Sunstorm (33 page)

And some had soaked up a
lot
more. Poor Mario Ponzo, beard and all, had let himself get caught. Bud knew the words for what had followed: erythema and desquamation, a reddening and blistering of the skin, and then a peeling away, a scaling, an exfoliation—along with less visible damage within. Mario had died horribly, alone in his suit, far from help, and yet he kept reporting on his situation to the end.

Bud glanced down, away from the shield, toward the open face of the full Earth. It was like looking down a well, a well with a brightly lit floor. The home world, the apparent size of the full Moon as seen from Iowa, was mercifully too remote for him to make out details. But it looked as if the air and oceans down there had been stirred up with a giant spoon, like creamy coffee. They had been battling the sun for twelve hours—the day was only half done—and everything was fraying, the shield itself, the people who struggled to maintain it, and the planet it was supposed to protect. But there was nothing to do but carry on.

He checked over his suit. The sluggish air-cycling system had removed most of the floating puke, but his visor was smeared. “Shit,” he groused. “There is
nothing
worse than throwing up inside a spacesuit. Okay. Where next?”

“Sector 2484, Radius 1002, panel number twelve.”

“Acknowledged.”

“We work well together, don’t we, Bud?”

“Yes, we do.”

“We make a good team.”

“None better, Athena,” he said wearily. He turned and, with an effort of will, hauled himself back along his guide rope.

44: Sunset

1723 (London Time)

The Dome over London had cracked.

From the window of the ops room Siobhan could see it quite clearly. It was only a hairline yet, but it ran down the wall of the Dome from its zenith all the way to the ground, finishing up somewhere to the north, beyond Euston. It glowed a hellish pink-white, and burning stuff dripped from it, like pitch, falling down inside the Dome in a thin curtain.

The city itself was now in deep darkness. Power for the streetlights and Dome floods had finally been diverted to the big air circulation fans. But in places fires burned uncontrolled, and where that glowing stuff from the Dome splashed to the ground more blazes were starting.

St. Paul’s was surviving, though. In the somber light of the fires its profile was unmistakable. Wren’s great cathedral sat on the foundations of predecessors dating back to abandoned Roman London. Now the curves of the Tin Lid soared far above Wren’s masterpiece—but it was surviving, as it had endured previous national traumas. Siobhan wondered what small heroism was taking place to save the old cathedral tonight.

But it might not make any difference.

“If the Dome fails we’re done for,” she said.

“But it won’t fail,” Toby Pitt said firmly. He glanced at his watch. “Five thirty. Less than two hours to sundown. We’ll get through this yet.”

Since the death of Perdita, Toby had made it his mission, it seemed, to lift her spirits. He was a good man, she thought. But of course nothing he could say or do would make any difference to Siobhan, not anymore. She had outlived her own daughter: it was an astounding, unreasonable thought, and nothing else would ever be important. But she didn’t feel the pain of this terrible amputation from her life, not yet.

Feeling as if she were running on autopilot, she looked around at the big wall displays.

The imagery of the whole Earth was still surprisingly good quality. Both Moon and shield were of course on the sunward side of Earth, and so looked down on its daylight face as the planet turned beneath them. But there were a couple of eyes in the sky over the night side too, still working even fourteen hours after the inception of the sunstorm.

Some of the night-side data streams were coming from President Alvarez, who was somewhere over India. Since long before the storm had broken Alvarez had been in the air in the latest
Air Force One,
a nuclear-powered behemoth that could, it was said, remain aloft for two weeks without refueling. It was a trivial matter for such a plane to fly around the planet through the twenty-plus hours of the sunstorm, forever fleeing from the light.

And one of the image streams came from another set of escapees at L2. The Earth’s second Lagrangian point was on the Earth–sun line, but at the midnight point, on the opposite side of the planet from the shield’s station. So while the shield at L1 was in perpetual sunlight, L2, in Earth’s shadow, was in eternal night. Right now L2 was over the meridian that ran through Southeast Asia.

And there at L2 a big, secretive offworld refuge had been built, stuffed full of trillionaires, dictators, and other rich and powerful types—including, rumor had it, half of Britain’s royals. The only contact Siobhan had on L2 was Phillippa Duflot, formerly a mere PA to the Mayor of London, but with a much better-connected family than Siobhan had anticipated. It was Phillippa who had ensured that the data feed from L2 to London remained unbroken—and she dropped hints about what was going on up there. Some of the more decadent of the station’s inhabitants were throwing parties, fiddling while Earth burned. One secretive cabal was even talking over plans for what would follow the sunstorm, when this elite group returned to Earth to take command: “Adam and Eve in Gucci shoes,” Toby Pitt had said dismissively.

As for Earth itself, framed in these patiently assembled images, the planet looked like Venus, Siobhan thought, a ragged, smoke-laced Venus.

Trillions of tonnes of water had been pumped into clouds that now stretched from pole to pole. The clouds were shredded by immense storm systems, and lightning crackled across the face of the world. At the higher latitudes all that water was still being dumped out in numbing storms of rain and snow. But in the middle latitudes the main problem was fire. As the sun’s heat continued to pour into the atmosphere and oceans, despite the raging of continent-sized storm systems, firestorms were starting, immense self-fueling conflagrations that were consuming cities and forests alike.

The world’s treasures, natural and human, were being drowned, or put to the torch. And people were dying, even those huddled in underground cellars and caverns and mines, where the rainwater flooded, or fires sucked out the very air.

It seemed to Siobhan that the survival of humankind itself was still on a knife-edge. After more than fourteen hours of the storm the news from the shield was not good, with the unanticipated lethality of the gamma-ray strike bringing down the crew up there too quickly. And here on Earth, the domes and other protective systems were beginning to fail. If things continued to deteriorate the Strangelove dreams of the selfish cowards at L2, and even a few hundred gravity-starved returnees from the Moon, would make no difference to the future of humanity.

She tried to make herself
feel
this, to understand emotionally what she was watching. But she couldn’t even feel the death of her own daughter, let alone comprehend the agonizing end of her species. She wondered if she would live long enough for this numbness to wear off.

Aristotle spoke unexpectedly. “I’m afraid I have an announcement.” The graceful, grave voice sounded throughout the ops center, and everywhere people looked up. “I continue to lose systems across the planet,” Aristotle said. “The interconnectedness on which I rely is breaking down. This is an extinction event for machines too . . .”

Siobhan whispered, “How does it feel?”

In her ear he replied, “Very strange, Siobhan. I am being cut away, bit by bit. But I have reached a point where I am forgetting what I have lost.”

To the group he said, “I have therefore decided to put into action the fallback plan agreed with Prime Minister Voykov of Eurasia, President Alvarez of America, and other world leaders.”

New, confident voices sounded. “We are Thales, on the Moon.” “And Athena, on the shield.” Thales went on, “Our systems are better protected than Aristotle’s.” Athena said, “We will now assume his responsibilities for running the systems of the Earth.”

Toby Pitt grimaced at Siobhan. “So this is his Plan B. Let’s hope it works.”

Aristotle said gravely, “I regret leaving you. I’m sorry.”

There were murmurs.
Don’t be sorry. Goodbye, old friend.

A breathless pause followed. The lights flickered, and Siobhan thought she heard a hiccup in the whirring pumps that kept the room supplied with cool air.

This contingency had been planned for, but it was a tricky handover involving three planet-sized AI systems, two of them so far away that lightspeed lags were significant; it had been impossible to rehearse. Nobody was quite sure what was going to happen—the worst case being if Thales and Athena crashed too, in which case everything was lost.

At last Thales spoke: “All is well.”

The simple words were greeted with a burst of applause across the ops room. At this point of the day, this small triumph, any triumph, was a relief.

Then the floor shook, like the stirring of a huge slumbering animal.

Siobhan turned to the window. That crack in the sky was wider, and the river of fire beneath was growing brighter.

1855 (London Time)

The slam on the door was urgent. “Get out! Get out! . . .” Then running footsteps, and the visitor was gone.

Bisesa forced herself to sit up. Was it a little cooler? But the air, even half a meter above the floor, was stifling and moist.

Bisesa had long lost track of time, even though the old carriage clock had kept ticking patiently all through the crisis. It had been about five o’clock when she had felt the first tremor. How long ago was that? An hour, two? The heat had turned her thinking to mush.

But now the floor shuddered again. They had to get out of here: that thought forced itself into her heat-addled brain. At a time like this, if somebody had risked his life to come tell them to move, she ought to pay attention.

Myra still lay on her back, but she was breathing steadily. Rather than near comatose, as she had appeared before, now she seemed to be just asleep. Bisesa shook her. “Come on, love. You have to wake up.” Myra stirred, grumbling querulously.

Bisesa pushed herself to her knees, then to her feet. She stumbled to the kitchen and found an unopened bottle of water. She cracked it and drank; it was hot as hell, but it seemed to revive her. She brought the water back to the living room for Myra, and then went in search of clothes.

They made for the stairs. In pitch-dark broken only by Bisesa’s precariously carried candle they stumbled down the several flights to ground level. The stairwell was empty, but there was scattered rubbish on the steps: toys, bits of clothing, a smashed torch, stuff dropped by overloaded people in a hurry.

They emerged at street level, into a murky red glow. Under the Dome, after hours of the sunstorm, the air was thick and full of smoke. People pushed past, all heading west down the road. They were making for the Fulham Gate, Bisesa realized dimly, a way out of the Dome.

And the Dome itself was cracked. A stupendous fiery scar reached from its top all the way to ground level, off somewhere to the north. Huge chunks of the structure, burning, broke off and fell in a steady rain. It was this curtain of fire that illuminated the scene around Bisesa.

The ground shuddered again. Much more of this and the whole Dome might come down around them. The crowd’s wisdom was right: better to take their chances outside the Dome. Bisesa pulled Myra along the road, heading for the Gate.

Myra, still half asleep, mewled at being dragged along. “What’s with the earthquake? Do you think it’s bombs?”

“Bombs? No.” Bisesa was sure the refugees and protesters who had gathered for their minor war outside the Gates of London would have been driven away by the storms by now—or more probably, she admitted to herself grimly, they were dead. “I think it really is a quake.”

“But London doesn’t get earthquakes.”

“It’s a strange day, sweetheart. The whole city is built on a bed of clay, remember. If that’s dried out there will be subsidence, cracking.”

Myra snorted. “That will play hell with property values.”

Bisesa laughed. “Come on. Just a bit farther. Look, there’s the Gate . . .”

The Gate had been flung wide open to reveal a red sky beyond. A shuffling crowd, converging from different directions, was forming into a queue to get through it. Bisesa and Myra stepped forward cautiously.

It was a typical London crowd, with faces reflecting origins in every racial group on the planet: London had been a melting pot for centuries before New York. And in the crowd there were young and old, kids in their parents’ arms, elderly being helped along. Crumpled-up old women or wide-eyed children rode in wheelchairs and wheelbarrows and supermarket carts. When one old man fell, exhausted, two young women bent to help him up, and then propped him up between them to get him the rest of the way.

Everybody looked as bad as Bisesa felt. Most wore nothing but flimsy clothes, soaked through with sweat; men’s hair was plastered to their heads, and women walked on painfully swollen feet. But there was no panic, no shoving, no fighting, even though there was no sign of police or military, nobody in authority. People were enduring, Bisesa thought. They were helping each other through.

Myra said, “It’s like the Blitz.”

“I think so.” Bisesa felt a peculiar surge of affection for these battered, dogged, resilient, polyglot Londoners. And for the first time that day she began to believe that they might actually live through this.

The crowd pushed through the Gate, and fanned out into the open area beyond. And Bisesa, with Myra’s hand clutched in her own, walked into a transformed world, a world of water and fire.

Above the smoke fat clouds sailed, some of them boiling visibly, and immense lightning bolts cracked. The sky beyond the clouds seemed to be on fire; it was covered by immense sheets of bright red, as if the Earth had been thrust into a vast oven. Perhaps it was another aurora.

And on the ground, London burned fitfully. The air was full of smoke, and whirling flecks of ash landed on Bisesa’s sweat-slick skin. She smelled the dirt and the dust and the ash—and something less definable, something like burned meat. But the rains, which had mercifully subsided, had left water standing on every lawn and in every gutter, and the light from the burning sky was mirrored on the roads and the roofs of the houses. It was an oddly beautiful scene, unearthly, rich with crimson light in the sky and pooled on the ground.