Great North Road (77 page)

“No quantum instabilities registering on our St. Libra detectors, sir. It doesn’t look like a Zanthswarm yet.”

“So this is just a natural phenomenon?”

The colonel turned to Toi. “Go ahead, Captain.”

“If it is a Zanthswarm, it’s a very unusual one.” She told her e-i to bring up the image. On the Sirius wall pane a large circle materialized, primarily composed of blue and yellow speckles. It was covered in dark splodges, like some kind of cancer chewing on a healthy organ. “We got lucky. The e-Rays being used by the expedition were built to operate during a Zanthswarm and provide us with additional communication relays. Part of their sensor suite is designed to look directly upward into space; we use the information they gather to feed our tactical base for the Thunderthorns. So far the expedition has just been using them to map the land beneath. I ordered them to scan up instead. What you’re seeing is a baseline composite image of Sirius in real time.”

“That’s good work, Captain,” the general said.

“Thank you, sir. Of course we can only see one half of Sirius from the planet, but we’re assuming this outbreak is uniform. The spots we’re observing are certainly well distributed.”

“Do we know when this started?”

“The science advisory team I’ve got has been measuring the expansion rate—we’re thinking the first ones started to develop about eighteen hours ago. Twelve have now reached seventy thousand kilometers in diameter and show no sign of contracting yet. Given the scale of Sirius, we’re expecting them to grow considerably larger than they do here at Sol, where they’ve been measured up to eighty thousand kilometers across.”

“All right, so what’s unusual about sunspots on a star?”

“Sir, Sirius has always been a sunspot-minimum star—it’s never been observed with anything approaching this kind of mass outbreak before. So far we’ve counted fifty-six sunspots. They usually erupt in pairs, because they’re driven by magnetic field twists in the photosphere. For this many to appear within such a relatively small time frame, something has to be agitating the whole star. And, sir, they’re still appearing. If anything the rate of emergence seems to be accelerating.”

Khurram Shaikh gave captain Toi a long look. “Agitating the star?”

“Yes, sir. The underlying origin of sunspots is the interaction between a star’s magnetic field and its convection zone. And the only thing we know that can operate on this kind of scale is the Zanth. Even so, it takes weeks for a convection layer disturbance to rise to the surface and produce a spot. This has been building for a while.”

“What about the companion, Sirius B?” the general asked. “Could that have triggered it?”

“The astronomers on the team don’t think so, sir. Right now Sirius B is still on an outward orbit; it’s twenty-three AUs from A. It’s difficult to see how it could affect the primary in this fashion at such a distance. If there was any interaction between the magnetic fields of both stars it would be when they’re at their closest. There have been two conjunctions since we opened a gateway to St. Libra, and nothing like this happened at either time.”

“So you’re considering an external event as the reason?”

“Given how stable Sirius usually is, the astronomy team believe that’s likely.”

“You said the disturbances take weeks to rise up through the convection zone,” Vermekia said. “So when did this agitation actually start? Could it have been back in January?”

“Possibly. The time scale isn’t exact. We’d need to have a much greater knowledge of the star’s internal structure, which we simply don’t have. Nobody ever put solar science satellites in orbit there.”

“You said the astronomy team thinks this might be due to an external event,” the general said. “Does that imply there’s another theory floating around?”

Toi gave the colonel a desperate look, which he ignored. “There is one other thing to consider,” she blurted.

“What is it?” Shaikh asked patiently.

“Sir, there’s something called the Red Controversy.”

“The what?”

“There is some evidence that Sirius once turned red.”

“Red, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. There are records of old astronomers recording Sirius as having a red coloration.”

“When was this?”

“Sir, eh, 150 BC was the first recorded instance.”

“Are you joking, Captain?”

“Sir, no sir. There have been several such inconsistencies in astronomical accounts in early history. They all happened prior to the invention of the telescope, so there’s no modern verifiable proof available. But the legend persisted for some time. There was even a tribe in Africa that supposedly knew about Sirius B centuries before telescopes confirmed its existence.”

“I’m glad you’re doing your homework, Captain, but exactly how is this folklore relevant?”

“Two things, sir.” She glanced up at the pane as the center’s AI bracketed a newly emerging sunspot. “We don’t know how many sunspots will erupt. If they continue at the current rate the overall luminosity may conceivably fall.”

“And the spectrum will redshift,” the general concluded. “Very good.”

“In which case we’ll have to admit there’s a very long-term natural cycle at work inside Sirius, something that might produce this kind of phenomenon only every two thousand years. The reports from the forward camps and the areas outlying Highcastle do seem to support this, too.”

“How?”

“Every plant on the planet is releasing its spores—that has to be an evolutionary trait. The jungles are bracing themselves for a storm. Some of the botanists are claiming the leaves may be sensitive to spectrum shift. However the plants know, they’re right to react in this fashion. The high-energy particle streams being ejected by this sunspot phase are colossal. Those storms are going to hit the planet in a few hours, and the effect they’ll have on all our electrical systems there is going to be extremely detrimental.”

“Will it affect the gateway?” the general asked sharply.

“Nobody knows, sir. But the atmosphere will be in turmoil once the particles start to energize the upper layers.”

“Yes. I see your point. So we’ve confirmed something unusual is happening, and yet we still don’t know if it is natural or Zanth-related.”

“And we might want to consider if it originated from St. Libra itself,” Vermekia said.

“How could that be, Major?” Shaikh asked.

“We’ve got a lot of unlikely coincidences starting to accumulate here, sir, especially after last night’s incident at Wukang.”

“There’s no genetic variance,” Fendes said. “None at all. The Norths are sending assassin clones to kill each other, or some such nonsense. Now you’re suggesting that an unseen, unknown alien running around a jungle with a spear can also interfere with a star’s convection layer?”

“The St. Libra aliens are not unknown,” Vermekia answered smoothly. “They are real enough to have killed several HDA personnel already. They also understand our technology well enough to circumvent most of it. To me that is a clear indication of highly developed abilities.”

“There is no animal life on St. Libra,” Fendes insisted.

“And what about the species that bioformed that world? If the geneticists on the expedition have shown nothing else, it is the extremely advanced evolution of the plant life, which given the age of the star is frankly impossible. Are you going to cherry-pick their results? St. Libra is a huge enigma that we have been ignoring for too long.” He jabbed a finger at the big pane with its sickly star dominating the center. “That is not a natural event. Something is happening out there, and we have to find out what.”

Shaikh nodded. “In that at least, we are in agreement. Captain, what options do you have to expand our information on Sirius?”

“Very limited, sir,” Toi said.

“But you do have something for me?”

“Realistically, there’s only one thing we can do at this point, but it’s expensive.”

“I’m the one who deals with politicians and their national treasurers, Captain. Let me make that decision.”

“Yes, sir. We have several batches of multifunction sensor satellites in storage at our Cape Town base ready to be deployed in a Zanthswarm. They’re intended to bolster the surveillance clusters above whatever planet is being attacked, so their systems are battle-hardened. If we were to open a war gateway above Sirius and inject them into orbit around the star they should be able to function in those conditions for a while, and supply us the data we need.”

“Break into war stocks?” The general seemed slightly bemused by the prospect. “Very well. You have the authorization to begin that operation. Colonel Fendes, liaise with the Cape Town base commander. Make this happen fast. I want to know what’s happening in that bedamned star system.”

W
EDNESDAY,
M
ARCH 20, 2143

It wasn’t the peculiar light that woke Saul Howard, but the sound. The sea was wrong. Living at Camilo Beach for so long, the sounds of the waves sloshing across the sands were ingrained. This morning the sound, the rhythm, of the waves was different somehow. Saul lay in bed for several minutes trying to figure out what exactly had changed. It was subdued, he decided, as if the tide had taken the water out like it did back on Earth rather than St. Libra’s gentle ebbing.

Sunspots can’t do that,
he thought,
can they?

He realized Emily was awake beside him. Turned his head to see her looking at him. Hazy light that shimmered slowly between pink and nankeen was stealing past the shutters, dappling the bed. It wasn’t a light that he’d ever seen before, so he didn’t know if it was morning or the middle of the night.

Emily smiled gently, though the strange shifting light allowed him to see the uncertainty haunting her. Yesterday, with the news of the sunspot outbreak dominating the transnet, had proved unsettling, and additional reports were coming in that the expedition was in some kind of trouble, that people were dying out in the jungle. The news sites didn’t have names, so he didn’t know who, which troubled him deeply. This wasn’t life as it should be in Abellia.

He watched in silence as she moved the thin duvet aside. Her hands slid the PJs over her hips and down her legs. Then his beautiful young wife slipped sinuously on top of him, naked and hungry, soft hair swishing across his chest, reaching for him, effortlessly coaxing him erect. A long involuntary sigh of delight escaped her mouth as she slowly impaled herself. Hands entwined, gripping hard. Neither of them said a word as they began to move together. There was an urgency to her he hadn’t known for a long time, perhaps not even since the first few months after they became lovers. Now she wanted the physical contact, needed the comfort and reassurance it bestowed. So did he.

There was a long time afterward when they held each other close, still silent. Kissing and smiling, hands stroking, exploring as if they’d never known each other before. An intimacy that held the world at arm’s length.

Eventually he glanced at the clock. Frowned. It was stuck on twenty-three seventeen. Yet he knew it was close to morning. The aurora borealis that the solar flares had brought to St. Libra’s atmosphere must be affecting the house’s electrical systems.

“I need to find out what’s happened to the sea,” he told her.

“I know. I hear it, too.”

They put on toweling robes and went out through the kitchen’s patio doors. When he asked his e-i to show him the time, it flashed up five fifty-seven in his grid. The fact that the sophisticated program was unaffected by the solar flare was good news. At least part of the house’s net was still functioning.

Outside, the sky was alive with the fluorescence of the aurora, sending tremendous rivers of pale color undulating through the upper atmosphere. They were considerably brighter than the ringlight. Despite himself, Saul had to marvel at the naked display of energy.

Still holding hands they made their way over the sheltered patio and onto the familiarity of dry warm sands. He was mildly relieved to see that the waterline was in the right place. Not that he’d
really
believed the sea was in retreat, but …

When they got to the line of damp sand, Saul’s first thought was that there’d been some kind of bioil spill. In the electron-kindled light from above the water was dark, slick, its viscosity altered by some unknown alchemy. Mysterious and threatening, it sucked and gurgled aggressively on the sand. There was no surf anymore; waves had become smooth elongated ripples, their power dampened as they slid ashore. And worse, the water was lumpy.

“What is that?” Emily asked in a disconcerted murmur. Her hand tightened its grip on Saul.

His looked from the ripples that strained to reach his bare feet, across the mild swell, all the way to a horizon where the rings and borealis streamers struggled for supremacy. The entire sea had the same syrupy constituency. He drew down a breath, tasting air full of tangy sulfur brine. And he finally knew what he was seeing.

“They’re jelly bubbles,” he said incredulously. “Millions of them.”

As with the land on St. Libra, so with the water. The planet’s seas had no fish, no shells or plankton. Not even coral. There was only seaweed; and the dominant plant, certainly around the coastlines, was the ubiquitous jelly bubble. A gluttonous, almost translucent ovoid as wide as a human hand, suffused with seed like a limpid pomegranate. It grew on a simple ribbon rooted in sand. When ripe, the ribbon would molt away, releasing the jelly bubble, which would then float up to the surface and be carried on the fate of wind and tide as it, too, slowly began to decay, shedding seeds as it went.

The sea before Saul had been smothered in a carpet of jelly bubbles, millions of them jostling together in a squishy coagulating mess. Somehow they had all broken free of their anchor ribbons simultaneously overnight, ripe or not. Now they were decomposing in turn, saturating the water with a slushy avalanche of seed.

“This is crazy,” Emily said. “How could they know? They said on the transnet news all the plants released their spores because their leaves sensed the sun changing. But how would the jelly bubbles know to do that?”