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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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Sarah took a pew next to Scott as the epigraphist chewed his pen and puzzled over another photograph, asking: “How long have we got?”
Scott glanced to Hackett who checked his watch. “Three minutes.”
Scott blew air anxiously and smacked his lips. He looked up at the cross behind the altar. His knee was bouncing up and down furiously. “Boy,” he said, “it puts a whole new perspective on this when you know these things are coming.”
Sarah took his hand in hers and squeezed it gently. “Where are you from, Richard?”
“Seattle,” he sighed. “Y'know, it's such a pretty city,” he said with passion. “It's condensed, see. There isn't much in the way of sprawling suburbs so you're never far from the countryside. You can hike, bike, sail. Mountains and lakes are all over. Forests … everything is this dark, dark green, y'know?” Sarah nodded like she did. “Douglas Fir, Broad Leaf Maple, Mountain Ash, Red Alder, Dogwood … You can go out into the country, then come back, get a coffee in Starbucks and feel like you actually went someplace. We've got two hundred and fifty-eight bridges in Seattle—every kind of bridge you can think of, coz of all the lakes. We've
even got two floating bridges. Some people say it's because it's a city full of gaps, socially as well as topographically, but I think it's full of bridges because it's full of people who are going places. And nothing's gonna stand in their way.” He thought about that for a moment. “I'll miss that if it goes.”
Matheson groaned as he took the weight off his feet and sat down next to them. “I went to Seattle once. It pissed down all week.”
“Where are
you
from?” Sarah asked.
“San Francisco. You?”
“Stillwater, Wisconsin.” Sarah eyed Hackett perceptively. The physicist seemed to be deep in thought. “How about you, Jon?”
“Me?” She nodded encouragingly. “I was born on a military base in Germany,” he said. “Spent a couple years in Hawaii, then Japan. We moved around a lot. I live in New York half the year now, spend three months of the year in Santa Fe down at the Institute. Travel … I travel a lot. I'll miss planes.”
“But not the food,” Sarah joked.
“No, not the food,” Hackett agreed. “Plane food is, uh, something else. But they do try, bless 'em.” He checked his watch again but didn't say anything.
Pearce pulled up behind them alongside November. “When I was fourteen I swore I saw a UFO land in the backyard. Told everybody at school and got the crap beat out of me. But I was telling the truth. It
had
been flying and as far as I was concerned, it
was
unidentified. How the hell was I supposed to know what a weather balloon looked like? When I was sixteen, I kissed the Homecoming Queen. And again I got the crap beat out of me. For lying. But I wasn't lying.”
November was confused. “What are you saying? You're gonna miss getting beat up?”
“No,” Bob explained. “I'm gonna miss the nonbelievers.”
Gant scooted up next to them. “Oh, they're not going anywhere,” he said. “Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.”
The pretty young assistant smiled at that as she noticed
Scott and Sarah holding hands, but she kept her comments to herself. Suddenly from a side door a mass of other scientists and technicians, mostly men, pale-looking and drawn, and sporting well-established beards, came in followed by a priest. He carried a vid-phone in his hands and set it down in the center of the altar as if it were a revered icon. He addressed the congregation nervously, and as the others took their seats it was the first clear indication the team had been given that they had found themselves slap in the middle of a real frontier town.
“We've had word from all across the world,” the priest announced. “The warning signal has been given. They started evacuating the cities some time ago …” His voice faltered. “But there really isn't anywhere safe to go.”
Matheson leaned across Hackett to catch Scott's ear. “Anyway,” he whispered, “I thought you didn't believe in Jesus?”
Scott shifted uncomfortably. “At this juncture I'm willing to open it up for discussion.”
The priest fiddled with the vid-phone and keyed the connection. “We're joined in today's service by Father McRack, who's coming to us today, live from the Vatican.”
Scott snapped his head back. “Fergus?” But he was too far from the phone to be heard.
Fergus, a well-lit head and shoulders on the screen, peered solemnly out at the congregation. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Let me welcome you all to McMurdo Chapel, a cross-denominational chapel, and I thank the authorities for allowing the Catholic Church to be a part of the service today. In a moment we shall bow our heads in prayer and ask God …”
Sarah leaned in close to Scott, whispering: “I just had a thought. What day is it today?”
Scott had to think for a moment. “Friday.”
November leaned in too. “It's Good Friday,” she corrected. “This is the day Jesus dies. On Sunday we get the resurrection.”
Scott couldn't mask his surprise. It had been such a hectic week he had completely forgotten about Easter. Suddenly everybody was standing, opening their hymn books and following
Fergus's instructions. A CD of organ music whirred into life and filtered around the congregation, and it was at that point Hackett's watch alarm began chirping.
“It's time,” he said, before joining the others and bursting into song.
“Ah-bide with me …”
Helium, named after the Greek sun god,
Helios
.
At the heart of the sun's 320,000 km diameter core, under unimaginable pressures, vast, god-like quantities of hydrogen were being heated to 14 million degrees Celsius, and were fusing in an almost eternal nuclear reaction to form helium.
Surrounding the core in a radioactive layer that sought to fuel the core at similar temperatures was a sea of hydrogen just waiting to be seized upon. And it was here, buried within the depths of the sun's heart that trouble had already begun. And a chain of events had been set in motion.
For the sun's core spun on its axis, at an entirely different rate to the hydrogen layer. And the tendrils of magnetic force that encapsulated the massive body had already started to snag and twist, warp and tighten.
Above the radioactive hydrogen layer, the rising and falling currents of the convection zone had already begun to falter in response to the magnetic interference from below. Great bulges on the surface of the core, like warts, two or three times the size of planet Earth were forming and whizzing around as the core continued its relentless rotation. And in so doing, the bulges started to act like blades on a blender, churning up the inner mass of the sun. Disturbing its equilibrium.
Vast swathes of the convection zone that should have been dropping to temperatures around the 1.5 million degrees Celsius mark were remaining abnormally high. While other areas were cooling off too rapidly. The conveyor belt of convection was snapping. Disintegrating. And all that was
reaching the photosphere and corona were intermittent pockets of cooling plasma being whipped about in a confused mass of magnetic flux.
They first started to appear at 40 degrees latitude—the cool dark patches known as umbra, and the lighter outer patches known as penumbra: together, known as sunspots. They were collecting like measles all over the surface of the sun, where the temperatures had dropped to a comparatively minuscule 7,200 degrees Celsius. And the sunspots were even cooler, up to 2,000 degrees cooler.
Some were small, maybe 1,500 km across. Others were as much as 5,000 km across—the size of the continental United States at a push. Yet compared with the entire earth's paltry 0.5 gauss magnetic field strength, these sunspots measured anywhere between 100 to 4,000 gauss. A field strength so large that if that kind of magnetism were embedded in the ceiling of a person's apartment, the earth's gravity could be increased threefold and there would still be no way of peeling him off its surface. There was enough iron in his blood to keep him there.
They were gathering now, the sunspots. Moving closer and closer toward the sun's equator. A dark, mottled effect that actively distorted the light searing out from the sun, and causing it to flicker.
This was magnetism, gravity, visible light and nuclear forces, both the strong and weak, having a family argument. They were all interrelated, like cousins. And all slugging it out with each other on a gigantic scale, at both the visible and the invisible level. Like colossal kings of nature they were twisting up their home and hurling it at each other. Disrupting space with their fury.
In “halo” orbit, 1.5 million kilometers above the earth, at the exact point where the sun and the earth's gravity canceled each other out, the battery of twenty-one telescopes and sensors aboard the
Solar Heliospheric III
observation satellite
suddenly kicked into gear as they caught activity 92 million miles away on the surface of the troubled star.
Coming into view around the eastern rim was a series of sunspots so dark and ominous, so massive that they could have contained the earth 300 times over. While snaking between them, looping in and out across the entire surface, were tubules of super-heated plasma caught like bottled fireflies within the confines of magnetic loops that twisted and turned, sewn into and out of the very fabric of the sun. Making the entire star resemble for one brief moment, a raging fiery ball of string on a galactic scale.
The signs were unmistakable. Like the trumpeting of heralds announcing a chariot race.
The sun was about to blow.
As it rotated, it became apparent that not one, but eight separate solar flares had ejected massively into space. They began as bright spots within the sunspot groups and spread like wildfire, glowing magnesium white against the sun's duller yellow for hundreds of thousands of square miles. Expanding exponentially until in an instant, billions upon billions of tons of radiation and matter exploded off the sun's surface, while simultaneously the sun appeared to wobble slightly, caught off-guard at the sudden loss in mass as the ejecta headed out, disrupting the sun's density.
In effect the sun had just pulsed another gravity wave.
—INITIATING SAFETY PROTOCOL ONE—
They were commands that had been uploaded to the craft in the last few days. Independent control of the onboard ion thrusters by
Soho III
so it could attempt to remain in halo orbit every time there was a gravity pulse.
The fact
Soho III
had just seen the ejecta on the sun meant the gravity wave, which traveled at the same speed as light, had already swept through.
The satellite was already out of alignment. It had to get back into position, and it had to do it soon. It had communications to re-establish. It had a warning to pass on.
The fastest solar flares ever measured traveled in the region of anywhere upward of 2 million mph.
These were traveling at 10 million mph.
One would be arriving in a little over nine hours.
And it was immense.
They were called P-waves. Fast pressure waves that were the first waves to be detected by seismographs when earthquakes started to erupt.
All over the planet, COSY—Comparison and Verification of Synthetic Seismogram—monitors were springing into action, sounding the alarm that the worst-case scenario for global seismic-wave propagation was actually taking place. That real data was matching theoretical data.
That planet Earth was up shit creek. And no amount of paddling was going to help.
In the twentieth century, statistics showed that when all the earthquakes that had ever struck were totaled into a single event, two million people had been killed in a quake that lasted less than an hour.
In the last three days the total earthquake activity had already lasted fifteen minutes and the death toll had risen past 500,000.
Currently, 21 percent of the entire earth's surface was shaking violently, caught in tremors, pre-tremors and aftershocks. Seven percent of those earthquakes were happening in overpopulated areas. And of the 8 billion people on planet Earth, 900 million lived in cities that were situated in the middle of earthquake-prone zones.
In San Francisco the shifting faultline sent out a crack like a rifle shot. The ground simply opened up with a
boom
!—dropping 50 feet on one side.
Within 30 seconds water mains had burst, gas pipes had exploded, glass had shattered and torn the running tourists to shreds. Fire trucks found they didn't have enough water to fight the blazes that were eating through the city. Elevated roads tumbled. And all buildings of a certain height were
shaken to pieces as the ground wave set up a resonance within those buildings and tore them apart.
Within a further 30 seconds, much of the lower Bay Area was reduced to a memory, while winds of extraordinary ferocity blasted through, whipping up the blazes into a raging firestorm.
At the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, they were watching Tornado Alley as their boards lit up like slot machines hitting the jackpot. But they weren't spitting silver dollars, rather magnitude 4 and 5 tornadoes, some of them up to a mile wide and touching down all over the Midwest.
In New Zealand, Mount Ruapehu had now blown its top, adding to an ever-increasing list of volcanoes that had suddenly gone active. But Ruapehu was different in that it had done more than merely trigger a few avalanches. Like the 1883 Krakatoa event when the explosion of a volcano sank an entire island, the explosion could be heard 3,000 miles away. The amount of dust thrown into the air was turning day to night for 160 miles in all directions.
 
At McMurdo they braced themselves for being swept away by the massive water reservoirs held at bay by the cracking glaciers at the base of Mount Erebus.
But mercifully the deluge didn't come.
It was like a prayer had been answered, and it gave Scott a chance to talk to his old friend, Fergus.

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