Nor did they get company cars. Both vehicles were new white Chevy sedans. Either the new arrivals were driving rental cars or they’d come from someplace with a motor pool.

  It’s not a news team, Marcus thought. There’s no broadcast van.

  “Let’s see who it is,” Roell said.

  “Stay here,” Marcus said, earning a scowl from his son. He looked at Kym. “We’re feeding our data streams to the net, right?”

  “Of course.”

  Marcus left his computer and pushed through the door of the control room into the lounge. Outside, he heard the cars pull up to the building. Their doors opened and banged shut as he exited into sunlight.

  Five men and a woman had poured from the vehicles. Two of the men wore Army uniforms. The others were dressed in business suits. Marcus had never seen any of them before, but the woman greeted him by name. “Mr. Wolsinger,” she said. “I’m Rebecca Drayer with the NSA.”

  SOUTH CHINA SEA

  Lieutenant Commander Drew Haldane stepped onto a dark catwalk on the towering edge of the USS America, a new Ford-class supercarrier. His watch read 00:06.

  She’s late, Drew thought.

  Ship’s time was synched with Hanoi, fourteen hours ahead of San Diego. It was the middle of the ni
ght on this side of the world. The America was blacked out. So were the rest of the ships in the strike group. Few stars sparkled through the cloud cover, and yet Drew couldn’t ignore the huge drop from the 03 Level, no less than six stories above the waves.

  The ocean clashed with the ponderous movements of the ship. The America was larger than many skyscrapers if those buildings were laid sideways, displacing one hundred thousand metric tons of water. Drew felt the conflict between the ocean and the America in the swirling updrafts of cold salt air against the hull. Damp wind brushed his hair.

  He was thirty-three, hard and fit. The young woman who joined him was twenty-five. Her hourglass physique looked neat and crisp in her uniform as she ducked the storage canisters bolted overhead. This sponson—a narrow, open catwalk beneath the flight deck—was crowded with gear. It was also exposed to the weather, which made it unpopular with the crew and an ideal place to meet.

  Lieutenant Junior Grade Julie Christensen stepped close to Drew, starlight gleaming in her brown hair. She smelled like clean laundry, a good, fresh, feminine smell.

  But this wasn’t a romantic interlude.

  “The satellites are up and down, sir,” she whispered. “We’re getting a lot of static. That’s why you went red. Most of the conventional systems pulled through, but special ops were the first to go.”

  “That’s scary as hell.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much of the solar activity is real?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry, sir.”

  Sunspots routinely disrupted global communications, but military satellites were far more expensive than civilian equipment and hardened against solar flares. Drew wasn’t buying it. He assumed the sunspots reported by the Armed Forces weather service were a rusty lie to minimize any appearance of weakness.

  He said, “Did the Chinese launch anything new?”

  “No, sir.”

  That means they already have a pulse weapon in orbit, he thought. What if they were targeting U.S. frequencies specifically? The best estimates he’d heard put the U.S. military at least a decade ahead of China with narrowband transmissions. China shouldn’t know about ROMEO at all.