Sunstorm (35 page)

Bud had kept up a determined public face. But even before the event he had had to make gruesome calculations of acceptable casualty levels. It felt as if he had
planned
for these people to die. And with each bright soul he had ordered into the furnace, with each new death added to this tally, he felt as if his heart were being twisted inside him.

He still had a job to do for the survivors; up to now he had been able to comfort himself with that. After so long in microgravity the heroes from the shield would not get their medals and parades for a while. They would all return to Earth weak as kittens, and would be subject to six months or a year of rehab, massage, hydrotherapy, and programs of exercise to bring up their strength, endurance, and bone mineral levels—until they were fit to stand before a President or two, and take the plaudits they had earned.

That had been his plan to get his people home, fondly rehearsed in his mind. But now it looked as if none of that was going to happen. For, if he understood what Mikhail and Eugene were telling him, this huge sacrifice might all have been in vain, and they might just as well have stayed home and waited for the storm to torch them all.

He was doing no damn good here. He took a deep breath and made his way back to the control room.

Eugene and Mikhail sat side by side in some poky cabin at Clavius.

“It is called a ‘coronal mass ejection,’ ” Mikhail said lugubriously. “In itself it is not an unprecedented phenomenon. In normal times there are many such events per year.”

Bud asked, “I thought June 9 was caused by a mass ejection?”

“Yes,” Eugene snapped. “But this is bigger.
Much
bigger, even than that.” Nervously Eugene began to gabble through a description of the latest events on the sun: the gathering of magnetic field lines over the zone of disturbance that had been the epicenter of the sunstorm, the trapping of an immense cloud of plasma beneath those flux lines—and then how the cloud had been hurled upward away from the sun.

Bud half listened to the words, and watched the two astrophysicists. They were suffering, Bud could see that. Mikhail’s face was grooved with weariness, the shadows deep as lunar craters around his eyes; Bud had never seen him looking so old.

Eugene’s expression, creasing up that bland jock’s face, was more complicated, but then so was Eugene. Rose Delea used to call Eugene “autistic” to his face, Bud remembered—but poor Rose was dead now. Bud, however, had never thought of Eugene as some inhuman calculating machine, and now Bud thought he could read the emotion in those pale blue eyes, an emotion any military man would sympathize with:
The operation is fucked. And I fear, dear God, that it might be me who screwed the pooch.

Bud rubbed his eyes and tried to focus, to think. After his own six-hour jaunt out on the shield, he was still in his grimy thermal long johns. He could smell the sweat and vomit crusted on a face that had been cocooned in a bubble helmet for too long, every muscle was stiff as a board, and he ached for a shower.

He said carefully, “Eugene, you’re telling me your models didn’t foresee this.”

“No,” Eugene said miserably.

Mikhail said gently, “There’s really no reason why they should, Colonel Tooke. Oh, perhaps some such ejection might have been foreseen. The turbulence at the heart of the sunstorm was like an active region. Such regions spawn flares, and they are sometimes, but not always, associated with mass ejections too. If there is a causal link it is a deep one we have yet to untangle. We have yet to understand the basic physics, you see. And besides, our models could see only as far as the great outpouring of energy of the sunstorm itself—which we got mostly right. But beyond that point our models ran into a singularity—a place where the curves shot off to infinity, and the physics broke down altogether.”

“We patched in a solution for the follow-up,” Eugene said desolately. “Continuous to the third-order derivatives. Over most of the sun the patch seems to be working out. All except for this vicious bastard.”

Mikhail shrugged. “In retrospect that anomalously high gamma flux we observed at the start of the storm may have been a precursor. But we had no time for remodeling, not then, as the storm itself broke—”

Bud said, “You feel like the sun itself has let you down, don’t you? Because it didn’t behave like you told it to.”

Mikhail said, “I have tried to explain to Eugene that no fault is attached to this. Eugene’s is the single most brilliant mind I have ever worked with, and without his insights—”

“We would never have seen the storm coming, would never have got the shield built—would never have saved all those lives.” Bud sighed. “You mustn’t feel bad, Eugene. And we need your help now, more than ever.”

“We don’t have much time,” Mikhail said. “It’s moving a lot more quickly than a normal mass ejection.”

“But this isn’t a normal day, right? How long?”

“We have an hour,” Mikhail said. “Maybe less.”

The answer was ridiculous; Bud could barely believe it. What could he do about this in an hour? “So what comes first?”

“An advance shock wave,” Eugene said. “More or less harmless—it will give us a lot of radio noise.”

“And then?”

“The bulk of the cloud will hit,” Mikhail said. “A fog bank as wide as the sun itself, more than a million kilometers across, heading right for Earth. Unusually, it is quite shallow, a kind of lens. Its shape is an artifact of its unusual formation, we think. It is made up of relativistic particles—mostly protons and electrons.”

“
Relativistic,
meaning moving close to the speed of light?”

“Yes. And very energetic.
Very.
Colonel, a proton can’t outrun light, but in getting closer to that final limit it can take on board an awful lot of kinetic energy—”

“And those energetic particles will do the damage,” Eugene said. “Colonel, it will be a particle storm.”

Bud didn’t like the sound of that.

On June 9, 2037, a similar cloud of fast-moving particles had hurled itself against Earth. Most had been trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. The bulk of the damage done that day had been caused by fluctuations in the Earth’s field, which had induced electrical currents in the ground.

“This time it will be different,” Mikhail said. “The ground will be directly engaged.”

Bud snapped, “What does that mean? Stick to English, damn it.”

Eugene replied, “These solar particles are so energetic that most of them will cut through the magnetosphere, and atmosphere, as if they aren’t there—”

“Like bullets through paper,” Mikhail said.

A lethal hail of radiation and heavy particles would slam onto land and sea. For an unshielded human, it would be like a trillion tiny explosions going off inside her cells; her delicate biomolecules, the proteins that built her and the genetic material that governed her structure and growth, would be smashed apart. Many people would die immediately. For those who lived, the suffering was only postponed. Even unborn children would suffer mutations that could kill them on their emergence from the womb.

Every living thing on Earth, every one of them reliant on proteins and DNA, would be similarly affected. Even where individuals survived, ecologies everywhere would be devastated.

Eugene kept talking, pitilessly, about long-term problems. “After the cloud has passed the air will be full of carbon-14, because of neutron capture by nitrogen nuclei. Very radioactive. And even when the farms start working again all that stuff is bound to get into the food chain. Ocean stocks would be least affected, until the die-off in the seas cuts in . . .”

Bud got the message. The disaster would continue to unfold, as far ahead as could be seen. Shit, he thought. And it was going to start in an hour, just an hour.

Impulsively Bud tapped his softscreen, and flicked at random through images of Earth.

Here were the last forests of South America, so doggedly preserved, and the soybean fields that had crowded them out, burning together. Here were the almost clichéd landmarks of the human world collapsing in flames: the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Here were great ports laid waste by the monstrous storms, spaceplanes crushed like moths, the bridges of Japan and Gibraltar and across the English Channel left smashed and twisted by massive lightning strikes. Even so, everybody thought the worst was over; everywhere people toiled in the rubble of their homes seeking survivors, sifting debris, already trying to make a new start. And now, this. And what about the shield? With no protection at all, surely it would be destroyed, a leaf in a gale.

After all they had been through it seemed unfair, as if some grown-up was changing the rules of the game, just when they had been about to win. But maybe, Bud thought uneasily, if that nutty soldier from Britain was right about her “Firstborn,” that was exactly what had happened.

Suddenly he longed to be with Siobhan. If she were here with him it wouldn’t seem so bad, he thought. But that was a selfish thing to wish for; on Earth, wherever she was, she was safer than she would be up here.

He faced the softscreens, Mikhail’s grave face. He was aware of his people watching him; even now he had to think about morale. “So,” he said. “What options do we have?”

Mikhail only shook his head. Eugene, his eyes flickering nervously, looked away.

Unexpectedly, Athena spoke up. “I have one.”

Bud looked up, bemused. On the softscreen, Mikhail’s jaw had dropped.

“Don’t worry, Bud. I felt just as bad about this when I first figured it out. But we’ll get through this, you’ll see.”

Bud snapped, “What are you talking about, Athena?
How
will we get through this?”

“I’ve already taken the liberty of warning the authorities,” Athena said evenly. “I have made contact with the offices of the Presidents of Eurasia and America, and the leadership units in China. I began this process when the sunstorm was still under way. Bud, I didn’t want to disturb you. You were rather busy.”

Bud said, “Athena—”

“Just a minute,” Mikhail said. “Athena, let me get this straight. You sent your warning messages
before
we came online. So you figured all this out
before
Eugene and I reported our observations of the mass ejection to Colonel Tooke.”

“Oh, yes,” Athena said brightly. “I didn’t make my warnings on the basis of your observations. They just confirmed my theoretical predictions.”

Eugene said, “
What
theoretical predictions?”

Bud growled, “Mikhail, tell me what’s going on here.”

“She seems to have figured out the particle storm,” Mikhail said, wondering. “Athena evidently ran her own models—and they were better than ours—and she saw the particle storm coming, where we couldn’t. That was how she was able to make her warnings to the authorities even while we were still struggling with the sunstorm itself.”

“I am rather bright, you know,” Athena said without a trace of irony. “Remember that I am the most densely interconnected and processor-rich entity in the solar system. The failure of Eugene’s model, pushed to its extremes, was quite predictable. Not that any blame accrues. You did your best.”

Eugene bridled visibly.

“But
my
modeling—”

Bud said, “Athena. No bullshit.
How
long before us did you figure this out?”

“Oh, I’ve known since January.”

Bud thought back. “Which was when you were switched on.”

“I didn’t work it out immediately. It took me a while to process the data you had stored in me, and to come to a conclusion. But the implications were clear.”

“How long did it take?—No, don’t answer that.” For an entity as smart as Athena it was quite possible that the answer would be mere microseconds after boot-up. “So,” he said heavily, “if you knew about this danger back then—
why didn’t you tell us about it?
”

Athena sighed, as if he was being silly. “Why, Bud—what
good
would it have done?”

The newborn Athena, suddenly knowing far more about the future than the humans who had created her, had immediately been faced with a dilemma.

“In January the shield was already all but completed,” she said. “And its design had been, rightly, focused on protecting Earth from the visible light peak energy of the sunstorm. To protect against the particle storm as well would have required a totally different design. There simply wouldn’t have been time to make the changes. And if I
had
told you that you’d got it all wrong, there was a danger you would give up altogether on the shield, which really
would
have been disastrous.”

“And even today you didn’t give us the warning until so late. Why?”

“Again there was no point,” Athena said. “Twenty-four hours ago nobody could be sure if the shield would work at all. Not even me! It was only when it was clear that the shield
was
going to save the bulk of humanity that the particle storm became worth worrying about . . .”

Gradually Bud began to understand. AIs, even Athena, while they could be far smarter than humans in many ways, were still sometimes rather primitive ethically. Athena had picked her way through the impossible moral maze that confronted her with the delicacy of an elephant trampling through a flower bed.

And she had been forced to lie. She wasn’t sophisticated enough, perhaps, to be able to express her inner confusion openly, but that turmoil had shown up in other ways. Bud’s instincts had been right: Athena, faced with conflicts arising from deep-buried ethical parameters, had been a troubled creation.

“I have always tried to protect you, Bud,” Athena said gravely. “Everybody, of course, but you especially.”

“I know,” he said carefully. The most important thing now was to get through this, to find a solution to this new problem if there was one, not to disturb whatever fragile equilibrium Athena had reached. “I know, Athena.”

Mikhail, frowning, leaned forward. He said carefully, “Listen to me, Athena. You said you had an option. You told Bud we would get through this.
You know a way to beat the particle storm,
don’t you?”