EDEN (7 page)

‘What is it?’ Jake asked.

Bradley dropped the piece of paper. Cody could see it contained a hand-written note.

‘We’re screwed, is what it is,’ Bradley uttered.

Cody looked down at the paper as Jake read from it out loud.

‘Brad, Sauri. Evacuation order given at one hour notice. No details. Forced to pull out regardless of situation. All personnel accounted for except yourselves and the American team. Asked for time to find you. Denied. Advised that the scientists would need protecting until our return. No date given for this. Sit tight buddy, whatever the hell’s happened I’m sure we’ll be back before long. Keys on the table for Polaris Hall to let us know you’re okay. Light left on so you’d find them. Probably get my ass kicked for it but hell, I don’t like seeing men get left behind. Best of luck, Tyrone and the guys.’

Cody looked at the keys Bradley held. The soldier hefted them thoughtfully for a moment and then shrugged as though he wasn’t bothered.

‘Let’s go and see what we can find.’

Bradley led them across the base to Polaris Hall, the communication centre, a blocky building festooned with satellite dishes and aerials. Bradley unlocked the door and they walked in to find the interior silent but warm: the departing soldiers had left the heating on to protect the computer stations and sensitive devices within.

‘Bingo,’ Bradley said as he pointed at a series of computer terminals. ‘We’ve got power here.’

A series of small blinking lights winked at them from what looked to Cody like a bank of supercomputers humming in a room next door. Bradley hit the lights, fluorescent tubes clicking as they flickering into life.

A large map of Russia and Alaska dominated one wall of the room, marked with pins and lines drawn on a protective acrylic sheet covering the map. Clocks above the map tracked time zones across the region.

‘Missile silos in the former Soviet Union,’ Jake guessed as he looked at the map. ‘They must still listen in on them.’

‘All the time,’ Bradley replied as he moved from one computer to another, switching them back on.

The room began to fill with the hum of hard drives as the screens lit up one by one. Cody watched as Bradley finished his sweep of the room and stood back.

‘All of these computers will have access pass codes which I don’t possess,’ he said as he looked at Jake.

‘So what’s the point in starting them up?’

Bradley gestured to a pair of large monitors mounted upon the rear wall of the room.

‘Those two monitors relay electromagnetic signals from the listening station. The signals are crunched by the supercomputers and run through these stations before reaching those screens. Even though we can’t access the stations themselves, the information being detected by the satellite dishes will still automatically pass through and reach the monitors.’

‘Good enough,’ Jake replied as he turned to look at the two screens.

As the computers hummed so the screens both blinked and a graph appeared on each, a time line and a frequency scale a little like a heart monitor in a hospital. Running along the graph was a line that hovered around a mark on the graph calibrated as “zero / background”.

Cody, Jake, Bradley and Sauri waited for the line to pick up as the dishes outside relayed their information.

And waited.

Bradley shook his head. ‘That’s not possible, man.’

‘Where’s the signals?’ Jake asked the soldier.

Bradley shook his head. ‘I’ve been up here on rotation for four months. That screen has always recorded something. There’s always a signal, even if it’s just a bunch of asshole truck-drivers talking over the airwaves. The damned thing’s always alive.’

‘What does background and zero mean?’ Cody asked, already suspecting the answer but unwilling to admit it to himself.

For the first time, Sauri spoke in a clear accent touched with a slight Canadian drawl.

‘Background radiation, from natural processes.’

Jake stared at the screen for a few moments longer and then he turned to Cody.

‘You realise what this means?’

Cody tried to think of something to say but no words came forth. He felt a quiver of apprehension as he looked into Jake McDermott’s eyes and saw a glimmer of something he’d never expected to witness there: fear.

‘There’s nobody out there,’ Jake said. ‘The whole world’s gone silent.’

***

The team reconvened in the Alert Five building.

Cody had spent the entire journey back from the base in a stupor, unable to grasp the magnitude of what had happened. First and foremost in his mind was Maria, and close beside her, Danielle. He had not yet been able to find in himself the frantic fear for their safety that must surely come upon him soon, and he realised that it was because he simply could not allow himself to believe what the instruments at Alert were telling him.

The world had fallen silent.

The rest of the team took the news in a similar kind of stupefied silence.

Bethany, Charlotte, Reece and Bobby were sat in a row across a bench at the rear of the communal room. Bradley and Sauri leaned against the wall nearby, their rifles slung across their backs. Jake stood in front of the darkened windows as Cody leaned against the closed door and listened to Jake.

‘Okay, it’s now eleven fifty three in the morning. Our connection to the outside world was lost approximately eight hours ago. We’ve lost our transmitters, receivers and electrical power here, but there is nothing wrong with those at Canadian Forces Station Alert. That means that for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom there are no signals being broadcast from anywhere in the world within range of this station.’ He sighed. ‘Given CFS Alert’s sensitivity, that may well mean the world in its entirety. Opinions, people.’

Nobody spoke for a long time. The room felt sombre, filled with an unspoken dread frozen in place by the Arctic chill.

‘Could be atmospheric,’ Cody finally forced himself to break the silence. ‘Maybe some kind of temperature anomaly that’s blocking signals?’

Jake looked across at Reece, who shook his head, his black fringe swaying across his eyes.

‘It’s possible, but unlikely. Temperature inversions in water can create channels of silence where submarines like to operate, and similar things can happen in the atmosphere but not with enough variation to block all signals. Something would always get through.’

‘What about fossil fuels running out?’ Bethany asked. ‘Oil runs everything, right?’

‘Wouldn’t stop the broadcasts so fast,’ Jake said. ‘There’d be generators running, nuclear power stations would still supply fuel to cities and so on. We wouldn’t be cut off so quickly.’

Bobby Leary raised a hand, his face pinched with concern.

‘What about a nuclear war?’ he said in a voice that seemed hushed, as though he were afraid to raise the possibility.

Jake looked across at Bradley.

‘I don’t think so,’ the soldier said. ‘CFS Alert’s monitoring equipment would have recorded the blasts, and there would have to have been hundreds of them to silence literally everything. Every city would have needed a direct hit. If that had happened we’d see it in the atmosphere even out here, the smog and debris and from so many cities burning.’

‘I suppose,’ Bobby said, ‘although I’ve heard that nuclear weapons emit an electromagnetic pulse that can fry electronics, shutting them down for good. Maybe that could have….’

‘It wasn’t a bomb,’ Charlotte said simply.

Everybody fell silent as Charlotte kicked off the bench and landed with a thump, staring into space.

‘How can you be sure?’ Jake asked.

‘The aurora, last night,’ she replied. ‘It coincided with the loss of signals from outside?’

‘Roughly,’ Cody agreed.

‘We lost satellite communication at the same time that the aurora started,’ Jake added.

Charlotte ran a hand through the thick tresses of her hair then turned to face them.

‘I know what happened,’ she said finally. ‘It’s why I tried to shut the power down here, and why it came back on all on its own. It was caused by something known as a Coronal Mass Ejection.’

‘A what?’ Bradley uttered.

‘A solar storm,’ Charlotte explained. ‘Giant blasts of solar material a thousand times larger than our planet normally held in loops of the sun’s magnetic field. Some of these loops become large enough that they break free of the solar surface and blast across the solar system. They occur every day, but most times we don’t know anything about them as the Earth’s magnetic field deflects any that head directly for us, causing the
aurora borealis
and
aurora australis
as waves of charged particles batter our atmosphere.’

‘Okay,’ Bobbie said. ‘So far, so normal, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Charlotte agreed, ‘but just a few years ago NASA took the unprecedented step of making a global warning about the possibility of solar super-storms over the next decade or so. The sun works in eleven year cycles, pulsing up and down in its level of activity. If a major super-storm coincided with a weakened magnetic field here on Earth, which is what we’re experiencing right now, then there would be nothing to deflect the storm itself.’ She looked across at Jake. ‘It would strike the Earth’s surface, perhaps for hours.’

‘In English, for Christ’s sake,’ Bradley shot at her. ‘What the hell’s happened?’

‘It’s like the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon,’ she said, ‘but many orders of magnitude greater and across the entire planet.’

Bradley stared at her. Beside him, Sauri spoke. ‘The whole planet?’

Charlotte nodded, her brow furrowed.

‘The huge power of the blast bathes the atmosphere with charged particles. They in turn hit ground level and strike power grids, navigation devices, computers, cell phones — anything with a current running through it. The extra power overheats the circuit, whatever it is, and either melts it or blows it up. Silicon chips run virtually everything, and without them… ’

‘There’s no power, no electricity,’ Reece finished the sentence for her.

‘Instantly?’ Bethany asked, and was rewarded with a nod from Charlotte.

‘How could it happen across the whole planet?’ Cody asked.

Charlotte glanced out of the window into the darkness.

‘The storm lasted for hours, and the Earth revolves as it moves through space in orbit around the sun. That storm could have hit pretty much the entire planet, enough to take out every single industrialised nation. ‘

Cody felt a new and nauseating pulse of alarm thread its way through his body.

‘But the authorities must have known about this. They must have had some kind of contingency plan?’

Charlotte scoffed in disgust.

‘NASA and the European Space Agency have been shouting about the dangers of a major solar storm for years. Every administration has simply ignored them. Governments across Europe ignored them. In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences published a report detailing the potential collapse of the United States technological base and the subsequent fall of civilisation as we know it.’ She shook her head. ‘Nobody took any notice.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ Jake said. ‘The population isn’t going to disappear because of this. They’ll rebuild the infrastructure. They’ll get the power back on, get things moving again, right?’

Reece shook his head.

‘It’s not a problem of technical repair. It’s an issue of scale. We’re not talking about a few transformers popping or a couple of GPS satellites going off line. It’s every single electricity-reliant system on the planet. Power grids and stations, financial systems, water plants, air travel, transport, farming, communications, computers — everything. There’s no way the whole thing could be repaired in time to prevent a collapse. With no power there will be no heat, no light, no fresh water from taps, no hospitals, no military, no nothing. Within days people will be suffering from starvation and dehydration. They’ll eat mouldy food, drink contaminated water. Sickness will emerge, and from that, pandemics. Make no mistake about it: if Charlotte’s right about this storm then everything’s about to go to hell.’

‘How would you know all of that?’ Bradley snapped.

‘I’m a
prepper
,’ Reece replied. ‘My folks lived out in Montana, spent their entire lives waiting for some goddamned apocalypse that never came. Oil running out, new Ice Age, super volcanoes — you name it, they worried about it. Didn’t worry about smoking though, which was what got them both in the end. I learned a lot from them over the years and kept a little emergency stash just in case. Trouble is all my damned survival gear is back in Great Falls.’

‘Jesus,’ Bradley uttered. ‘That’s why you’re so damned sociable.’

‘How come this hasn’t happened before?’ Bethany asked Charlotte.

‘It has,’ Charlotte said. ‘In 1859 the Carrington Event, a major geomagnetic solar storm, hit the Earth. The aurora was visible even over the Caribbean. They were so bright during the night over the Rocky Mountains that miners began preparing breakfast, believing the sun to be rising behind the clouds. Telegraph systems across the United States were totally blown, often shocking the operators and settling paper alight, and the telegraphs often carried messages even after they’d been unplugged, such was the charge.’

Cody’s mind focused on Danielle and Maria as Charlotte went on.

‘It happened again in 1989, when a minor storm took out the Hydro-Quebec power grid for nine hours. This isn’t a rare occurrence. It’s just that in recent decades we’ve become so reliant on electrical energy that we’ve become vulnerable to these storms.’

‘Couldn’t they have sent a warning?’ Bobby asked her. ‘The government I mean, or people watching the sun? That’s your speciality, right?’

‘Yeah, it is,’ she agreed. ‘But it depends on the energy of the blast. Normally they take three or four days to reach the Earth, plenty of warning time. But the storm in 1859 got to us in seventeen hours because a previous, smaller event had cleared the path between the sun and the Earth of solar debris and particles. The sun is currently at its solar maximum, at its most ferocious. If this recent storm was also ejected after a smaller outburst then it could have travelled here in twelve hours or less. There would be no time. The best that governments could do is attempt a shut down of the global power system to mitigate the damage, but even that might not work if the storm was powerful enough.’