Sunstorm

  Bisesa stroked the bit of smartskin. “So this stuff grows slowly.”

  “Too slowly. There aren’t enough factories on the planet for us to churn out the quantity of smartskin we need. We’re stuck.”

  “Then ask for help.”

  Siobhan was puzzled. “Help?”

  “You know, people always think on a big scale—what can the government do for me, how can I gear up industry to churn out what I want? But I learned, working for the UN, that the way the world really works is through ordinary people helping each other, and helping themselves.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Bisesa cautiously picked up the smartskin. “You say this stuff grows like a plant. Well, could I grow it?”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious. If I put it in my window box, and fed and watered it, and kept it in the sun—”

  Siobhan opened her mouth, and closed it. “I don’t know. An open plant pot wouldn’t do, I’m sure of that. But maybe some reasonably uncomplicated kit would work. And maybe the design could be adapted to draw on local nutrients—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “From the soil. Or even household waste.”

  “How would you get it started?”

  Siobhan thought. “You’d need some kind of seed, I guess. Enough to encode the construction data, and to bootstrap the macro-scale growth.”

  “But if my neighbor grew one, she could pass on seeds to me. And I could pass them on from my, umm, ‘plant’ to the next person.”

  “And then you’d need some kind of collection system to bring the finished smartskin to some central point . . . But wait,” Siobhan said, thinking fast. “The total area of the shield is around a hundred thousand billion square meters. One percent of that, and a global population of ten billion—why, every man, woman, and child on Earth would have to produce, oh, say a blanket ten or twenty meters on a side. Everybody.”

  Bisesa grinned. “Surely less than that if the factories do their job. And it isn’t so much. We’ve still got three years. You’d be surprised what Boy Scouts and Girl Guides can produce when they’ve a mind to do it.”

  Siobhan shook her head. “This needs thinking through. But if it’s possible I’ll owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  Bisesa seemed embarrassed. “It’s an obvious idea. If I hadn’t come up with it, you would have yourself—or somebody else.”

  “Maybe.” She smiled. “I ought to introduce you to my daughter.” Saving the world is so 1990s disaster movie! Nobody believes in heroes anymore, Mum . . . This way, everybody would be a hero, she supposed. Maybe it would catch even Perdita’s imagination.

  Bisesa asked, “Why did you show me this stuff?”

  Siobhan sighed. “Because this is real. This is engineering. This is what we’re building, right now. I thought if you saw this—”

  “It might puncture my fantasies,” Bisesa said.

  “Something like that, maybe.”

  “Just because something is big, indeed superhuman, doesn’t make it any less real,” Bisesa said evenly. “Or any less relevant. And anyhow, as I’ve said, you don’t have to believe me. Just look for proof.”

  Siobhan stood up. “I really ought to get back to my meeting.” But she hesitated, intrigued despite herself. “You know, I’m open-minded enough to accept the existence of extraterrestrial aliens as a possibility. But what you’re describing makes no psychological sense. Why would these hypothetical Firstborn try to destroy us? And even if it were so, why would they give you these hints and glimpses? Why would they warn any of us—and why you? . . .”

  But even as she spoke, Siobhan thought of a possible answer to her objection.

  Because there are factions among these Firstborn. Because they are no more united and uniform of view than humanity is—why should a more advanced intelligence be homogeneous? And because there are some of them, at least, who believe that what is being done is wrong. A faction of them, working through this woman, Bisesa, are trying to warn us.

  This woman could be crazy, Siobhan thought. Even after meeting her, she was ninety percent sure that was true. But her story did make a certain sense. And what if she was right? What if an investigation did turn up evidence to back her claims? What then?

  Bisesa was watching her, as if reading her thoughts. Siobhan didn’t trust herself to speak again, and she hurried away.

  When she got back to the Council Room, the level of chatter among the population of heads dropped a little. She stood in the middle of the room and peered around. “You’re all acting as if you’ve got something to be ashamed of.”

  Bud said, “Perhaps we have, Siobhan. It’s beginning to look as if things aren’t as black as we painted them. The issue of the solar pressure and positioning—one of us came up with a solution. We think.”

  “Who?” Siobhan faced Rose Delea. “Rose. Surely not you.”

  Rose actually looked embarrassed. “Actually it was our conversation earlier. When I said something about how we’d have no problem if the sunlight was allowed to pass straight through the shield? It got me thinking. There is a way we could make our shield transparent. We don’t reflect the sunlight. We deflect it . . .”

  The shield would be made clear, but scored on one side with fine parallel grooves: prisms.

  “Ah,” Siobhan said. “And each ray of sunlight would be turned aside. We’d be building, not a mirror, but a lens, a huge Fresnel lens.”

  It would be an all-but-transparent lens that could turn the sunlight away a little, by only a degree or less. But that would be sufficient to spare the Earth from the blast of the sunstorm. And a lens would suffer only a fraction of the photon pressure of a fully reflective mirror.

  Rose said, “It’s really no more of a manufacturing challenge than our current design. But the total mass could be much less.”

  “And so we’re back in the realms of feasible design solutions?” Siobhan asked.

  “With a vengeance,” Bud said, beaming.

  Siobhan glanced around. Now she saw restlessness in their expressions, even eagerness; they were all keen to get back to their people, to begin exploring this new idea. It was a good team, she thought with pride, the best there was, and she could trust them to take this new idea and worry it until it was thoroughly integrated into the design and the construction program—by which time the next obstacle would have appeared, and they would all be back here again.

  “Another bit of good news before we close,” she said. “I may have a solution to the nanotech manufacturing problem too.”

  Eyes widened.

  She smiled. “It will keep. I’ll mail you the details when it’s fleshed out a bit more. Thank you, everybody. Meeting closed.”

  The screens winked out, one by one.

  “You old ham,” Toby grinned.

  “Always leave them wanting more.”

  “Were you serious about the smartskin issue?”

  “Needs work, but I think so.”

  “You know,” Toby said, “mathematically speaking L1 is a turning point—a point where a curve changes direction, from downhill to up. That’s why it’s a point of equilibrium.”

  “I know that—ah. You think we’ve gone through a turning point on the project today?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you should leave the headlines to the journalists. Okay. What’s next?”

  23: Heathrow

  In March 2040—with another dismal Christmas come and gone, and just a little over two years left before sunstorm day—Miriam Grec decided to visit the shield construction site in person. And that meant flying into space, for the first time in her life.

  As she was driven away from the Euro-needle that day she felt guilty but excited, like a child playing hooky from school. But she needed a holiday; her friends and enemies alike would agree on that, she thought wryly.

  London’s Heathrow had been an airport for a century, and now it was a spaceport too. And, sitting on a long, hardened
runway in the watery sunlight, the spaceplane looked quite remarkably beautiful, Miriam thought.

  The Boudicca was a slim needle some sixty meters long. It had alarmingly small vanes at its nose and tail, and even its main wings were just stubby swept-back deltas. Mounted on the wingtips were fat, asymmetrical nacelles that contained the principal rocket motors—or rather they would work as rockets in the vacuum of space, but in Earth’s atmosphere they breathed air like jet engines. The plane’s upper surface was a dull white ceramic shell, but its underside was coated with a gleaming black plate, a heat shield for reentry, made of a substance that was a remote descendant of the thermal tiling that had given the venerable space shuttle so much trouble.

  Despite the ground support vehicles that clustered around it and the clouds of vapor steaming from its tanks of cryogenic fuel, the plane really did look as if it belonged to another order of creation entirely, and had only diffidently set down here on Earth. But it was a working ship—indeed, a veteran of space. That gleaming outer hull was punctured with the nozzles of attitude control rockets around which the surface was scarred and blistered, and repeated reentries had splashed scorch marks over its underside.

  And the plane was proudly British. While the tailplane bore on one side the starry circle of the Eurasian Union, on the other side waved an animated Union flag, and on the spaceplane’s wings and flank were painted the famous roundels of the Royal Air Force, a reminder that this soaring bird of space could be called on to serve military duties.

  The design had an ancestry dating back to pioneering studies in the 1980s by firms like British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce, paper birds with names like Hotol and Skylon. But those studies had languished until the 2020s, when a new breed of materials technologies and engine designs, and the new push into space, had suddenly made a fleet of fully reusable spaceplanes a commercial proposition. And when the planes actually flew, of course, the British were quite unreasonably proud of their beautiful new toys.

  The choice of a female name was obviously right, Miriam thought: surely this spaceplane was the most beautiful piece of British aeronautical engineering since the Spitfire. But the name of the Celtic queen who had once defied the Romans, selected by a popular vote, seemed a rather tactless moniker in these days of pan-Eurasian harmony—though Miriam wondered if the second choice would have been any more acceptable: Margaret Thatcher . . .

  Still, even in these days of a united Eurasia you had to respect lingering national sentiments, as long as they played themselves out in a constructive way. And besides, as Nicolaus never ceased to remind her, this year, 2040, was an election year. So Miriam allowed herself to be photographed before the shining hull, a smile fixed to her face.

  She rode a small escalator, and entered the plane through a hatch cut in the curving fuselage.

  She found herself in a poky little compartment. If she had expected an elegance inside the plane to match its beautiful exterior, she was immediately disappointed. There were a dozen seats set in unimaginative rows, rather like first-class seats on a long-haul flight—but no better than that. There weren’t even windows in the walls.

  She was greeted by a tall, very upright man in a Eurasian Airways uniform and a peaked cap. His hair was silver-white, and he must have been in his late seventies; but he had sharp, good-looking features, his blue eyes were clear, and when he spoke his accent was a reassuring upper crust. “Madam Prime Minister, I’m delighted to welcome you aboard. I’m Captain John Purcell, and it’s my pleasant duty to make sure you enjoy your flight up to the shield. Please take a seat; the flight is yours today, and you can take your pick . . .”

  Miriam and Nicolaus sat one row apart, so they had the luxury of more room. Purcell helped them strap into intimidatingly robust harnesses, then offered them drinks. Miriam accepted a Bucks Fizz. What the hell, she thought.

  Nicolaus declined a drink, a bit testily. It struck Miriam that he had seemed edgy for some time. She supposed that anybody had a right to be nervous about being hurled into space, even nowadays. But perhaps there was more to it than that. She remembered her resolve to try to get him to open up a bit more.

  Now Nicolaus called over his shoulder, “You know, this reminds me of the Concorde. The same mix of a high-tech exterior, but a poky little passenger cabin.”

  Purcell perked up. “Did you ever fly the old plane, sir?”

  “No, no,” Nicolaus said. “I just crawled around a retired model in a museum a few years ago.”

  “Was that the one at RAF Duxford? . . . As it happens, I used to fly the Concorde, before she was retired at the turn of the century. I was a pilot for the old British Airways.” He grinned at Miriam, almost flirtatiously, and smoothed back his silver hair. “I’m sure you can tell I’m old enough. But the spaceplane is a different bird altogether. It is human-rated, of course, but it was primarily designed as a cargo carrier. Actually it’s almost all propellant.”

  Miriam said, a bit nervously, “It is?”

  “Oh, yes. Of three hundred tonnes all-up weight, only twenty tonnes is payload. And we’ll use up almost all of that fuel getting away from the Earth.” He eyed her cautiously. “Madam, I’m sure you were sent a briefing pack. You do understand that we will glide home from space, without powered engines? Returning to Earth is a question of shedding energy, not spending it . . .”

  She’d had no time to touch the glossy briefing pack, of course, but she did know that much.

  “So we’re just a flying bomb,” Nicolaus said.

  Even allowing for his nervousness Miriam was surprised he would say such a thing.

  Purcell’s eyes narrowed a bit. “I like to think we’re a bit smarter than that, sir. Now if I may I will take you through our emergency procedures . . .”

  These turned out to be rather alarming too. One option, in the event of decompression, involved being zipped up into a pressurized bag, as helpless as a hamster in a plastic globe. The idea was that astronauts in spacesuits would manhandle you inside your sphere across to a rescue ship.

  Captain Purcell smiled, competent, reassuring. “Madam Prime Minister, we no longer treat our passengers as children. Everything has been done to ensure your safety, of course. I could talk you through the flight profile, and describe to you how our engineers have labored to close what they unromantically call ‘windows of nonsurvivability.’ But this spaceplane is still a young technology. One has to simply ‘buy the risk,’ as we used to say in my day—and sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  The ground preparations appeared to be complete. Large, high-resolution softscreens unrolled over the walls and ceiling like blinds, and lit up with daylight. Suddenly it was as if Miriam were sitting in an open framework, looking out at the runway’s long perspective.

  Purcell began to strap himself into a seat. “Please enjoy the view—or, if you prefer, we can blank out the screens.”

  Miriam said, “Shouldn’t you be up in the cockpit?”

  Purcell looked regretful. “What cockpit? Times have changed, I’m afraid, madam. I’m the Captain on this flight. But Boudicca flies herself.”

  It was all a question of economy and reliability; automated control systems were much simpler to install and maintain than a human pilot. It just defied human instinct, Miriam thought, to give up so much control to a machine.

  And then, quite suddenly, it was time to leave. The plane shuddered as the big wing-mounted engines lit up—an invisible hand pushed Miriam back into her seat—and Boudicca was hurled like a spear down the long runway.

  “Don’t worry,” Purcell called over the engine noise. “The acceleration will be no worse than a roller coaster. That’s why they keep me on, I think. If an old duffer like me can live through this, you’ll be fine!—”

  Without ceremony Boudicca tipped up and threw herself into the sky.

  London’s sprawl opened up beneath Miriam.

  Orienting herself by the shining chrome band of the river, she picked out Westminster at its sharp bend in the river’s f
low, said to be the place where Julius Caesar had first crossed the Thames. As her viewpoint rose higher the urban carpet of Greater London spread out below her, kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories, a floor of concrete and tarmac and brick. In the spring morning light the suburban avenues were like flower beds, Miriam thought, stocked with brick-red blooms that gleamed in the sun. You could see the streets gather into little knots, relics of villages and farms planted as far back as the Saxons, now submerged by the urban sprawl. Miriam had grown up in the French countryside, and despite her career path was averse to city life. But London from the air really was remarkably beautiful, she thought—accidentally, for nobody had planned it this way, and yet it was so.

  As she climbed farther she saw that over the heart of the metropolis the great Dome was rising, skeletal and tremendous, designed to protect all those layers of history. She was glad it was there, for she felt a surging affection for the scattered, helpless city that lay spread-eagled below her, and a sense of duty to protect it from what was to come.

  Soon London was lost in cloud and haze. When she looked ahead, the sky was fading from deep blue, to purple, and at last to black.

  24: BDO

  Shining in the light that flooded space, Aurora 2 was undeniably a magnificent sight. But it was a complicated, ungainly magnificence, Miriam thought. Unlike Boudicca this ship had never been intended to fly in the atmosphere of any world, not even Mars, and so had none of the spaceplane’s slender aerodynamic grace.

  Aurora looked something like a drum majorette’s baton. The spine of the ship was a slim triangular spar some two hundred meters long. Under thrust, the greatest load the Aurora had to bear was along the length of its spine—and that was the direction in which this fragile ship was strongest, reinforced with struts of nano-engineered artificial diamond. At one end of the spine clustered power generators, including a small nuclear fusion reactor, and an ion-drive rocket engine whose gentle but relentless acceleration had pushed Aurora all the way to Mars and back. Spherical fuel tanks, antennae, and solar-cell arrays were strung along the spine. At the spine’s other end was a bloated dome that contained the crew quarters: habitable compartments, a bridge, life support systems. Somewhere in there, surrounded by water tanks for extra shielding, was the small, cramped, thick-walled solar-storm shelter where the crew, caught in interplanetary space, had retreated during the blistering hours of June 9, 2037.