Solstice

by David Hewson

  Bennett was back to shuffling papers. The interview was over. For today, at least, it looked like his role was to play tourist.

  CHAPTER 5

  Straight-in Approach

  Central Siberia, 0448 UTC

  You don't just fall out of the air. Ian Seabright knew that, had it drilled into him from the first time he'd left the earth, behind the twisting prop of that long-dead Chipmunk. The aircraft did what it was supposed to do when it lost its source of thrust. It settled into the long, steady glide that was determined by the angle of its control systems and the aerodynamic profile they presented to the air as it flowed over its wings and fuselage.

  It was descending at around 2,300 feet per minute, something he soon realized he could confirm by using one of the few instruments on board that didn't require electricity to feed it: the altimeter, with its subsidiary ascent and descent readout, triggered by the simple pressure of the air rushing past the aircraft.

  You don't just fall out of the air.

  The land below was flat and low — no mountains, no all-covering cloud, and thank God for that. There was time to think this through. There was time to act.

  Seabright looked at his first officer seated next to him. Mulligan was a mess, his face mask smeared with dried blood, his white short-sleeved shirt stained too, big sweat patches coming out under the arms. The Irishman stared mutely back at him, not flinching, and Seabright felt grateful. Jimmy Mulligan was not a man to let you down.

  Gingerly, Seabright removed the mask from his face, took a deep breath, tried to judge what it felt like. Instinct told him the aircraft was not depressurizing, that it would be okay for him to work without the mask that he found annoying. The atmosphere felt fine. The masks had actually fallen due to some electrical fault, not a pressure failure. What was now pumping oxygen into the cabin was the movement of air through the engines, and that would be enough for now. This would keep them alive as the aircraft continued its descent, and by the time you got down to 18,000 feet or so it didn't matter anyway. There was enough oxygen around at that altitude to keep you awake, keep the blackouts away.

  Mulligan waited for the instruction, then took his own mask off.

  Seabright spoke rapidly, thinking ahead all the time.

  'I want you to go back, find Ali, tell her to get the rest of the crew together, to brief the passengers that we are working on the problem, we expect to have it fixed. But just in case, they should prepare for an emergency landing in around fifteen minutes from now, they should get the drill card out of the back of the seat and memorize every word on it, memorize the brace position, keep aware of what's happening out the window. Tell them they can take their oxygen masks off but they should keep them on their laps, use them if they need to. It might just keep the panic down a little if they don't have those damn things around their faces. Tell them not to expect any announcements. The intercom's down. They know that already, but make sure they don't expect it to come back up. Tell them we're in fine weather, descending onto flat, open terrain, not mountains. And we can see down every inch of the way.'

  'Sir.'

  'Then get back here pronto and help me get this bugger back flying again.'

  'Done,' Mulligan answered, then took off his shoulder harness, wriggled out of the seat, and was out the door.

  Seabright looked at the blank LCD screens in front of them. Still no sign of life, no indication that there was, anywhere within the aircraft, an amp of usable current. Not even hoping for any joy, he felt the yoke. Dead too. This was fly-by-wire. You needed the power, you needed the servos to shift the ailerons and elevators and rudder, to adjust the flaps and slats that kept the beast on its correct, three-dimensional journey through the air. Without electricity, the machine was locked in whatever attitude it held when the circuits failed, in this case the cruise configuration, which, just then, was the best he could hope for. Had the freeze occurred when they were climbing, the results would have been cataclysmic in a matter of seconds. The aircraft would have set itself a high angle of attack, expecting the thrust to keep it flying, keep it going up all the time at a healthy airspeed. Without the engines, and without the ability to trim for the glide, it would have flown itself straight into a stall in under a minute, shuddered to a halt in the air, ceased to be an object that flew, and turned into one that fell, like a brick, straight out of the sky.

  Seabright knew this was a time to improvise. This was a machine — a very complex one, but a machine nonetheless. Its circuits and pulleys and servos, its huge fan-driven engines, the reservoirs of volatile aviation fuel that now sat leaden and useless in its wings, were just overcomplicated cogs in a child's toy. The way you got them working was by finding some means to re-establish the links that made them live. You had to use the tools that came in the box. You couldn't kick-start this beast back into being. You couldn't wind up some rubber band. You had to think alongside the system, not against it.

  He was still staring at the dead grey panels, watching the altimeter unwind at the corner of his vision, when Mulligan returned, and that worried Seabright. He was the captain and he was taking too long at this. His mind wasn't working straight. He could have done something. Punched some buttons, tried the radio, punched anything.

  Doesn't work like that, Seabright told himself. This wasn't some gigantic fruit machine waiting for the right combination by accident. There were too many sequences available, in the mass of buttons and dials in front of them, for that. You had to think your way through.

  'We'll go through the start-up sequence, Jimmy. What's it like back there?'

  'Pretty calm.' Amazingly calm, he thought, and Jimmy Mulligan wished his head hadn't made that analogy when he saw the people, strapped so tightly in their seats, just waiting. With the same blank, hopeless look you saw on animals making their way to the slaughterhouse.

  'Ali's coping,' he added. And she was. Of course she was. Just.

  Seabright had started to work the grey, lifeless panel.

  'Sir…'

  'I know. It's dead. We don't have time for explanations. Let's just see what happens.'

  And so they spent a minute racing through the sequence, punching the dead buttons, reading through the list, faster than they'd ever done, so fast the company's chief pilot would carpet them on the spot if he'd ever heard it rushed in this way. Then they activated the final switch, sat back, and waited.

  After five seconds, five seconds that seemed like a lifetime to both men, Seabright said, very calmly, no panic in his voice, 'Okay, Jimmy. Now we do it the other way round. We run through the shutdown sequence. Then we try the start-up once more. See if we can fire something up in this bloody thing.'

  'Sir…?'

  'Jimmy.' Seabright glared at him with a fierceness Mulligan had never before seen. 'Do you have some other idea?'

  Mulligan said nothing.

  'Right. Well, let's get to it, then.'

  It was almost the reverse of the start-up routine. A few extra switches. A few extra procedures. By the time they had finished, the altimeter had wound down to 11,000 feet. It would take another minute or more to run through the start-up routine again. This would bring them down to close to 8,000 feet. There might be time enough to try this thing once more. There might be time to try something else. If he could think of something else, and right now there was nothing in his head except this repetitive set of actions that should, in a universe that worked by the rules, bring the aircraft back to life.

  'That's it,' Mulligan said quietly.

  The two men stared at the dead panel, lost for words. Then Ian Seabright closed his eyes, let his mind look into the blackness there, and wondered: What next? Do we keep on punching in this little chant all the way down to the ground? Or do we just sit back and wait? Let it all happen around us, in this dead plane, with its frozen controls, its burned-out circuitry, and close to 340 helpless people waiting to die? 'Sir.'

  Mulligan's voice was urgent now. The first officer was tugging at his sleeve.


  Seabright looked up, cursed the light coming through the window, the bright, piercing sunlight that made his eyes hurt, then saw something, recognized what it was, and found his mind coming back to him from that black, hopeless place it had found a moment before.

  A single light winked on the panel. It was the auxiliary power unit, the tiny jet engine housed in the tail, and it was starting to flicker. Something inside had found the spark and, once it was there, had decided to inhale. 'Come on,' Seabright muttered. 'Come on.' Then he watched, in hot, sweaty silence, as the rest of the panel came slowly, erratically back to life, a life that was as much amber and red as green — but that didn't matter. Seabright could have reached forward and kissed every one of them because what they promised was hope.

  Seabright gripped the yoke. Shook it, knowing this was pointless, knowing there was no physical link here, that only the buzzing of electrons down the circuit — if it still existed — could help him fly the plane. It was rock-hard. Still frozen. He kept his hand there, just in case.

  'The number-one engine's coming back up,' Mulligan said, his eyes flashing over the panels, just a tremor of excitement in his voice.

  'It's something. You just watch what happens there. Don't push it too hard yet. Make sure we don't start to lose it again. Once you're happy with that, work on the others. Leave the controls to me.'

  The altimeter was unwinding more slowly now. Down to around 800 feet per minute, the aircraft's descent cushioned by the single engine pushing out a modicum of thrust.

  Time, Seabright thought. Just what he wanted. Then made the Mayday broadcast he'd tried to transmit what seemed like hours ago, made it all the way through, with a reading off the moving map, a reading that looked as if it just might be accurate. Someone came back on it too, a controller with a heavy Middle European accent and an undisguised note of urgency in his voice. Seabright turned down the volume, didn't even think about responding. There were better things to do. They knew there was an emergency. The aircraft was squawking its stricken presence through its transponder to anyone who wanted to listen. He had other tasks to occupy his time.

  'We've just got number one, sir,' Mulligan said. 'I think I can keep that one up okay. The rest are dead.'

  'Fine,' Seabright answered. One engine was better than none.

  'If worse comes to worst, Jimmy, we're just going to have to fly this aircraft gently into the ground. I want you to drop the gear at fifteen hundred feet, then give us enough power on the one engine from one thousand to cut the descent rate to something as gentle as we can get. The terrain should be obvious by then. If necessary, we'll use the power to pop us over any obstacles we can see and then get this thing on the ground, and-'

  Seabright stopped in mid sentence, turned to the horrified Mulligan, and smiled.

  'Sorry, Jimmy. I didn't mean to worry you.'

  'It was you?'

  'Oh yes.' Seabright grinned. 'Oh yes.'

  The movement was so familiar to them, such a part of the training routine. Out of nowhere, the aircraft had moved out of balance, yawed in the air, slipping sideways, moving them in their seats until Seabright realized what was happening, centred the rudder, brought the ship back into a straight line.

  'You try it,' Seabright ordered. 'Try some right pedal.'

  The same thing happened, shifting them in the opposite direction, then Mulligan relaxed, let the aircraft take up its natural position.

  'I have control,' Seabright said, and added, mainly to himself, 'and now for the big one.'

  He pulled back gently on the yoke, expecting to feel it lock against him. This time it moved — only half an inch — and then he let it centre again. But it moved. The nose of the aircraft rose gently against the horizon. The altimeter slowed, came down to 7,300 feet… and stayed there.

  'Airspeed?' Seabright wasn't taking his mind off these controls. He intended to stay on top of these all the way until the moment their wheels gently kissed the ground.

  'Three-fifty and settled.'

  Both men peered out the window, out to pale nothingness, empty, bare rocky terrain. But flat. Flat enough, if it came to it.

  'Get working on that map, Jimmy. Either you find me some airfield near here and straight ahead or we're going for a forced landing pretty damn soon.'

  Mulligan wiped his face with his arm, came away with a mixture of sweat and blood and mucus on his skin, and stared at the display.

  'There's a military base ninety miles away; you need to turn twenty degrees to the right.'

  These were command decisions, Seabright thought. These were why they made you a captain.

  'We'll go for it, and take her down on the way if we need to. It's probably the station that came back on the Mayday call.'

  Then, gently, with a rate of turn that was so slow that no one in the aircraft would even notice it, he moved the plane through twenty degrees to the north and let it settle once more. The aeroplane moved steadily forward through the sky.

  Seabright tried to compose his thoughts. He needed to talk to the people in the cabin. And after that another call — to the airfield ahead, to explain their predicament. To describe, in as much detail as he possibly could, what had happened to them, at what flight level, and where. This was good practice. This was just plain good manners. If something struck your aircraft out of the blue, you told air traffic so they could pass it on to anyone else in the area, make sure they were aware of the danger. There was no other reason than that, Seabright said to himself, and almost believed it.

  'We'll make it, Jimmy,' Seabright said, then started to work the radio. When the Mayday was done, he called Air Force One again. There was nothing on the frequency but noise.

  CHAPTER 6

  Calvary

  Pollensa, 1002 UTC

  Lieberman waited outside the huge wooden entrance doors of La Finca, feeling like a wallflower waiting for a date. The mansion was something. He stood at the head of a long, broad driveway that led inland, out of the estate. At his feet was a vast Renaissance fish pond in golden stone with ancient, crumbling statuary and the odd orange shape bobbing up to disturb the opaque green surface. Beyond the water, which seemed out of place in this arid landscape, a line of cypresses ran like exclamation marks down each side of the road, winding through parched, dead fields of wheat into a narrow valley. The crop moved in the faint wind, a febrile dance without energy. This place had money, he thought. Money and class. But all that didn't buy a respite from this strange hiccup in the climate that seemed to have gripped the world. When he thought about it, he found it impossible to pinpoint when the weather had gone bad. Meteorology was not his field, and his gut feeling was that it was wrong to judge what was happening with the climate on intuition alone. Stone Age man had probably spent a large part of his life complaining that the weather just wasn't what it was. Maybe there was some neural circuit inside your head that filtered out the prolonged extremes from your childhood and turned it all into an episode of The Waltons, a little rain, a lot of sun, and then some snow now and again. But as far back as 1995 he had started to feel the climate was changing for real, and he wasn't the only one. Maybe it was global warming, maybe it was some new mischief on the part of El Nino. He had no idea, but this couldn't be just received wisdom. The ice caps weren't melting like crazy, the Gulf Stream hadn't shifted north as the pundits had predicted. It didn't look likely that one day you'd be planting vineyards in Scotland or watching reindeer wander the streets of Paris — depending on your particular point of view — but it was obvious something was happening. And to him it just seemed as if someone had turned the weather dial so that it was always set to full. When it got hot, it got very hot. When it rained, it poured. And when it snowed, the best part of Canada and New England could lock the doors, break out the Molsons, and prime the generator, because no one was going back to work in anything close to a hurry.

  This was the hot phase, and it had hung around here for a long time, long before the spot cycle began its early peak. Maybe
these things were linked, in the way that cancer might be sparked by a random quark from Saturn zipping through your spleen. But this was no straight-line relationship. No one had yet figured out the way to read those particular runes.

  There was the sound of a car scrunching across the gravel and Mo Sinclair drew up in a Suzuki Vitara, Annie in the back. Something different there, Lieberman thought. Mo didn't look as lost and dreamy as she had three hours earlier. She gave him half a smile. Annie jumped out of the open-topped vehicle, grinned, and said, 'We've been talking about it and this is the deal.'

  'The deal?' he asked. He was wearing his Lone Wolf Solar Observatory baseball cap (which he liked to think of as office uniform) and not just out of vanity either. Sunburn was a real danger in this weather. 'What deal?'

  'We show you Pollensa. You tell us what this stuff is all about. Okay?'

  'You mean like… everything?'

  'Everything.'

  'Sure.' He shrugged. 'What little I know.'

  'That will be nice,' Mo said coolly.

  So he walked back into the building that served as quarters, back into his bedroom, and picked up the gear he'd need for his little tutorial. Then the first part of the tour began, on foot, the three of them sweating in the incessant heat. La Finca, it turned out, was even bigger than he had expected. Some fancy banking family from Madrid had owned the estate for almost two hundred years before getting caught up in the recession of the late eighties. By 1990, it was on the market, and Sundog — 'whoever they are,' Mo said pointedly — stepped in with an offer no one could match.

  'But why here?' Lieberman asked as they walked over to the clifftop and caught a startling view straight out onto the empty blue waters of the Mediterranean. 'What kind of a place is this for astronomers?'

  'You're supposed to be telling us that,' Annie objected, with the dogged lack of logic Lieberman associated with kids.