Helena spoke softly, and the image was magnified by her visor, bringing Earth and Moon into sharp focus. This morning they were two fat crescents in identical phases, facing the sun that was about to betray them. All over the Earth and Moon people would be pausing in whatever they were doing and looking up at the sky, billions of pairs of eyes all turned in the same direction, waiting for the show to begin at last. Despite the urgency of her rescue mission, at such a moment she couldn’t be anywhere but here, out under the complex Martian sky, one with the rest of an apprehensive humankind, holding her breath.
A clock chimed softly. It was an alarm she had set up earlier, to sound at the precise moment of the breaking of the storm.
In the dawn sky nothing changed. It takes thirteen minutes for light to travel from the sun to Mars. But Helena knew that already the electromagnetic fury of the sunstorm must be spilling out across the solar system.
She stood in Martian dust, in solemn silence. Then she walked back to her rover to resume her mission.
40: Dawn
0307 (London Time)
Bisesa and Myra, unable to sleep, sat huddled on the floor of their living room, arms wrapped around each other. Rising from the city beyond the walls of the flat they could hear drunken shouts, smashing glass, the wails of sirens—and occasional deep bangs, like doors slamming, that might have been distant explosions.
A candle flickered in its holder on the floor. A few battery-powered torches lay to hand, along with other essentials: a hand-cranked radio, a comprehensive first-aid kit, a gas stove, even firewood, though the flat lacked a hearth. Away from this room, the flat was dark. They had taken official advice and shut down almost everything electrical or electronic. It was a “blackout” order, the Mayor had said—not wholly accurate, but another deliberate echo of World War II. But they had kept the power on for the air-conditioning, without which, in the increasingly smoggy air of the Dome, they would quickly get uncomfortable. And they hadn’t been able to bear killing the softwall. Somehow not knowing what was happening would have been worst of all.
Anyhow, from the noise outside it sounded as if nobody else was paying much attention to the Mayor’s entreaties either.
The giant softwall was still working. With commentary delivered by somber talking heads, it brought them a mosaic of scattered images from around the planet. On the night side some cities were darkened by the blank circles of domes, while others burned in a final frenzy of partying and looting. Other images came from a daylit hemisphere that had not known a proper sunrise that morning, for the shield blocked all but a trickle of the sun’s light. Even so, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, cultists and ravers danced in its ghostly glow.
In these last moments before the storm, the image that kept catching Bisesa’s eye was of the solar eclipse. The picture came from a plane that had been flying in the eclipse’s shifting shadow for more than an hour. Right now it was over the western Pacific, somewhere off the Philippines. In a sense this was a double eclipse, of course, the Moon’s shadow reinforcing that of the shield, but even in this reduced trickle of light the sun provided its usual beautiful spectacle, with the thread-like corona like the hair of the Medusa from which Athena’s shield was intended to protect the Earth.
The observing plane wasn’t alone in the sky. A whole fleet of aircraft tracked the Moon’s shadow as it scanned across the face of the Earth, and on the ocean below, ships, including one immense liner, huddled along the track of totality. To shelter beneath the shadow of the friendly Moon was one of the more rational strategies people had dreamed up to avoid the sunstorm’s gaze, and thousands had crowded into that band of shaded ocean. Of course it was futile. In any given site the duration of the eclipse’s totality was only a few minutes, and even on one of those shadow-chasing planes there was only a bit more than three hours’ shelter to be had at best. But you couldn’t blame people for trying, Bisesa supposed.
Somehow this neat bit of celestial clockwork made the dreadful morning real for Bisesa. The Firstborn had arranged the storm for this precise moment, with this cosmic coincidence bright in Earth’s sky. They had even had the arrogance to show her what they intended. And now here it was, unfolding just as they had planned, live on TV—
Myra gasped. Bisesa clutched her daughter.
In that eclipse image, light gushed around the blackened circle of the Moon, as if an immense bomb had gone off on the satellite’s far side. It was the sunstorm, of course. Bisesa’s clock showed it was breaking at the very second Eugene Mangles had predicted. There was a brief, tantalizing glimpse of eclipse-tracking planes falling out of the sky.
Then that bit of the softwall flickered, fritzed, and turned to the sky blue of no feed. One by one the other segments of the softwall winked out, and the talking heads fell silent.
0310 (London Time)
On board the Aurora 2, the shield’s mission controllers broke out bags of salted peanuts.
Bud Tooke grabbed a bag of his own. This was an old good-luck tradition that derived from JPL—the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—which had always handled NASA’s great unmanned spacecraft, and which had supplied key personnel and wisdom for this project. Now’s the time for luck, Bud thought.
One big softscreen was dedicated to showing a view of the whole Earth.
From the point of view of Bud’s mission control room, right at the center of the shield, celestial geometry was simple. Here at L1 the shield hung forever between sun and Earth. So from Bud’s point of view the Earth was always full. But today, right on cue, the Moon had moved between sun and Earth, and so was sailing through the shield’s tunnel of shadow—a tunnel nearly four times as wide as the Moon itself. Bud could even make out the deeper shadow that the Moon cast on the face of the Earth, a broad gray disk passing over the Pacific. This remarkable alignment was seen in a ghostly, reduced light, for the shield was doing its job of turning aside all but a trickle of sunlight.
When the storm broke, the Moon’s illuminated face flared a fraction of a second before the hail of light splashed against the face of the Earth.
Bud turned immediately to his people. He surveyed rows of faces, the people in the room with him, or transmitted from across the face of the shield and the Moon. He saw shocked, blanched expressions, mouths round. Bud had always insisted on full mission control discipline, to the standards honed by NASA across eighty years of manned spaceflight. And that discipline, that focus, was more important now than ever.
He touched his throat microphone. “This is Flight. Let’s get to work, folks. We’ll go around the loop. Ops—”
Rose Delea was surrounded by a tent of softscreens; for this critical day he had put her in overall charge of shield operations. “Nominal, Flight. We’re taking a battering from the hard rain, everything from ultraviolet to X-rays. But we’re holding for now, and Athena is responding.”
While the peak energy of the storm was expected to be in the visible light spectrum, there was plenty of shit pouring down at shorter wavelengths too—not to mention the immense flare that had kicked off yesterday. The electronic components of the shield had been hardened to military standard, and the people were protected too, as far as possible. There would be losses of the shield’s capacity, and among the crew. It was going to be painful, but enough slack had been built into the design that the shield should get through.
But there was nothing they could do for the Earth. The shield had been designed to cope with the peak-energy bombardment in the visible and near-infrared spectrum, which would soon cut in; this preliminary sleet of X-rays and gamma rays would pass through its structure as if it didn’t exist. They had always known it would be like this: the shield was engineering, not magic, and couldn’t deflect it all. They had had to make hard choices. You did your best, and moved on. But it was agonizing to sit up here knowing you could offer the Earth no help, none at all.
“Okay,” Bud said. “Capcom, Flight.”
“Flight, Capcom,” Mario Ponzo called. �
��We’re ready for when you call on us, Flight.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to for a while yet.”
Mario, pilot of an Earth—Moon shuttle, had volunteered for a position up here after he had met Siobhan McGorran during one of her jaunts to the Moon. Mario was responsible for communicating with the maintenance crews who stood ready in their hardened spacesuits to go out into the storm. Bud had given him the title of Capcom—“capsule communicator.” Like Bud’s own job title of Flight Director, “Capcom” was a bit of NASA jargon that dated from the days of the first Mercury flights, when you really did have to communicate with a man in a capsule. But everybody knew what it meant, and it was a word that carried its own traditions. Mario had his traditions too, in fact; he was the most heavily bearded man on the shield, superstitiously unwilling to shave in space.
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.
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