Sunstorm (3 page)

Mikhail forced a smile. “We’ll talk it over. Come inside. You can see as much data as you want. Do you like coffee?”

“They have to listen,” said Eugene.

They?
. . . “About what?”

“The end of the world,” Eugene said. “Possibly.” He led the way into the dustlock, leaving Mikhail standing openmouthed.

They didn’t talk as they worked their way through dustlock and airlock into the hab. Every human on the Moon was still a pioneer, and if you were smart, no matter what was on your mind, as you moved from one safe environment to another through seals and locks and interfaces and in and out of EVA suits, you concentrated on nothing but the life-preserving procedures you were going through. If you
weren’t
smart, of course, you would be lucky if you were forcibly shipped out before you killed yourself, or others.

Mikhail, slick with daily practice, was first out of his EVA suit. As the suit slithered to its cleaning station—somewhat grotesquely, its servos dragging it across the floor like an animated flayed skin—Mikhail, in his underwear, went to a sink where he scrubbed his hands in a slow trickle of water. The gray-black dust he had picked up handling the suit, grimy despite the dustlock’s best efforts, had rubbed into his pores and under his nails, and was burning slowly with his skin’s natural oils, giving off a smell like gunpowder. The Moon’s dust had been a problem since the first footsteps taken here: very fine, getting everywhere, and oxidizing enthusiastically whenever it got the chance, the dust corroded everything from mechanical bearings to human mucous membranes.

Of course it wasn’t the engineering problems of Moon dust that were on Mikhail’s mind right now. He risked a look around. Eugene had taken off boots and gloves, and he lifted his helmet away, shaking his beautiful head to free up thick hair. That was the face Mikhail remembered, the face he had first glimpsed at some meaningless social function in Clavius or Armstrong—a face freshly hardened into manhood, but with the symmetry and delicacy of boyhood, even if the eyes were a little wild—the face that had drawn him as helplessly as a moth to a candle.

As Eugene stripped off his spacesuit Mikhail couldn’t help dwelling on an old memory. “Eugene, have you ever heard of
Barbarella
?”

Eugene frowned. “Is she at Clavius?”

“No, no. I mean an old space movie. I’m something of a buff of pre-spaceflight cinema. A young actress called Jane Fonda . . .” Eugene clearly had no idea what he was talking about. “Never mind.”

Mikhail made his way to the dome’s small shower cubicle, stripped off the last of his clothing, and stood under a jet. The water emerged slowly, in big shimmering low-gravity droplets that fell with magical slowness to the floor, where suction pumps drew in every last precious molecule. Mikhail lifted his face to the stream, trying to calm himself.

Thales said gently, “I’ve brewed some coffee, Mikhail.”

“Thales, that was thoughtful.”

“Everything is under control.”

“Thank you . . .” Sometimes it really was as if Thales knew Mikhail’s moods.

Thales was actually a less sophisticated clone of Aristotle, who was an intelligence emergent from a hundred billion Earth-side computers of all sizes and the networks that linked them. A remote descendant of the search engines of the late twentieth century, Aristotle had become a great electronic mind whose thoughts crackled like lightning across the wired-up face of the Earth; for years he had been a constant companion to all humankind.

When humans had begun their permanent occupation of the Moon at Clavius Base, it had been inconceivable that they should not take Aristotle with them. But it takes light more than a second to travel from Earth to the Moon, and in an environment where death lurks a single error away, such delays were unacceptably long. So Thales had been created, a lunar copy of Aristotle. Thales was updated continually from Aristotle’s great memory stores—but he was necessarily simpler than his parent, for the electronic nervous system laid across the Moon was still rudimentary compared to the Earth’s.

Simpler or not, Thales did his job. He was certainly smart enough to justify the name he had been given: Thales of Miletus, a sixth-century Greek, had been the first to suggest that the Moon shone not by its own light but by reflection from the sun—and, it was said, he had been the first man to predict a solar eclipse.

For everybody on the Moon, Thales was always there. Often lonely despite his stoical determination, Mikhail had been soothed by Thales’s measured, somewhat emotionless voice.

Right now, thinking wistfully of Eugene, he felt he needed soothing.

He knew that Eugene was based at Tsiolkovski. The huge Farside crater was host to an elaborate underground facility. Buried in the still, cold Moon, undisturbed by tremors, shadowed from Earth’s radio clamor and shielded from all radiation except for a little leakage from trace quantities in the lunar rocks, it was an ideal location for hunting neutrinos. Those ghost-like particles scooted through most solid matter as if it weren’t even there, thus providing unique data about such inaccessible places as the center of the sun.

But how odd to come all the way to the Moon, and then to burrow into the regolith to do your science, Mikhail thought. There were so many more glamorous places to work—such as the big planet-finder telescope array laid out in a North Pole crater, capable of resolving the surfaces of Earth-like planets orbiting suns spread across fifty light-years.

He longed to discuss this with Eugene, to share something of his life, his impressions of the Moon. But he knew he must keep his reactions to the younger man in appropriate categories.

Since his teens, when he had become fully aware of his sexuality, Mikhail had learned to master his reactions: even in the early twenty-first century, homosexuality was still something of a taboo in Vladivostok. Discovering in himself a powerful intellect, Mikhail had thrown himself into work, and had grown used to a life lived largely alone. He had hoped that when he moved away from home, as his career took him through the rest of the sprawling Eurasian Union as far as London and Paris, and then, at last, off the Earth entirely, he would find himself in more tolerant circles. Well, so he had; but by then it seemed he had grown too used to his own company.

His life of almost monastic isolation had been broken by a few passionate, short-lived love affairs. But now, in his midforties, he was coming to accept the fact that he was never likely to find a partner to share his life. That didn’t make him immune to feelings, however. Before today he had barely spoken two words to this handsome boy, Eugene, but that, evidently, had been enough to develop a foolish crush.

He had to put it all aside, though. Whatever Eugene had come to Shackleton for, it wasn’t for Mikhail.

The end of the world,
the boy had said. Frowning, Mikhail toweled himself dry.

5: Emergency Management

Siobhan was taken to the Council Room on the first floor of the Royal Society building. The room’s centerpiece was an oval conference table large enough to seat twenty or more, but Siobhan was alone here save for Toby Pitt. She sat at the head of the table uncertainly. On the wall was a slightly surreal Zulu tapestry, meant to show symbolically the rise of science, and portraits of former fellows—mostly dead white males, though the more recent animated images were more diverse.

Toby tapped at the table’s polished surface, which turned transparent to reveal a bank of embedded softscreens. The screens lit up, variously showing scenes of disaster—crashes on the road and rail systems, raw sewage spilling from a pipe onto a beach somewhere, what looked horribly like the wreck of a plane plowed into a Heathrow runway—and concerned faces, most with softscreens in their backgrounds and earpieces clamped to their heads.

One serious-looking young woman seemed to be calling from a police control room. When she caught Siobhan’s eye, she nodded. “You’re the astronomer.”

“The Astronomer Royal, yes.”

“Professor McGorran, my name is Phillippa Duflot.” Perhaps in her early thirties, alarmingly well spoken, she wore a slightly disheveled business suit. “I work in the Mayor’s office; I’m one of her PAs.”

“The Mayor—”

“Of London. She asked me to find you.”

“Why?”

“Because of the emergency, of course.” Phillippa Duflot looked irritated, but she visibly calmed herself; considering the strain she was evidently under, Siobhan thought, her self-control was impressive. “I’m sorry,” Phillippa said. “All this has hit us so suddenly, over the last couple of hours or less. We rehearse for the major contingencies we can think of, but we’re struggling to cope today. Nobody anticipated the
scale
of this. We’re trying to find our feet.”

“Tell me how I can help you.”

Formally Phillippa was calling on behalf of the London Resilience Forum. This was an interagency body that had been set up following the upsurge in terrorism at the turn of the century. Chaired from the Mayor’s office, it contained representatives of the city’s emergency services, transport, the utilities, the health services, and local government. There was a separate body responsible for London emergency planning, which also reported in to the Mayor. Above such local bodies were national emergency planning agencies, which reported to the Home Office.

Siobhan learned quickly that most of these agencies were talking shops. The real responsibility for emergency responses lay with the police, and right now the key figure in touch with the Mayor was a chief constable. It was the way things were done in Britain, Siobhan gathered; there was a lack of central control, but a local flexibility and responsiveness that generally worked well. But now that Britain was thoroughly integrated into the Eurasian Union there was also a Union-wide emergency management agency, based on the Americans’ FEMA, under whose auspices, some years earlier, firefighters from London had been sent in response to a chemical plant disaster in Moscow.

And today this network of disaster management agencies was buzzing with bad news. London was afflicted by a whole series of interconnected problems, whose root cause Siobhan at first couldn’t guess at. Suddenly, all at once, everything was falling apart.

The most immediate problem was the collapse of the power grid. Phillippa bombarded Siobhan with data on areas of brownout and blackout, and images of the consequences: here was an underground shopping mall in Brent Cross, its lights doused and elevators and escalators stalled, thousands of people trapped in a darkness broken only by a ruddy emergency glow.

Phillippa looked doleful. “The very first call we logged today was from a man trapped in his hotel room when the electronic lock jammed up. Since then it’s just mushroomed. Every transport system has ground to a halt. People are stranded on planes ramped up on runways; others are trapped in planes that can’t land. We don’t even have numbers yet. We don’t dare think how many people are just trapped in lifts!”

The power system was the problem. Electrical power originated in generating stations—these days mostly nuclear, wind-generated, tidal, and a few fossil-fuel-burning relics. The generators sent out rivers of current in transmission cables at high voltages, more than a hundred thousand volts. These were stopped down at local substations and transformers and sent out through more lines, eventually reaching the level of the few hundred volts that reached businesses and homes.

“And now it’s all failing,” Siobhan prompted.

“Now it’s failing.”

Phillippa showed Siobhan an image of a transformer, a unit as big as a house, shaking itself to pieces as its core steel plates crashed and rattled. And here were power lines sagging, smoking, visibly melting, and where they touched trees or other obstacles powerful arcs sparked fires.

This was called magnetostriction, Phillippa said. “The engineers know what’s happening. It’s just that the GICs today are bigger than anything they’ve seen before.”

“Phillippa—what’s a
GIC
?”

“A geomagnetically induced current.” Phillippa eyed Siobhan with suspicion, as if she shouldn’t have had to explain; perhaps she wondered if she was wasting her time. “We’re in the middle of a geomagnetic storm, Professor McGorran. A huge one. It came out of nowhere.”

A geomagnetic storm: of course, a storm from the sun, the same cause as the beautiful aurora. Siobhan, her brains clogged in the room’s gathering heat, felt dull not to have grasped this at once.

But her basic physics was coming back to her. A geomagnetic storm, a fluctuation of Earth’s magnetic field, would induce currents in power lines, which were simply long conductors. And as the induced currents would be direct, while the generated electrical supply was alternating, the system would quickly be overwhelmed.

Phillippa said, “The generating companies are wheeling—”

“Wheeling?”

“Buying in capacity from outside. We have exchange deals with France, primarily. But the French are in trouble, too.”

“There must be some tolerance in the system,” Siobhan said.

“You’d be surprised,” Toby Pitt said. “For fifty years we have been growing our power demands, but have resisted building new power stations. Then you have market forces, which ensure that every component we do install barely has the capacity to do the job that’s asked of it—and all at the lowest possible cost. So we have absolutely no resilience.” He coughed. “I’m sorry. A hobbyhorse of mine.”

“The worst single problem is the loss of air-conditioning,” Phillippa said grimly. “It isn’t even noon yet.”

In a 2030s British midsummer, heat was a routine killer. “People must be dying,” Siobhan said, wondering; it was the first time it had really struck her.

“Oh, yes,” Phillippa said. “The elderly, the very young, the frail. And we can’t get to them. We don’t even know how many there are.”

Some of the softscreens flickered and went blank. This was the other side of the day’s problems, Phillippa said: communications and electronic systems of all kinds were going down.

“It’s the satellites,” she went on. “The comsats, navigation satellites, the lot—all taking a beating up there. Even land lines are failing.”