Starfire a-2

by Charles Sheffield

  More radical was the scheme, conceived in haste and executed at panic speed, of a European group, Earth Will Provide (La Terre Suffira). Its three hundred members, all among the world’s richest individuals, had rightly concluded that if Earth’s surface provided some protection, then the whole of Earth should offer more.

  They had ascended to high orbit three days ago. There they would hover on their mirror-matter engines at Alpha Centauri’s antipodean point, two thousand kilometers above the surface, while Earth turned below them and the particle storm attained its maximum. The vast bulk of the planet would shield them until the storm blew past. When all was over they would return.

  It was tempting to ask, return to what?

  A logical mind might offer two alternatives. Either they would find a world that had survived the particle storm, in which case their flight was unnecessary; or they would return to a dying planet, where the old definition of wealth had lost its meaning and their own quietus, unhindered by privilege, could not be long delayed.

  But who am I to mock the dreams and prayers of others? Their hope, like mine, is that the prevailing scientific view lacks validity. God knows, humans have been wrong often enough. We may be wrong again.

  Meanwhile, business continues, though it is difficult to justify the customary added phrase “as usual.” Seth and I prepare ourselves, mentally and physically, for a meeting with a murderer. That encounter, unlike Earth’s rendezvous with the particle storm, will be decided by human actions alone.

  32

  The geometry had been set in place six days ago and fine-tuned every hour. The hollow tip of the conical shield pointed its arrow toward Alpha Centauri and maintained a fixed distance of half a light-second from Earth. Cusp Station hovered thirty thousand kilometers behind, precisely on the axis of the cone. Sky City in turn was locked in position one kilometer behind Cusp Station, whose newly installed field generators bathed the shield in a low-intensity glow mediated and diffused by the shield’s fine network of superconducting fibers.

  Each particle bundle impinging on the shield would generate a burst of radiation, whose direction and signal frequency shift contained enough information for a precise trajectory to be computed. But to be useful, the calculation — like every other action — had to be made fast. Within seconds of hitting the shield, a free-flying particle bundle would reach Earth. Before then the detection data must be received on Sky City, necessary calculations completed, a loop field generated and sent on an interception trajectory, and the particle bundle caught and diverted safely away.

  It was all possible — just. Maddy had watched the first tests, when the flux of particle bundles was still limited to a few thousand arrivals per second. Before the human eye could detect anything at all, each bundle was intercepted, netted, and curved away to miss Earth by thousands of kilometers. After a few hundred successful encounters, the conversation in the engineering control center became casual and upbeat. What no one mentioned — what Maddy wondered if most people knew — was the projected change in the situation as the storm approached its height. If the convergence of the beam was as strong as expected and the maximum arrival rate of particle bundles came even close to the projected value, the field generators would be unable to produce enough loop fields to handle the entire flood. At that point some of the bundles would begin to get through. Cusp Station and Sky City would have to be preferentially protected, since if their systems failed all defenses would be lost. But the consequence of that would be weaker protection at the edges of the shield, and thus of the parts of Earth, that lay behind them.

  One thing was certain: The team on Sky City would know the worst before very long. The flux counters had begun their final climb. Storm maximum would occur in less than three hours, and long before that the defense system would be tested to the limit.

  Maddy stared around the room, with its score of working engineers and data analysts. She wondered again: How far had the word spread of Wilmer Oldfield and Star Vjansander’s worst-case prediction? Did they all know?

  She herself had told no one — but news, especially bad news, leaked out no matter how you tried to contain it. Yet she had seen no small groups closely-knit in conversation, and she had overheard not a dropped word.

  On the other hand, she knew that John had heard Wilmer’s worst-case assessment — she had been with him at the time. And he now showed no hint of interest in anything beyond the task at hand. In fact, she was beginning to wonder if he had forgotten to make a promised announcement on a quite different subject. In the circumstances, that would be more than reasonable. A dozen murders must seem like nothing in the face of billions of deaths.

  But John had not forgotten. When he finally spoke he was terse, almost casual. He addressed the room at large, his gaze intent on the displays. “We’re at zero minus two hours forty-one minutes, and are approaching one-tenth flux maximum. By the way, the particle storm seems to have produced an unexpected result. Because of it, they’ve found Doris Wu’s body.”

  He seemed ready to leave it at that, leaning over the control panel and monitoring the final countdown, but Will Davis whistled loud through his front teeth and said, “You can’t stop there, boyo. Where, and how?”

  “One of the last up-leg shuttles to Sky City. A million-to-one chance. If we hadn’t moved to our present position, the body might never have been found. The shuttle passed within forty meters, and a passenger made visual contact. They took her body on board and brought it here. It’s sitting in Cargo Bay Fourteen.”

  Maddy was standing inconspicuously at the back. She said under her breath, Go on, go on. But John seemed intent on the controls.

  “Did they find anything that might tell who killed her?” Torrance Harbish asked. Engineers from all around the center, their tasks for the moment ignored, looked up or moved closer.

  “I don’t know,” John said. “I doubt it. Until this is all over, the security staff must have other things on their mind.” He looked up. “And so do we. Lauren, do you have those capture rates? Wilmer Oldfield is panting for them.”

  “Right here. Shall I transmit?”

  “Waste of time. Wilmer won’t look at the feed. Do you have time to take it to him?”

  “I’ll find time. Where is he?”

  “At the back of the water buffer. He and Star want to compare the bundles they get now with what they caught during the blip storm.”

  “I hope the results they’re getting make more sense than mine do,” Amanda Corrigan said. She had three separate displays running in front of her. “We have a set of quickie Sniffers a few light-days out, and they’re showing a stronger storm convergence toward Sol than we’ve ever seen. But the counts I’m making locally fail to confirm. Both sets of data can’t be right. Take a look. Where are the bundles?”

  The first display was a simple two-axis graph. The horizontal axis showed distance from Sol in astronomical units. The vertical axis was estimated beam area. As the storm approached the solar system, the area decreased dramatically. The. Alpha C storm was homing in on the solar system.

  The second display was a table of total beam area versus predicted particle count per second at Sky City. The third display was another graph, with time as the horizontal axis and particle count as vertical axis. Both predicted and observed counts were shown. The predicted count rose rapidly at the time of maximum flux, and fell away as fast beyond it; the observed count went only up to the present time, but at the moment it was close to constant over time and looked nothing like the predicted peak.

  John Hyslop gave the curves and tables in front of Amanda a cursory glance. “I’ve no time to look at them now. Get them to Wilmer and Star, let them figure it out. Matching predictions and observations isn’t our business. Our job is to deal with whatever arrives.”

  He caught Maddy’s eye. She wondered if he could possibly be as calm as he looked. She surveyed the whole information center, with people constantly hurrying in and out, and found everyone busy and preoccupie
d. But she saw no sign of nervousness. The only nervous one was Maddy herself — maybe because she had too little to do.

  She waited a few more moments, then quietly slipped out of the room. She was no help here, an engineering nonentity surrounded by the pick of the solar system’s engineers. But somewhere on Sky City there must be someone who needed assistance. If it was not true now, it would be when the storm arrived.

  33

  When the storm hit Earth, regardless of intensity and duration, one thing seemed sure: The sky would seethe with electromagnetic energy, and during the final few minutes all forms of radio communication might be lost.

  Temporarily lost? Celine had posed that question to Benedict Mertok. He shrugged and gave a less-than-useful reply: “Madam President, we need to define temporary. Nothing lasts forever.”

  But some things seemed to. Pressure on a President to hide away from every form of danger was one of them. Celine had refused all suggestions that she retreat to a deep underground refuge.

  “Didn’t you tell me that there is no chance of direct bundle impact this far north?” It was early morning on what she secretly thought of as doomsday, and she was sitting in her specially designed padded chair in the Oval Office.

  Ben Mertok frowned. “Well, yes, I did . . .”

  “Then that’s good enough for me. I’ll wait out the particle storm right here. You can go now.”

  “I think maybe I should—”

  “I said you can go now, Ben. I need privacy.”

  It was wrong to take even a mild pleasure in Mertok’s discomfort. But at times like this pleasures were few and far between, and you took them wherever you found them. As soon as she was alone Celine tilted her chair back and stared up at the ceiling. She had displays all around her, hooked up through ground-based fiber-optic feeds to every country on the planet, but the one link she wanted might be blacked out. The front line of battle was nowhere on Earth; it was up on Sky City and Cusp Station. Already the view of the shield seemed grainy, and the speckling of random points of light that she saw might be transmission noise, nothing to do with the detection of particle bundles. On the other hand, there was a good chance it was all her imagination, and the image of the shield looked exactly as usual.

  “The Honorable Nicholas Lopez is on line eight,” said the calm voice of the autocom. Celine sighed and returned her chair to its upright position.

  “Nick? Where are you?”

  “At the airfield in New Rio. Waiting for takeoff.”

  Celine glanced at the clock. Two and a quarter hours to flux maximum. “You’re cutting it fine.”

  “Not from choice. The space defense can’t stop a hundred percent of the bundles, and a few are already getting through. At our longitude they are coming in close to horizontal, but they’re still coming in. Nothing like the way they will be in another couple of hours, but we already lost a suborbital to an unlucky hit on the flight control box. This is the last flight out, then everybody who’s left here heads for the deep shelters.”

  “I thought that was your plan.”

  “I thought so, too.” The visual feed finally kicked in, and Nick’s face appeared on the display. He was smiling ruefully and smoothing his gray hair back with one hand. “The trouble is, the shelters have only energy-sensor contact with the surface. When it comes right down to it, I’m too curious to know what’s going on.”

  “You remember what curiosity killed.”

  “I know. I comfort myself with the thought that only the good die young. But I expected you’d be in the underground Washington refuge. What’s your excuse?”

  “I’m here because it’s second-best. What I really wish is that I were up there.” Celine pointed her thumb toward the ceiling.

  “On Sky City? Then go. You remember what Saul Steinmetz said? Sometimes when you’re President, you have to do something that nobody else in the whole damn country could get away with, just to prove that you can.”

  “It’s too late. We have an embargo on outgoing spacecraft until the storm is over — issued on my instructions.”

  “A good decision, I think. We’ve just lifted off. Take a look from the plane here, and remember it’s only just starting.”

  Nick’s face on the screen was replaced by a close-up view over the great bay at New Rio. The overall landscape was peaceful, but the nearby waters showed widely spaced spurts of foam disturbing the calm surface. An occasional sun glint came from the silver-white bellies of dead fish.

  Celine glanced at the other displays scattered around her office. An unfamiliar one caught her attention. She stared for a few seconds, then said, “Don’t waste time sightseeing, Nick. Get out of there and head north. At once.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’d like to show you something. Can you accept visual feeds?”

  “For the moment. The radio link is supposed to get noisy, but we’re cleaning it up pretty well using high signal redundancy.”

  “This is a fiber-optic lead that the ID says is coming from Kerguelen Island, fifty degrees south in the Indian Ocean.”

  “I know Kerguelen. I’ve even been served Kerguelen land cabbage at a French embassy dinner. Famous, and supposed to be nutritious; but it tastes disgusting.”

  “Well, you’re ahead of me — I’ve hardly heard of the place. But at the moment the particle storm is hitting there from almost directly overhead. A reporter suite is planted near the summit of a peak called Mount Crozier, about a thousand meters up. The mobiles can go anywhere, but the main imager looks down and across the Morbihan Gulf to a peninsula on the other side. We’re getting a high-data-rate feed via landline and submarine cable, and the reporter is mixing mobile high-resolution and fixed low-resolution sequences. Tell me what you make of these.”

  The first image came from the fixed imager. On the island, halfway around the world from Celine, it was already close to dusk and the illumination was poor. The scene showed the surface of the shallow gulf alive with white jets of steam. Now and then a deeper eruption brought a spouting geyser meters high into the air. The bodies of a diversity of sea creatures rolled and floated half submerged in the turbulent waters. Seals? Penguins? Black-backed sharks? Killer whales? Identification would have to wait for pictures from the mobile reporters.

  Beyond the gulf, the peninsula looked to be on fire. Not just the dark green scrubby bushes, but the fat round bodies of cabbagelike plants and even the windswept ground itself flamed and sparked and quivered in angry dots of red and orange.

  Nick watched in silence for a while, then said, “Pretty impressive, and we still have a long way to go before maximum flux. Believe it or not, this was anticipated. It was even requested.”

  “Not by me, it wasn’t. How do you mean, requested?”

  “All the U.S. is north of the Tropic of Cancer, so you’re shielded by Earth’s mass from direct bundle impact. The Southern Hemisphere isn’t so lucky. The more advance information that we have about effects, the better. A consortium of countries near and below the equator asked Sky City to run a control experiment on Kerguelen Island. Particle bundles with trajectories that terminate in and around Kerguelen are not being diverted at all. They smack right on in. Every scientist with ground-based data feeds is getting a look at what could happen to a full hemisphere of an unprotected Earth. It’s tough on the local wildlife and the vegetation, but the population of Kerguelen has been completely evacuated.”

  “Nick … I don’t think so.” Celine had been staring at an image from one of the mobiles. The flying imager was zooming steadily in toward a starfish splash of yellow that stood out against the somber beach of the peninsula. Soon she could make out arms and legs and the dark blob of a helmeted head sticking out of the bright jacket. It was the body of a man lying facedown.

  “Damnation. That’s a Media Guild logo on his back.” Lopez sounded more angry than concerned.

  “What did he think he was doing?” Celine wanted a close-up of the man’s head, but she
was not getting it. “The mobiles can go anywhere that the reporter tells them. Isn’t the reporter smart enough to know what’s worth imaging, or ask for studio guidance when it’s not sure?”

  “Of course it is. Celine, you’re looking at human stupidity and arrogance. The reporter can handle the job; it was designed for it. But I’ve seen this over and over. No matter what the event — hurricane, riot, particle storm, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, you name it — and no matter how much you warn people, some idiot will decide he can ride it out and get a news exclusive by recognizing something that ’only a human can tell is important.’ I bet this one’s a freelance. He heard through the wires that Kerguelen had been picked out for special attention, and he went there deliberately.”

  Now that Nick had made the identification, Celine could recognize the small black video unit that sat a couple of feet away from the man’s outstretched right hand.

  She asked, more to say something than because she cared to know the answer, “How do you think he died?”

  As she spoke the body’s left arm jerked to one side, giving her the momentary impression that the man was still alive. Then she saw the puff of smoke close to the shoulder.

  “He died like that,” Lopez said. “See, another one just hit him.”

  Celine glanced at the data table accompanying the Kerguelen display. “It’s surprising that he would be hit twice. The particle bundles on Kerguelen are arriving at a rate of three per minute per hundred square meters, and they’re coming down close to vertical. An upright human provides a target less than half a square meter in area. You’d expect to be able to stand outside for an hour before you’d get hit. And he was hit twice, counting that last one.”