by Ben Bova
Over cycles of roughly eleven years the Sun’s violence waxes and wanes. During periods of maximum solar activity the Sun’s shining face is blotched with sunspots, slightly cooler regions that look dark compared to the surrounding chromosphere. Solar flares erupt, sudden bursts of energy that can release in a few seconds the equivalent of a hundred million billion tons of exploding TNT: more energy than the entire human race consumes in fifty thousand years.
The electromagnetic radiation from such a flare—visible light, radio waves, ultraviolet and X-rays —reaches the Earth’s vicinity in about eight minutes. This is the warning of danger to come. Close behind, a few minutes or a few hours, comes the first wave of extremely energetic protons and electrons, traveling at velocities close to the speed of light.
The energy in these particles is measured in electron volts. One electron volt is a minuscule bit of energy: It would take five million electron volts to light a fifty-watt lamp. But protons with energies of forty to fifty million electron volts can easily penetrate a quarter-inch of lead, and particles from solar flares with energies of more than fifteen thousand billion electron volts have reached the Earth.
Yet the most violent effects of the solar flare are still to come.
The flare has ejected a gigantic puff of very energetic plasma into interplanetary space. The cloud expands as it moves outward from the Sun, soon growing to dimensions larger than the Earth. When such a cloud hits the Earth’s magnetosphere it rattles the entire geomagnetic field, causing a magnetic storm.
The auroras at Earth’s north and south poles flare dramatically, and the “northern lights” (and southern) are seen far south (and north) of their usual haunts. The ionosphere—the belt of ionized particles some eighty kilometers above Earth’s surface—runs amok, making a shambles of long-range radio transmissions that are normally reflected off its ionized layers.
On the Moon and even out in the Asteroid Belt all surface activity is halted when a solar flare bathes the region in lethal radiation. All spacecraft that operate beyond the Moon carry protective electromagnetic shielding to divert the energetic particles of the flare’s cloud. Otherwise the people in those spacecraft would swiftly die, killed by the invisible bullets of ionizing radiation.
Within a few days the deadly cloud wafts away, dissipates in interplanetary space. Earth’s ionosphere settles down. The auroras stop flaring. Space-suited workers can return to the surface of the Moon and the asteroids. The solar system returns to normal. Until the next solar flare.
WEATHER FORECAST
Jersey Zorach was a dour, dark, stolid astrophysicist who studied the weather in space. Despite his being a third-generation American, born and raised just outside Chicago, he had never outgrown his Latvian heritage of being burdened with a sense of impending doom.
He sat in his messy little cubbyhole of an office, a squat, untidy man built rather like a fireplug, with a thick thatch of unruly prematurely gray hair flopping down over his forehead, surrounded by beeping display screens, stacks of books, reports, video chips and the scattered remains of many meals he had eaten at his desk.
Since interplanetary space is a nearly perfect vacuum, most people smiled or even laughed when Zorach told them his profession, waiting for a punch line that never came. There was no rain or snow in space, true enough. But Zorach knew there was a wind of ghostly microscopic particles blowing fitfully from the Sun, a solar wind that sometimes reached hurricane velocities and more. There was a constant drizzle of cosmic particles sleeting in from the distant stars as well.
And there were clouds, sometimes. Invisible but quite deadly clouds.
For years he had worked to make precise predictions of solar flares. He studied the Sun until his eyes burned from staring at its seething, roiling image. He made mountains of statistical analyses, trying to learn how to forecast solar flares by matching existing data on earlier flares and making “backcasts” of them. He spun out holographic maps of the interplanetary magnetic field, knowing that those invisible threads of energy steered the radiation clouds that were thrown out by solar flares.
Nothing worked. His predictions were estimates at best. Everyone praised him and the results he was obtaining, but Zorach knew he had yet to predict a single flare. Not one, in all the years he had been working on them.
So he wasn’t surprised when one of the display screens in his cluttered office suddenly pinged. Turning to it, he saw nothing unusual to the unaided eye. But the alphanumerics strung along the bottom of the screen told him clearly that a new solar flare had just erupted.
A big one, he saw. Big and nasty. He knew the automated system was already sending warnings to every human habitat and outpost from Selene to the colony in orbit around distant Saturn. But he pecked at his own phone and called Selene’s safety office to make certain they started bringing everybody in from the surface. It was a point of honor with him. If I can’t predict the bloody storms, he said to himself, at least I can make certain no one is killed by them.
Deep below the Moon’s surface in his private grotto, Martin Humphries had no worries about solar flares or the radiation clouds that accompanied them.
He was ambling slowly through the colorful garden in the patio outside the elaborately carved front door of his mansion, with Victoria Ferrer at his side. The heady aroma of solid beds of roses and peonies filled the air, and he felt victory was close enough almost to touch.
“We’re winning,” Humphries said happily. “We’ve got Astro on the run.”
Ferrer, walking slowly alongside him, nodded her agreement. But she warned, “This latest move of Astro’s could cut off the ore shipments coming in from the Belt.”
Humphries disagreed with a wave of his hand in the air. “Drones attacking our automated freighters? I’m not worried about that.”
“You should be. This could be serious.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Humphries sneered. “This fiasco with that Starlight vessel has brought Pancho’s little scheme out into the open.”
“But they could strangle your profits if—”
“I’m going to get rid of Astro’s drones at one stroke,” Humphries said confidently.
Ferrer looked at him questioningly.
“Set up a meeting for me with Doug Stavenger.”
“Stavenger?”
“Uh-huh. Once Stavenger has his nose rubbed into the fact that Astro’s controlling those birds from inside Selene, he’ll close down their operation.”
“He will?”
“Yes indeed he will,” said Humphries, smiling broadly. “He’s made it clear to me and that little guttersnipe that he doesn’t want any fighting in Selene. No fighting anywhere on the Moon.”
“But does that mean he’ll demand that Astro close down its control center for the drones?”
“Damned right he will. And he’ll make it stick, too.”
Ferrer was silent for a moment, thinking. Then, “Pancho will just move the control center off the Moon. Put up a space station.”
“And we’ll blast it to smithereens.” Humphries clapped his hands together. “I only hope the damned greasemonkey is aboard when we wipe it out.”
Ferrer thought it over and had to admit that her boss was correct. HSS mercenaries had scored major victories over Astro forces in the Belt. Astro had sprung a surprise with their drones attacking HSS freighters as they approached the Moon, but Humphries was probably right in thinking that Stavenger would force them to move that operation out of the safety of Selene. Of course, zapping that independent freighter and wiping out that family didn’t help Astro’s cause. Not at all.
Yet she heard herself ask, “What about Fuchs? He’s still lurking out there somewhere.”
“Fuchs?” Humphries snorted disdainfully. “He’s a spent force. Once we’ve cleaned out Astro we can hunt him down at our leisure. He’s as good as dead; he just doesn’t know it yet.”
For weeks, Lars Fuchs had been living in the machinery and storage spaces in Selene’s “base
ment.”
On the Moon, where the deeper below the surface you are, the safer you are from the radiation and temperature swings and the thin but constant infall of micrometeors that pepper the surface, Selene’s “basement” was its topmost level.
Just below the Grand Plaza and its extensions, Selene’s highest underground level was entirely devoted to the pumps and power converters and other life-support equipment that provided the city’s air, water, light and heat. Living quarters were on the lower levels, the lower the more prestigious—and expensive.
The “basement” also held the warehouses that stocked spare parts, clothing, preserved foods, and the tanks of water that Selene’s residents drank and washed in. In short, the “basement” had all the supplies that a renegade, a fugitive, a homeless exile would need to survive.
During the years he had lived at Ceres, Fuchs had listened for hours to Big George Ambrose talking about the “bad old days” when he had lived as a fugitive in Selene’s shadowy underground economy, surviving on his wits and the petty pilfering that provided food and shelter for him and his fellow nonpersons. Even Dan Randolph had once spent a few months hiding from the authorities in Selene.
So Fuchs had politely checked out of the Hotel Luna, afraid that sooner or later he would be identified and forced to return to Earth, and toted his meager travel bag up toward the kilometer-long tunnel that led to Armstrong Spaceport. Instead of going to the spaceport, though, he found one of the access hatches marked MAINTENANCE AND SUPPLY SECTION: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, quickly decoded its simple security lock, and disappeared into the shadowy “basement,” where machinery throbbed incessantly and the air was heavy with the odors of lubricating oil and ozone from the electrical machinery.
Color-coded pipes and electrical conduits ran overhead. Maintenance robots trundled back and forth along the walkways between the pulsating machinery and the warehouse stacks. Simpleminded machines programmed to alert human controllers of malfunctioning equipment or water leaks, the robots were fairly easy to avoid. Fuchs could see the red lights set into their tops flashing through the dimly lit passageways while they were still far enough distant to get out of range of their optical sensors.
There was a scattering of other people hiding there, too, a ragged handful of men and women who preferred to scratch out an underground living rather than submit to Selene’s laws. Some of them were wild-eyed from drugs, or raving alcoholics; others were simply unable or unwilling to live by other people’s rules. Fuchs met a few of them, barely avoided a fight when one of them pulled a knife and ordered him to swear loyalty. Fuchs bent his knee and agreed, then quickly moved as far away from the megalomaniac as he could and never saw him again.
Fuchs settled down in the “basement,” content to sleep in a bedroll and eat canned foods pilfered from the warehouse stocks. He spent his waking hours peering at his palmcomp, studying the schematics of Selene’s air ducts and water pipes, searching for a way to penetrate the lunar city’s lowest level, where Humphries lived in his magnificent mansion.
As the weeks passed, Nodon, Sanja, and Amarjagal arrived at Selene one by one, each of them bearing identification as Astro Corporation employees, lowly technicians. Their one-room corporate apartments were sufficient for them, luxurious compared to Fuchs’s hideout in the storeroom shelves in the “basement.”
Fuchs visited his crew members, furtively making his way through Selene’s corridors to spend long hours with them, planning how he might kill Martin Humphries.
SHINING MOUNTAIN BASE
Daniel Jomo Tsavo hated the three-second lag in communications between the Earth and Moon. It upset him to ask a question and then wait and wait and wait until the answer came back. Yet there was no way around the lag. And now the safety people have warned us that a solar storm is on its way; normal communications will be disrupted and all work on the surface will have to stop until the storm passes. Ah well, he said to himself, this call to Yamagata is on a tight laser-beam link. The storm should not affect it, unless it’s powerful enough to fry the laser transmitter on the surface.
“Pancho Lane wants to visit your base?” Nobuhiko Yamagata replied at last.
Tsavo nodded vigorously. “She just called. She’s at the Astro facility in the Malapert Mountains, no more than a hundred kilometers from where I sit.”
Again the interminable lag. Tsavo used the time to study Yamagata. His round, flat face looked frozen, his eyes hooded, his expression unreadable. Yet he must be thinking furiously, Tsavo thought. Come on, come on. Tell me what I should do.
“This is a striking opportunity,” Yamagata said at last. Tsavo agreed heartily. “I took it on my own authority to invite her to come over tomorrow.”
Yamagata again seemed lost in thought. At last he said, “Don’t delay. Bring her to your base as quickly as you can. I will send an interrogation team immediately on a high-g burn. There is much we can learn from her.”
Pancho felt slightly nervous being out on the surface with a solar flare cloud on its way. The scientists had estimated that it would take more than six hours for the radiation to even begin building up, but still she felt edgy about it. She was wearing a standard hard-shell space suit as she followed the Astro base director along the crest of Mount Randolph. Approaching storm or not, the director wanted to show off what his people were doing and Pancho had no intention of showing any fear in front of her own people.
I should be testing the softsuit I brought with me, she said to herself. Yet she answered silently, You know what they say about test engineers: more guts than brains. I’ll wear a softsuit when they’ve been in use for a year or two. Momma Lane didn’t raise any of her daughters to get themselves killed trying out new equipment.
She was being conducted on a quick walk through the small forest of gleaming white towers that reached up into the bright sunlight. Their wide, circular tops were dark with solar cells that drank in the Sun’s radiant energy and converted it silently to electricity. They look like great big mushrooms, Pancho thought. Then she corrected herself. Nope, they look more like giant penises. She giggled inwardly. A forest of phalluses. A collection of cocks. Monumental pricks, all standing at attention.
“As you can see,” the base director’s voice rasped in her earphones, “another advantage of the power towers is that the solar cells are placed high enough above the surface so they’re not bothered by dust.”
It took an effort for Pancho to control her merriment. “You don’t need to clean ’em off,” she said, trying to sound serious.
“That’s correct. It saves quite a bit of money over the long run.”
She nodded inside her helmet. “What about damage from micrometeoroids?”
“The cells are hardened, of course. Deterioration rate is about the same for the ground arrays around Selene.”
“Uh-hmm.” Pancho seemed to recall a report that said otherwise. “Didn’t the analysis that—”
A new voice broke into their conversation. “Ms. Lane, ma’am, we have an incoming call for you from the Nairobi base at Shackleton.”
“Put it through on freak two,” she said.
It was voice only, but she recognized Tsavo’s caramel-rich baritone. “Ms. Lane, Pancho, this is Daniel. I’m sending a hopper over to your facility within the next half-hour. Please feel free to visit us whenever you’re ready to.”
Grinning, delighted, Pancho answered, “I’ll get over there soon’s I can, Danny.”
“You know that a solar storm is approaching,” he said. Pancho nodded inside her helmet. “Yup. I’ll get to you before it hits.”
“Fine. That’s wonderful.”
Pancho cut her inspection tour short, apologizing to the base director, who frowned with undisguised disappointment.
Sure enough, there was a Nairobi Industries hopper standing on its spindly little legs, waiting for her at the launchpad. It was painted a vivid green with the corporate logo—an oval Masai shield and two crossed spears—stenciled just below the glass
teel bubble of the cockpit.
She dashed to the room that the base director had given her for her quarters, picked up her still-unopened travel bag, and headed out toward the pad. She called Jake Wanamaker on her handheld to tell him where she was going and why. Then she buzzed her security chief and asked him why in the name of hell-and-gone he hadn’t been able to locate Lars Fuchs yet.
“I want him found,” she insisted. “And pronto.”
At that moment, Lars Fuchs was huddled with his three crew members in a narrow, shadowy niche between one of the big electrical power converters and the open-shelved storehouse that he used as his sleeping quarters.
“This is where you live, Captain?” Amarjagal asked, in a whisper that was halfway between respect and disbelief.
“This is my headquarters,” Fuchs replied evenly. “For the time being.”
Nodon said, “You could move in with me, sir. There is no need for you—”
“I’ll stay here. Less chance of being discovered.”
The three Mongols glanced at one another, but remained silent.
Over the weeks since Fuchs had gone underground he had learned the pattern of the maintenance robots that trundled along the walkways set between the machinery and storehouses in Selene’s uppermost level. It was easy enough to avoid them, and he swung up into the higher tiers of the warehouse each night to spread his bedroll for sleep. It was a rugged sort of existence, but not all that uncomfortable, Fuchs told himself. As long as he kept his pilfering of food and other supplies down to the bare necessities, Selene’s authorities didn’t bother to track him down. From what Big George had told him, it was easier for the authorities to accept a slight amount of wastage than to organize a manhunt through the dimly lit machinery spaces and storehouses.
