Sunstorm

  The dust at her feet stirred. She looked down.

  Amid the pattering raindrops, something was pushing out of the soil. No bigger than her thumb, it was like a leather-skinned cactus. It had translucent sections, windows to catch the sunlight, she thought, without losing a precious drop of moisture. And it was green: the first native green she had seen on Mars.

  Her heart hammered.

  The Aurora crew, during their long exile, had searched in vain for life on Mars. They had even risked a hazardous journey to the South Pole, where they had sought out the oldest, coldest, undisturbed permafrost on all of Mars, hoping to find Martian microorganisms trapped and preserved. Even there they’d found zilch. That epochal discovery would surely have made their years away from home worthwhile; it had been a crashing disappointment to find nothing.

  And now here it was, just bubbling up out of the ground before her.

  She felt a painful pull at her chest. She didn’t need to check her monitors to know her suit was failing. To hell with her suit; she was going to report her discovery. Hastily she turned on her helmet camera, and bent over the little plant. “Aurora, Helena. You won’t believe this . . .”

  Its roots were buried deep in the cold rock of Mars. It didn’t need oxygen, but fueled its glacial metabolism with hydrogen released by the slow reaction of the volcanic rocks with traces of water ice. Thus it had survived a billion years. Like a spore waiting under a desert on Earth for the brief rains of spring, this patient little plant had waited out an eon for the Martian rains to return, so it could live again.

  46: Aftershock

  A chain of events stretching back millennia was almost complete. The sunstorm had been wasteful of energy, of course—but not nearly so wasteful as humankind might one day have become, if allowed to infect the stars.

  The sunstorm was ending. Though the sun’s relatively orderly cycles of activity would be disturbed for decades to come, the great release of energy had been cathartic, and the destabilization of the core was resolved. All this was just as Eugene Mangles’s remarkably successful mathematical models of the sun’s behavior had predicted.

  But those models had not been, could never be, perfect. And before this long day was done, the sun had one more surprise for its weary children.

  The sun’s tremendously strong magnetic field shapes the star’s atmosphere, in a way that has no analogies on Earth. The corona, the outer atmosphere, is full of long sheets of gas, like the petals of a flower, that can extend many radii from the sun. The elegant curves of these “streamers” are sculpted by the magnetic fields that control them. The streamers are bright—it is these plasma sheets that are visible around the blocked-out sun during a solar eclipse—but they are so hot, pumped full of energy by the magnetic field, that their spectral peak is not in visible light but in X-rays.

  All this in normal times.

  As the sunstorm subsided, one such streamer formed over the active region that had been the epicenter of the storm. In keeping with the giant instability that had spawned it, the streamer was an immense structure, its base spreading over thousands of kilometers, and extending so far out in space that its feathery outer edge reached the orbit of Mercury.

  At the base of the streamer, flux tubes rooted in the sun’s deep interior arched to enclose a cavity. Inside the cavity, contained by the magnetic field’s arches, were trapped billions of tonnes of ferociously hot plasma: it was a cathedral of magnetism and plasma. And as the storm died, this cathedral began to collapse.

  As the “roof” gave way, immense rivers of magnetic energy flowed into the trapped plasma mass. The mass was raised up from the sun’s surface, slowly at first. But then as the magnetic field unwound the plasma was hurled away ever more rapidly, as a stone is hurled from a catapult. The ejected cloud, a tangle of plasma and magnetic field lines, was very rarefied, less dense than most “pure” vacuums manufactured on Earth. But it was not its density but its energy that counted. Some of its particles had been accelerated almost to the speed of light. Energetically it was a hammer blow.

  And, just as had been planned by cool minds millennia ago and sixteen light-years away, it was aimed squarely at the suffering Earth.

  47: Bad News

  When Mikhail came online with the news, for a moment Bud couldn’t bear it. He escaped the control room, hauled himself to his cabin, and shut the door.

  On a battered softscreen spread out on his bunk, he scrolled slowly through the names of the lost. They were mostly maintenance engineers who had been out there on the shield in the thick of the storm—and volunteers, like Mario and Rose, who had gone out to take their places as they fell. Bud knew them all.

  In the five years of its existence the community on the shield had evolved its own culture, which Bud had done his best to foster. There had been zero-gravity sports tournaments, and music and theater, and parties and dances, and big public celebrations at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Ramadan, Passover, and every other excuse they could come up with. There had been the usual human tangle too, of love affairs illicit and otherwise, marriages, divorces—and one murder, a crime summarily dealt with. Despite all precautions, two babies had been born, apparently with no ill effects from their gestation without gravity, hastily shipped to Earth with their parents.

  But now fully a quarter of this community had died, another quarter lay seriously ill, and the rest had taken a battering, including Bud himself. They all had a hugely increased chance of contracting cancer in the future, or of having their irradiated systems fail in some other way. For what they had done today they had all paid with their life expectancy, or their very lives—and not one had demurred, even when called on to make that final sacrifice.

  Bud had kept up a determined public face. But even before the event he had had to make gruesome calculations of acceptable casualty levels. It felt as if he had planned for these people to die. And with each bright soul he had ordered into the furnace, with each new death added to this tally, he felt as if his heart were being twisted inside him.

  He still had a job to do for the survivors; up to now he had been able to comfort himself with that. After so long in microgravity the heroes from the shield would not get their medals and parades for a while. They would all return to Earth weak as kittens, and would be subject to six months or a year of rehab, massage, hydrotherapy, and programs of exercise to bring up their strength, endurance, and bone mineral levels—until they were fit to stand before a President or two, and take the plaudits they had earned.

  That had been his plan to get his people home, fondly rehearsed in his mind. But now it looked as if none of that was going to happen. For, if he understood what Mikhail and Eugene were telling him, this huge sacrifice might all have been in vain, and they might just as well have stayed home and waited for the storm to torch them all.

  He was doing no damn good here. He took a deep breath and made his way back to the control room.

  Eugene and Mikhail sat side by side in some poky cabin at Clavius.

  “It is called a ‘coronal mass ejection,’ ” Mikhail said lugubriously. “In itself it is not an unprecedented phenomenon. In normal times there are many such events per year.”

  Bud asked, “I thought June 9 was caused by a mass ejection?”

  “Yes,” Eugene snapped. “But this is bigger. Much bigger, even than that.” Nervously Eugene began to gabble through a description of the latest events on the sun: the gathering of magnetic field lines over the zone of disturbance that had been the epicenter of the sunstorm, the trapping of an immense cloud of plasma beneath those flux lines—and then how the cloud had been hurled upward away from the sun.

  Bud half listened to the words, and watched the two astrophysicists. They were suffering, Bud could see that. Mikhail’s face was grooved with weariness, the shadows deep as lunar craters around his eyes; Bud had never seen him looking so old.

  Eugene’s expression, creasing up that bland jock’s face, was more complicated, but then so was Eugene. Rose D
elea used to call Eugene “autistic” to his face, Bud remembered—but poor Rose was dead now. Bud, however, had never thought of Eugene as some inhuman calculating machine, and now Bud thought he could read the emotion in those pale blue eyes, an emotion any military man would sympathize with: The operation is fucked. And I fear, dear God, that it might be me who screwed the pooch.

  Bud rubbed his eyes and tried to focus, to think. After his own six-hour jaunt out on the shield, he was still in his grimy thermal long johns. He could smell the sweat and vomit crusted on a face that had been cocooned in a bubble helmet for too long, every muscle was stiff as a board, and he ached for a shower.

  He said carefully, “Eugene, you’re telling me your models didn’t foresee this.”

  “No,” Eugene said miserably.

  Mikhail said gently, “There’s really no reason why they should, Colonel Tooke. Oh, perhaps some such ejection might have been foreseen. The turbulence at the heart of the sunstorm was like an active region. Such regions spawn flares, and they are sometimes, but not always, associated with mass ejections too. If there is a causal link it is a deep one we have yet to untangle. We have yet to understand the basic physics, you see. And besides, our models could see only as far as the great outpouring of energy of the sunstorm itself—which we got mostly right. But beyond that point our models ran into a singularity—a place where the curves shot off to infinity, and the physics broke down altogether.”

  “We patched in a solution for the follow-up,” Eugene said desolately. “Continuous to the third-order derivatives. Over most of the sun the patch seems to be working out. All except for this vicious bastard.”

  Mikhail shrugged. “In retrospect that anomalously high gamma flux we observed at the start of the storm may have been a precursor. But we had no time for remodeling, not then, as the storm itself broke—”

  Bud said, “You feel like the sun itself has let you down, don’t you? Because it didn’t behave like you told it to.”

  Mikhail said, “I have tried to explain to Eugene that no fault is attached to this. Eugene’s is the single most brilliant mind I have ever worked with, and without his insights—”

  “We would never have seen the storm coming, would never have got the shield built—would never have saved all those lives.” Bud sighed. “You mustn’t feel bad, Eugene. And we need your help now, more than ever.”

  “We don’t have much time,” Mikhail said. “It’s moving a lot more quickly than a normal mass ejection.”

  “But this isn’t a normal day, right? How long?”

  “We have an hour,” Mikhail said. “Maybe less.”

  The answer was ridiculous; Bud could barely believe it. What could he do about this in an hour? “So what comes first?”

  “An advance shock wave,” Eugene said. “More or less harmless—it will give us a lot of radio noise.”

  “And then?”

  “The bulk of the cloud will hit,” Mikhail said. “A fog bank as wide as the sun itself, more than a million kilometers across, heading right for Earth. Unusually, it is quite shallow, a kind of lens. Its shape is an artifact of its unusual formation, we think. It is made up of relativistic particles—mostly protons and electrons.”

  “Relativistic, meaning moving close to the speed of light?”

  “Yes. And very energetic. Very. Colonel, a proton can’t outrun light, but in getting closer to that final limit it can take on board an awful lot of kinetic energy—”

  “And those energetic particles will do the damage,” Eugene said. “Colonel, it will be a particle storm.”

  Bud didn’t like the sound of that.

  On June 9, 2037, a similar cloud of fast-moving particles had hurled itself against Earth. Most had been trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. The bulk of the damage done that day had been caused by fluctuations in the Earth’s field, which had induced electrical currents in the ground.

  “This time it will be different,” Mikhail said. “The ground will be directly engaged.”

  Bud snapped, “What does that mean? Stick to English, damn it.”

  Eugene replied, “These solar particles are so energetic that most of them will cut through the magnetosphere, and atmosphere, as if they aren’t there—”

  “Like bullets through paper,” Mikhail said.

  A lethal hail of radiation and heavy particles would slam onto land and sea. For an unshielded human, it would be like a trillion tiny explosions going off inside her cells; her delicate biomolecules, the proteins that built her and the genetic material that governed her structure and growth, would be smashed apart. Many people would die immediately. For those who lived, the suffering was only postponed. Even unborn children would suffer mutations that could kill them on their emergence from the womb.

  Every living thing on Earth, every one of them reliant on proteins and DNA, would be similarly affected. Even where individuals survived, ecologies everywhere would be devastated.

  Eugene kept talking, pitilessly, about long-term problems. “After the cloud has passed the air will be full of carbon-14, because of neutron capture by nitrogen nuclei. Very radioactive. And even when the farms start working again all that stuff is bound to get into the food chain. Ocean stocks would be least affected, until the die-off in the seas cuts in . . .”

  Bud got the message. The disaster would continue to unfold, as far ahead as could be seen. Shit, he thought. And it was going to start in an hour, just an hour.

  Impulsively Bud tapped his softscreen, and flicked at random through images of Earth.

  Here were the last forests of South America, so doggedly preserved, and the soybean fields that had crowded them out, burning together. Here were the almost clichéd landmarks of the human world collapsing in flames: the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Here were great ports laid waste by the monstrous storms, spaceplanes crushed like moths, the bridges of Japan and Gibraltar and across the English Channel left smashed and twisted by massive lightning strikes. Even so, everybody thought the worst was over; everywhere people toiled in the rubble of their homes seeking survivors, sifting debris, already trying to make a new start. And now, this. And what about the shield? With no protection at all, surely it would be destroyed, a leaf in a gale.

  After all they had been through it seemed unfair, as if some grown-up was changing the rules of the game, just when they had been about to win. But maybe, Bud thought uneasily, if that nutty soldier from Britain was right about her “Firstborn,” that was exactly what had happened.

  Suddenly he longed to be with Siobhan. If she were here with him it wouldn’t seem so bad, he thought. But that was a selfish thing to wish for; on Earth, wherever she was, she was safer than she would be up here.

  He faced the softscreens, Mikhail’s grave face. He was aware of his people watching him; even now he had to think about morale. “So,” he said. “What options do we have?”

  Mikhail only shook his head. Eugene, his eyes flickering nervously, looked away.

  Unexpectedly, Athena spoke up. “I have one.”

  Bud looked up, bemused. On the softscreen, Mikhail’s jaw had dropped.

  “Don’t worry, Bud. I felt just as bad about this when I first figured it out. But we’ll get through this, you’ll see.”

  Bud snapped, “What are you talking about, Athena? How will we get through this?”

  “I’ve already taken the liberty of warning the authorities,” Athena said evenly. “I have made contact with the offices of the Presidents of Eurasia and America, and the leadership units in China. I began this process when the sunstorm was still under way. Bud, I didn’t want to disturb you. You were rather busy.”

  Bud said, “Athena—”

  “Just a minute,” Mikhail said. “Athena, let me get this straight. You sent your warning messages before we came online. So you figured all this out before Eugene and I reported our observations of the mass ejection to Colonel Tooke.”

  “Oh, yes,” Athena said brightly. “I didn’t mak
e my warnings on the basis of your observations. They just confirmed my theoretical predictions.”

  Eugene said, “What theoretical predictions?”

  Bud growled, “Mikhail, tell me what’s going on here.”

  “She seems to have figured out the particle storm,” Mikhail said, wondering. “Athena evidently ran her own models—and they were better than ours—and she saw the particle storm coming, where we couldn’t. That was how she was able to make her warnings to the authorities even while we were still struggling with the sunstorm itself.”

  “I am rather bright, you know,” Athena said without a trace of irony. “Remember that I am the most densely interconnected and processor-rich entity in the solar system. The failure of Eugene’s model, pushed to its extremes, was quite predictable. Not that any blame accrues. You did your best.”

  Eugene bridled visibly.

  “But my modeling—”

  Bud said, “Athena. No bullshit. How long before us did you figure this out?”

  “Oh, I’ve known since January.”

  Bud thought back. “Which was when you were switched on.”

  “I didn’t work it out immediately. It took me a while to process the data you had stored in me, and to come to a conclusion. But the implications were clear.”

  “How long did it take?—No, don’t answer that.” For an entity as smart as Athena it was quite possible that the answer would be mere microseconds after boot-up. “So,” he said heavily, “if you knew about this danger back then—why didn’t you tell us about it?”

  Athena sighed, as if he was being silly. “Why, Bud—what good would it have done?”

  The newborn Athena, suddenly knowing far more about the future than the humans who had created her, had immediately been faced with a dilemma.

  “In January the shield was already all but completed,” she said. “And its design had been, rightly, focused on protecting Earth from the visible light peak energy of the sunstorm. To protect against the particle storm as well would have required a totally different design. There simply wouldn’t have been time to make the changes. And if I had told you that you’d got it all wrong, there was a danger you would give up altogether on the shield, which really would have been disastrous.”