Sunstorm Read online

  Phillippa said, “We know that much—”

  “It has given off what the sungazers call a ‘coronal mass ejection.’ ”

  She described how the corona, the sun’s extended outer atmosphere, is held together by powerful magnetic fields rooted in the sun itself. Sometimes these fields get tangled up, often over active regions. Such tangles will trap bubbles of superheated plasma, emitted by the sun, and then violently release them. That was what had happened this morning, over the big sunspot continent the experts were calling Active Region 12688: a mass of billions of tonnes of plasma, knotted up by its own magnetic field, had been hurled from the sun at a respectable fraction of the speed of light.

  “The ejection took less than an hour to get here,” Siobhan said. “I understand that’s fast, for such phenomena. Nobody saw it coming, and nobody was particularly expecting it to happen at this stage of the sun’s cycle anyhow.” Except, she made a mental note, that lone astronomer on the Moon.

  Phillippa prompted, “So this mass of gas headed for the Earth—”

  “The gas itself is sparser than an industrial vacuum,” Siobhan said. “It’s the energy contained in its particles and fields that has done the damage.”

  When it hit, the mass ejection had battered at the Earth’s magnetic field. The field normally shields the planet, and even low-orbiting satellites, but today the mass ejection had pushed the field down beneath the orbits of many satellites. Exposed to waves of energetic solar particles, the satellites’ systems absorbed doses of static electricity that discharged wherever they could.

  “Imagine miniature lightning bolts sparking around your circuit boards—”

  “Not good,” Phillippa said.

  “No. Charged particles also leaked into the upper atmosphere, dumping their energy on the way—that was the cause of the aurorae. And Earth’s magnetic field suffered huge variations. Perhaps you know that electricity and magnetism are linked. A changing magnetic field induces currents in conductors.”

  Phillippa said hesitantly, “Is that how a dynamo works?”

  “Yes! Exactly. When it fluctuates, Earth’s field causes immense currents to flow in the body of the Earth itself—and in any conducting materials it can find.”

  “Such as our power distribution networks,” Phillippa said.

  “Or our comms links. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of conducting cables, all suddenly awash with fast-varying, high-voltage currents.”

  “All right. So what do we do about it?”

  “Do? Why, there’s nothing we can do.” The question seemed absurd to Siobhan; she had to suppress an unkind impulse to laugh. “This is the sun we’re talking about.” A star whose energy output in one second was more than humankind could muster in a million years. This mass ejection had caused a geomagnetic storm that went far off the scales established by the patient solar weather watchers, but to the sun it was nothing but a minor spasm. Do, indeed: you didn’t do anything about the sun, except keep out of its way. “We just have to sit it out.”

  Phillippa frowned. “How long will it last?”

  “Nobody knows. This is unprecedented, as far as I can make out. But the mass ejection is fast moving and will pass over us soon. Only hours more, perhaps?”

  Phillippa said earnestly, “We need to know. It’s not just power we have to think about. There’s sewage, the water supply…”

  “The Thames barrier,” Toby said. “When is high tide?”

  “I don’t know,” Phillippa said, making a note. “Professor McGorran, can you try to nail down a timescale?”

  “Yes, I’ll try.” She closed down the link.

  “Of course,” Toby said to Siobhan, “the sensible thing to do would be to build our systems more robustly in the first place.”

  “Ah, but when have we humans ever been sensible?”

  * * *

  Siobhan continued to work. But as time wore on the comms links only worsened.

  And she was distracted by more images.

  Here was an immense explosion in the great trans-European pipeline that nowadays brought Britain most of its natural gas. Like cables, pipelines were also conductors thousands of kilometers long, and the currents induced in them could increase corrosion to the point of failure. Pipelines were grounded at frequent intervals to avert this problem. But this pipeline, a very modern structure, had been made of ethylene for economy’s sake, and was a good deal easier to ignite. Numbly Siobhan studied the statistics of this one incident: a wall of flame a kilometer wide, trees felled for hundreds of meters around, hundreds feared dead… She tried to imagine such horror multiplied a thousandfold around the world.

  And it wasn’t just humans and their technological systems that were affected. Here was a random bit of news of flocks of birds apparently losing their way, and a haunting image of whales beached on a North American shore.

  Toby Pitt brought her a phone, a clunky set trailing a cord. “I’m sorry it took so long,” he said.

  The phone must have been at least thirty years old, but, connected to the Society’s reliable fiber-optic backup lines, it worked, more or less. It took her a few tries to get through to Guy’s, and then to persuade a receptionist to find her mother.

  Maria sounded scared, but in control. “I’m fine,” she insisted. “The power outages have just been blinks; the emergency system is working well. But things are very strange here.”

  Siobhan nodded. “The hospitals must be overwhelmed. Heat victims—the accidents in traffic—”

  “Not just that,” Maria said. “People are coming in because their pacemakers are playing up, or their servo-muscles, or bowel control implants. And there’s a whole flood of heart attack victims, it seems to me. Even people with no implants at all.”

  Of course, Siobhan mused. The human body itself is a complex system controlled by bioelectricity, itself subject to electrical and magnetic fields. We are all tied to the sun, she thought, like the birds and the whales, tied by invisible lines of force nobody even suspected existed a couple of centuries ago. And we are so very vulnerable to the sun’s tantrums, even our very bodies.

  Toby Pitt said, “Siobhan, I’m sorry to interrupt. You’ve another call.”

  “Who is it?”

  “The Prime Minister.”

  “Good Lord.” She thought it over, and asked, “Which one—?”

  The phone came alive in her hand. As electricity jolted into her body the muscles of her right arm turned rigid. Then the phone shot from her grasp and slid over the table, showering blue sparks.

  PART 2

  PRESAGINGS

  8: RECOVERY

  SOMEBODY WAS HAMMERING on the door of the flat.

  Bisesa had learned to mask her reactions in front of Myra. Fixing a smile on her face, ignoring the racing of her heart, she got up from the sofa slowly and folded away her magazine.

  Myra turned her head suspiciously. She was lying on her belly watching a softwall synth-soap. There was a lot of knowingness in those eight-year-old eyes, Bisesa thought, too much. Myra knew that something strange had happened to the world a few days ago, and it was odd that her mother was here in the first place. But there was a sort of understanding between the two of them, a conspiracy. They would act normal, and maybe at some point things would turn out to be normal after all: that was their unspoken hope.

  Bisesa could use a whispered command to Aristotle to turn a section of the door transparent. But as a British Army officer trained in combat technology, she had never quite trusted electronic senses, and she peered through the old-fashioned spy hole to double-check.

  It was only Linda. Bisesa opened the door.

  Linda was a short, stocky, competent-looking girl. Aged twenty-two, she was Bisesa’s cousin, a student at Imperial College studying biospheric ethics. For the last two years she had served as Myra’s nanny during Bisesa’s long postings abroad. Right now she held two bulging paper bags of groceries, with two more stacked by her feet, and she was sweating profusely. “Sor
ry for kicking the door down,” she said. “I thought these damn bags would give way.”

  “Well, you made it.” Bisesa let Linda in and carefully double-locked the door.

  They hauled the groceries to the flat’s small kitchen. Most of what Linda had bought were staples—milk, bread, quorn products, some limp-looking vegetables, and mottled apples. Linda apologized for the meagerness of her haul, but it could have been worse; Bisesa, who followed the news assiduously, knew that London had come close to a strict rationing system.

  For Bisesa, unpacking groceries was oddly nostalgic, something she used to do every Friday evening with her mother, who would do her “big shop” at the end of the family farm’s long week. These days family habits had changed; most groceries were remote-ordered and delivered. But days after June 9 the transport and distribution services were still clogged up, and everybody had had to return to the stores in person to go through the rituals of carts and checkouts.

  This was a new experience to Linda, and she was complaining briskly. “You wouldn’t believe the queues. They actually have bouncers on the meat counters. The checkout registers are operating now, so that’s a blessing; no more hand-calculated bills. But a lot of people still won’t swipe through.” A sight you often saw since June 9 was the telltale forearm scar of somebody who’d had to have her implanted ident chip replaced, the original having been wiped and fried by the solar frenzy of that day.

  “Still no bottled water,” Bisesa said.

  “Not yet, no,” Linda said. She reflexively turned on the taps at the kitchen sink, to no effect. The solar storm had induced corrosive currents in London’s hundreds of kilometers of aging pipe work. So even when they got the pumps working, no water could be delivered to many parts of the city until the engineers and their smart little mole-shaped robots had fixed up the network once more. Linda sighed. “Looks like it’ll be the standpipe again.”

  Right now a corner of the softwall was showing an aerial view of London, overlaid by an outline map of the continuing power-outs, with a few sparks that marked riots, lootings, and other instances of disorder. Blue asterisks showed the positions of standpipes, most of them along the banks of the Thames. Bisesa found this evidence of the resilience of the old city oddly moving. Long before the Romans came to found London in the first place, Celts had fished the Thames in their wicker boats, and now in this twenty-first-century crisis Londoners were drawn back to their river once again.

  Linda looked at her callused palms. “You know, Bis, I can manage the shopping. But I could sure do with some help with the water.”

  “No,” Bisesa said immediately. Then, more considered, she shook her head. “I’m sorry.” Reflexively she glanced across at Myra, who was engrossed once more in the endlessly elaborating luridness of her softwall soap. “I’m not ready to go out yet.”

  Linda, still packing food away, said in a deliberately casual tone, “I’ve been asking Aristotle for advice.”

  “About what?”

  “Agoraphobia. It’s more common than you’d think. I mean, how would you know if somebody was a prisoner in her home? You’d never meet her! But there are treatments. Support groups—”

  “Lin, I appreciate your concern. But I’m not agoraphobic. And I’m not crazy.”

  “Then what—”

  Bisesa said lamely, “I just need more time.”

  “I’m here if you need me.”

  “I know…”

  Bisesa returned to her vigil with Myra, and the softwall.

  * * *

  Maybe she wasn’t crazy. But she couldn’t explain to Linda any of her strange circumstances.

  She couldn’t explain how she had been on patrol with her Army unit on its peacekeeping duties in Afghanistan, how she had suddenly found herself hurled beyond the walls of space and time, how she had learned to construct a new life for herself on a strange patchwork other-Earth they had called Mir—and how she had somehow been brought home, through a kaleidoscope of even stranger visions.

  And she couldn’t explain to her cousin the strangest detail of all: how she had been serving in Afghanistan on June 8, 2037, but had found herself here in London the very next day, June 9, the day of the storm—but in her memories, more than five years had passed between those two events.

  At least she was restored to Myra, the daughter she thought she had lost. But this was a Myra who had grown older only by a day, while years had passed for Bisesa. And Myra, who studied her mother with the searching gaze of a neglected child, could surely see the sudden strands of gray hair, the deeper wrinkles around Bisesa’s eyes. There was a distance between them that might never heal.

  So arbitrary had been the way she had been ripped out of her life before that she couldn’t get over the fear that it might, somehow, happen all over again. And that was why she couldn’t leave the flat. It wasn’t a fear of the open; it was a fear of losing Myra.

  After a few minutes she whispered a command to Aristotle. He resumed the compulsive search of the world’s news outlets and databases she had ordered.

  June 9 had been a worldwide catastrophe, by orders of magnitude the worst solar storm ever experienced, and days later it absorbed even Aristotle’s mighty energies to keep up with the flood of words and images. But try as he might, Aristotle couldn’t find a single mention of the silver sphere Bisesa had spotted hovering over London on that difficult morning, the thing her companions on Mir would have called an Eye. Even on a day like June 9, a thing like that hovering over London should have been a remarkable sight, the ultimate UFO, the subject of a thousand news items. But nobody else had reported it.

  It terrified Bisesa to the root of her soul that only she had seen the Eye. Because that must mean they, the Firstborn, the powers behind the Eye and everything else that was happening to her and the world, wanted something of her.

  9: LUNAR DESCENT

  BY THE THIRD DAY OF the journey the Moon was huge in the black sky.

  Siobhan had to bend her neck to peer through the Komarov’s poky little windows of tough, micrometeorite-starred glass. But when she found the Moon’s bony crescent she felt a shiver of wonder. How strange this was, she thought. Amid the mundanity of the flight—the usual horrors of airline food, the space sickness, the dismal engineering of zero-gravity toilets—the Moon itself had come swimming out of the dark to greet her, forcing its way into her consciousness with a cold, massive grace.

  And yet the most marvelous thing of all was that even here, in the passenger cabin of Earth–Moon shuttle Komarov, her mobile phone worked.

  * * *

  “Perdita, please ask Professor Graf to cover my supervisions with Bill Carel.” Bill was one of her graduate students, working on spectral analyses of structures in dark energy. Troublesome but able, Bill was worth the effort; she would have to trust old Joe Graf to figure that out for himself. “Oh, and please ask Joe if he will handle the proofs of my latest paper in the Astrophysical Journal. He’ll know how. What else? My car was still acting up, last time I tried it.” The great shock of June 9 had been traumatic for humankind’s semi-sentient machines as well as for people; even months later many were still struggling to recover. “It probably needs a bit more time with the therapist… What else?”

  “You have a dentist appointment,” her daughter said.

  “So I do. Damn. Well, please cancel it.” She probed with her tongue at the tooth that was giving her trouble, and wondered what the standard of dentistry was like on the Moon.

  Her students, her car, her teeth. These fragments of her life from Milton Keynes, where she held a seat at the Open University, seemed incongruous, even absurd, out here between planets. And yet once this immense flap was over things would go on; she must focus some of her energy on holding things together, so there was a life for her to go back to.

  But of course routine business was not what Perdita was interested in.

  The image of her daughter’s face in her phone’s tiny screen was fuzzed by static, but good enough. Sio
bhan wasn’t about to complain at such slight imperfections in a telecommunications system that now linked every human being to every other on two worlds—and, the systems providers boasted, would soon be reaching out to Mars as well. But the delay was eerie, a reminder that she had traveled so far from home that even light took a perceptible time to connect her to her daughter.

  It wasn’t long before the issue of Siobhan’s safety came up once more.

  “You really mustn’t worry,” Siobhan told her daughter. “I’m surrounded by extremely competent people who know exactly what to do to keep me alive and well. Why, I’ll probably be safer on the Moon than in London.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Perdita said, her voice mildly scolding. “You’re not John Glenn, Mother.”

  “No, but I don’t need to be.” Siobhan suppressed a stab of fond irritation. And I’m only forty-five! But, she reflected guiltily, when she was twenty or so, wasn’t this just the way she had treated her own mother?

  “And then there are solar flares,” Perdita said. “I’ve been reading up.”

  “So has most of the human race since June, I would think,” Siobhan said dryly.

  “Astronauts are outside the Earth’s air and magnetic field. So they aren’t shielded as they would be on the ground.”

  Siobhan waved her phone around to show Perdita the cabin. Big enough to hold eight but empty save for herself, it had hefty walls whose thickness was revealed by the depth of the window sockets. “See?” She thumped the wall. “Five centimeters of aluminum and water.”

  “That won’t help if a big one hits,” Perdita pointed out. “In 1972 a massive flare erupted only months after Apollo 16 returned from the Moon. If the astronauts had been caught on the lunar surface—”