Starfire

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.”

“We don’t know how long he stood around taking pictures. But let’s say he was unlucky as well as stupid.”

“Extremely stupid. See, he’s wearing a hard hat — heaven knows what he thought that would do for him. The particle bundles are whipping in there at thirty thousand kilometers a second.”

There was a five-second silence before Nick said, “Maybe none of us is too smart in situations like this. I should have known better, but I told my staff to put on hard hats until they could head for the deep shelters. And now you’ve got me wondering about the cross-sectional area of this suborbital, and the particle rate over the Caribbean.”

It sounded like a rhetorical question, but Celine happened to be able to answer it. “Once you’re north of Venezuela, you’ll be safe if you keep below a couple of hundred kilometers altitude. Your path puts you behind Earth relative to Alpha C.”

“Safe.” Lopez laughed, but Celine would bet that he was not smiling. He went on, “I like that word, safe. Is anybody safe? Is the particle beam still converging?”

“Faster than ever, according to Sniffer reports.”

“Then we better hope that our smart boys and girls on Sky City know what they’re doing. Otherwise, we might as well all be on Kerguelen Island and finish up like him.”

Lopez and Celine fell silent. The sea boiled and the land burned, while drifting black smoke intermittently hid the forlorn yellow-clad figure on the beach. The bodies of marine animals of all sizes darkened the lifeless shore of the gulf. Mobiles, most of them no bigger than a cicada, flew over and under the water, seeking targets. Their small size provided some immunity from particle bundle impact.

But you can’t shrink a human down to cicada size, Celine thought. And humans are what this is all about. Am I looking at my own future on that screen, and the future of everybody on Earth? Will only the machines be left as observers in another month or two? Come on, Nature. Let’s get this over with — one way or another.

In front of her, the Kerguelen Island data showed the bundles arriving more and more frequently. After a fifty-year journey through interstellar space, the particle storm from Alpha Centauri was ready to show its power.