by Eric Flint
"No, honey. Please don't distract me when I'm driving."
He mumbled an apology and sat back quietly in his couch. Maddy looked at her sensor display and saw several dozen icons representing the pinnaces of other evacuees. The majority maintained the recommended three hundred gees, and a few actually matched her acceleration. However, three of them barely plodded along at a leisurely two hundred gees.
Don't these people know what's going to happen? she thought in astonishment. She looked closer and saw they were all from the Solar Steel Works smelter. Solar Steel Works was the solar system's largest producer of B-steel— though they couldn't match Lee's quality. Theoretically, they were Lee and Maddy's competition, but they were still human beings, albeit stupid human beings.
She opened a channel. "Attention SSW pinnaces. Increase your acceleration to the three hundred gees SunWarn recommended. Pick it up people! We don't know when this is going to blow."
"No-can-do, Kurchowsky," a defeated voice came back. "These buckets are at their maximum accel right now."
A decade of search-and-rescue work screamed at her to turn around and shepherd the stragglers. However, everyone was on their own right now. Maddy had her own family to think of. Still, it was unthinkable for her to sit back and do nothing when lives were at stake, and she racked her brain for a solution.
Inspiration hit her. "SSW pinnaces. What type of pinnace are you flying."
There was a brief pause. "Buick Millennium CEs. Why?"
"Oh, thank God," she muttered. "Now listen carefully: you can override your governors and max out your accel. You'll probably burn out your impellers, but you can make it."
"But our gravcomps—"
"Don't worry about them! The Millenium is a civilian version of the Solar Guard's SP-7, and they all use the same compensator. It's mil-spec, so it can take the load. Now shut your mouth and listen to me . . ."
While Maddy tried to save the SSW people, Lee saw a telltale on his screen flash to life as the partial slag exited the smelter's shield and brought up its own impellers. He watched it surge forward as it screamed spaceward at nearly a kilogee toward a pickup point halfway between the orbits of Mercury and Venus. A gigantic weight lifted off his shoulders. Lee had done his part; now the rest was up to Maddy.
* * *
They were only minutes away from the MSD point when Sol belched. Instantly, the SWS feed hissed into static, overwhelmed by the electromagnetic howl produced by megatons of liberated plasma. Not even the SWS equipment, custom-tuned to function this close to the sun, could filter out the cacophony of physics gone insane. She chanced a quick glimpse at her family. Kat read a book, while Shelby slept. However, Lee's eyes met hers. His eyes gazed back with complete and utter trust. She cracked a faint, forced smile to reassure him, then turned back to her console.
Helplessly, she watched the icons for two of the SSW pinnaces wink out on her display. Each one represented living, breathing human beings seared to a whiff of carbon atoms in a nanosecond. The flight crews of those two pinnaces must have somehow misunderstood her instructions and not been able to override their governors. However, the third one had increased its accel. Maddy felt a surge of relief, but it did nothing to ease the guilt of not being able to save those aboard the other two. A few other pinnace pilots must have panicked because they threw their craft into wild evasive maneuvers. The gyrations decreased their relative accel, and they died, too. The rest increased their accel as much as they could, and they barely kept ahead of the superheated reaper.
Maddy fought every instinct to override the navcomp and pull some idiotic nugget move. Contrary to the ancient piloting mythos, the last thing a smart pilot did in a hairy situation was "shut off the computer." Panic welled up inside when she noticed the outside radiation readings climb; the monster was tickling their shield. The heavy-duty shielding easily kept out the worst heat and radiation normally encountered in Sol's corona, but it couldn't hold back a massive blast of plasma larger than any of the inner planets.
A voice cut through the static in her headset, and the speaker sounded like he was fighting to stay calm. "This is S77GTC to all pinnaces hearing my transmission. I have you on my sensors, and I've found some thin spots in the plasma. If you follow the course I'm downloading to your navcomps, you should be able to avoid the worst of it, and your shields should hold. Transmitting now."
A vector appeared on Maddy's screen, and she instantly altered course to follow it. Other pinnaces followed suit, each on a slightly different vector to find the weak spots in the plasma. Maddy was in awe of the young ham who managed not only to establish communication through this hurricane of electromagnetism, but actually to use it to download individually customized navigational data to each ship's computer. Maddy guessed he had just stretched the SCC regs well beyond the breaking point, and she was glad he did it.
"Looking good, people. Looking good." She could hear a sense of satisfaction in the voice. "Stay on those courses and you should be safe. Godsp—"
The communication suddenly broke off, and Maddy felt her guts clench up. She hoped beyond hope that it was only interference, but she didn't have time to think about it. She worried her lower lip with stress, and she contemplated diverting an extra trickle of power from the engines to the shields. She quickly disregarded it because, in this circumstance, speed was life. Radiation readings increased, and alarm telltales lit up on her display. However, none of the radiation had reached the pinnace itself, and the shield still held. Another pinnace, which had drifted off its vector, vanished from her sensors. Maddy felt a trickle of blood run down her chin, and realized she had bitten deeply into her lip.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the radiation levels slowly started to drop and continued to drop. They were safe! After she took several deep breaths to calm herself, she rotated her couch sideways and played her eyes across her family. Except for Lee, who could see it in her eyes, they had no idea how close they had come to dying, for which she was eternally grateful.
Kat looked up from her book. "Mom? Is your lip bleeding?"
Lee's eyes popped up, and she could feel the concern radiating from him. She smiled and wiped the blood away with her sleeve. "Oh, it's nothing. It just got a little bit tense back there. But everything's going to be all right."
She slid out of her harness and got up from the couch. "Excuse me for a moment, hon, I've got to take care of this cut. Then we'll decide what we want to do on Mercury."
She stopped by Shelby and tousled her hair. The girl murmured slightly, then rolled over and went back to sleep. Maddy closed the door behind her, tossed her headset aside, dropped to her knees in front of the toilet, and threw up. She gripped the rim of the bowl and held tightly until her hands stopped shaking. She took several deep breaths, then stood up and turned to the sink. While she was washing out her mouth, she heard a tinny voice call from her headset.
"Calling Kurchowsky pinnace, this is SSW Niner-Golf-Three."
She snatched up the headset and put it back on. "Go ahead Niner-Golf-Three."
"You were right, Kurchowsky: we toasted our impellers. If we sent you our coordinates, do you think you could, um, give us a tow?"
Maddy couldn't help but grin. "I don't think that would be a problem, Niner-Golf-Three."
* * *
After they reached Mercury with the other survivors, Maddy handed the disabled SSW pinnace and its occupants off to the Mercury Orbital Patrol. Then she and Lee found out what went wrong.
For the past two centuries, the SWS had operated an automated network of solar forecasting satellites orbiting the sun. The network scanned Sol in every imaginable spectrum, and was able to issue accurate forecasts days, if not weeks, in advance. It was so effective that, since it went online, only fifty-seven people had died as a result of solar weather—and most of those because they either disregarded the warnings or were unable to receive them.
Today, the network failed, and the system ceased issuing warnings. The cause was a bug
that appeared in the system after the latest software patch. Naturally, the SWS blamed the software developer for creating a defective patch, and, just as naturally, the software developer blamed the SWS for improperly installing it.
Regardless, the quick action of a single person aboard SunWarn Seven saved the day. The ham on watch, a seventeen-year-old man named Ndungu Semenya, noticed the wild buildup of energy in Sol's magnetic field. He was astonished that the system never issued a warning. He wondered, if SunWarn could see what was happening with their less sophisticated weather equipment, why couldn't SWS? Quickly, he logged into the SWS network and found it had registered an alert two days ago, but did not issue a warning. Ndungu, using a series of codes issued by the SCC, made himself a superuser and issued the warning manually. Since they were in the damage path as well, the SunWarn people started to evacuate.
Ndungu was ready to board the pinnace, when he noticed the network had updated its forecast and narrowed the window for escape, but, yet again, the network didn't issue a warning. He made a split-second decision, told his comrades aboard the pinnace to leave without him, then went back to his comm station. He logged back in as a superuser, became SWS, and started issuing warnings. He then acted as an impromptu, one-man space traffic control. Ndungu was the "S77GTC" to whom Maddy had been listening.
Fortunately, while SunWarn's weather equipment was lacking, their comm gear was top-notch. Ndungu managed to keep talking to the pinnaces even after the CME erupted, guiding them out of harm's way. He stayed at his rig until the ejecta bombardment collapsed SunWarn Seven's shields and vaporized the station. However, because he stayed behind, only fifteen pinnaces out of one hundred seven were lost, and those mostly because their pilots didn't, or couldn't keep their acceleration high enough. One hundred and forty-nine people died, but thanks to Ndungu, over one thousand were saved.
Of all the organizations and institutions that played a part in the disaster, only the amateur comm community came out of it with its reputation intact. However, the community was too busy mourning its "silent key" to enjoy the accolades.
Lee decided to take the family down to the pool to blow off some steam, and Maddy heartily agreed. The children, lacking their parents' sense of mortality, threw themselves wholeheartedly into the simple joy of the pool. The two immediately discovered that they could create some truly monumental splashes in little over a third of a gee. This was their first time in any gravity besides microgee and earth-normal. Maddy was about to take a nap when a petite, dark-haired woman walked up to them. A camera drone hovered behind her.
She smiled and said, "Hi, I'm Misa Gonzales from SNN. How are you holding up?"
Maddy stared with shocked disbelief. How am I holding up? she thought in amazement. I damn near lost my family you little airhead, how the hell would you be holding up?
"As fine as can be expected, Misa," Lee answered, his voice weary. "We're alive, so that's a start."
When she saw Maddy shoot her a hostile glare, Misa reached in her pocket and pulled out a remote. She clicked a button, and the red light went out on the drone. Then she clicked another, and the drone turned its camera away. "I can come back later, if you guys want. Or not at all."
Touched by the gesture, Maddy waved her to a seat. Maddy had developed a not-unfounded knee-jerk reaction to reporters while she was in the Guard. It surprised her to see one act like a human being.
"Thanks," Misa said. "This really isn't my bag. I mostly work the business sector—whistle-blowers, shady deals in smoke-filled rooms, and the like. But, my boss wanted a 'human interest' story on the disaster, and since I just happened to be on Mercury at the time . . ."
She shrugged. "My ancestors on Mom's side of the family have a long history of getting their homes washed away by tsunamis, along with reporters sticking cameras in their faces and asking them how they felt about it. So, I guess you could say my heart isn't really in it."
Maddy cracked a slight smile. "Sorry I gave you the evil eye. I guess I'm still a little worked up."
"That, and you really didn't want to deal some annoying newsie," Misa added.
"That too. Maddy Kurchowsky." She stuck her hand out, and Misa took it. "And this is my husband Lee."
Misa shook hands with Lee. "Pleased to meet you. Those your kids there?"
"Yes," Maddy answered. "The little one's Shelby and the older one is. . .KAT! STOP SPLASHING YOUR SISTER! Um, her name is Kat—as you probably guessed."
"Oh, they're both wonderful."
"You have any of your own?" Lee asked.
"I have a ten-year-old son." Misa grimaced. "With this job, I don't get to spend as much time with him as I'd like to. Someday that'll change."
"With our work," Lee said, "we've been able to keep our kids with us. But it almost killed them in the process."
"What work do you do?"
"We were solar smelters." He grimaced.
"Oh! Wildcatters! You make B-steel, huh?" Her eyes lit up.
"Yes we do. However, I'm trying to take things a step further." He gave her a thumbnail rundown of his plans for his data. "In fact, I just sent off a cover letter and synopsis to the Mars Technical Institute before I came down here."
Maddy looked up at him and nodded in approval.
"My wife tells me that they're pretty sharp at MTI," Lee continued. "So, if anyone can do anything with the data, it's Mars Tech. Oh sure, it'd be easy to say 'stop making B-steel,' but that stuff is the key to the stars. It's the only material that can reliably withstand a transition into warp without degrading. Enriched titanium, the best metal we had before B-steel, crumbles like dry cake after only four transitions. So, B-steel is what we need to get out of the solar system. We've left Earth's cradle, but now it's high time to move out of the nursery."
"So, you basically want to get as many people as you can away from the sun—away from all that danger." Misa scratched her chin. "Wouldn't a remotely operated smelter do? You'd have people in the loop, but nobody at risk."
"Oh no." He shook his head. "Solar Steel tried it a few years ago. It sounded like the way to go, but it didn't work out."
"Really? I hadn't heard that."
"Yeah, it turned out to be kind of an embarrassment for them. I got the details from a former employee."
"Well, why didn't it work?" Watching her draw Lee out, Maddy concluded that Misa was in the right line of work. Maddy was about to cut her off, but she noticed that Misa seemed genuinely interested in what Lee was saying.
"There are a few reasons, Misa. First off, it's extremely expensive to fit a smelter with all the necessary remote equipment—the big boys can do it, but a wildcatter is on too tight a budget to begin with.
"Another problem is that Sol throws off a lot of interference on every imaginable spectrum. It's hard enough to make a phone call to or from the sun, much less transfer trillions of lines of code back and forth. You get a glitch during a phone call to Grandma, it's no big deal. You just ask her to repeat what she said. With a slew of code, it's a lot different because if you mess up the right line of code, you might ruin an entire slug.
"Finally, when you're throwing transmissions across open space, whether electromagnetic or quantum band, there's always a chance that it'll be hacked."
"I thought encryption could prevent that."
"So did Solar Steel. Just remember that no matter how sophisticated the lock, someone still has to open it. You can pick it, make your own key, or steal someone else's key. SSW's not sure what happened, but someone got into their system and, well, changed the specs on the slug."
"Changed the specs? How?"
"Well, when the tug went to fetch the slug, they found its structure had been modified . . ."
"Go on."
"How can I put this delicately? The slug that got shot out was shaped like . . . well, let's just say that somebody was compensating for something. A 'shortcoming,' shall we say?"
"Oh. My. God." Misa burst out laughing, and it wasn't the standard "ha-ha, that's funny"
kind of laugh. It was a hope-your-bladder-is-empty laugh. She laughed so hard—roaring guffaws with snorts here and there to punctuate—Lee and Maddy couldn't help but join in. Others around the pool gaped at them, and a few pretended to ignore them.
"Oh, I haven't laughed that hard in years." She coughed as she got herself under control. "Thank you!"
She let out a few more giggles, then settled down. "So, since you said you 'were' solar smelters, it's my guess that you're thinking about another line of work?"
"Yes I am. I'd prefer a job nice and far from the sun. Maybe Mars . . ."
Lee trailed off when Misa looked away and gazed across the pool. Then she turned her camera back on. Lee and Maddy followed Misa's gaze and saw a man and a woman in business suits heading their way.
"That can't be good," she whispered. "The man is Ray Quimby from Solar Steel Works, and the woman is Selene Rostov from Lunar Applied Metals. They're both pretty high on their respective corporate food chains, and they look like they want to talk to you. My advice: watch out. Sharks leave the water when they go swimming. Oh, they're just gonna love running into me—especially Quimby."
