Starfire

37

Night had vanished two hours ago. Now it seemed to be returning. The office was darker, with interior lights turned off and most of the illumination provided by the display screens.

Celine glanced at each of them. Everything coming in by radio feed showed a blur of electronic noise added to the video signal. Contact with Nick Lopez had been lost, though he should now be well north of the equator and safely landed. Fiber-optic links with the Southern Hemisphere revealed a world empty of human life. People had fled north, or moved to deep shelters. Plants and animals were not so lucky. The landscapes of South America, southern Africa, and Australia were strewn with dead creatures large and small, and the smoking remnants of trees and shrubs cast a purple-gray haze over everything.

Most of the mobile observation units still functioned, but their pictures jerked and twitched and veered as though the guidance signals from the main reporters were not quite working. As Celine watched, the screen showing a feed from McMurdo Sound collapsed to a kaleidoscope of random colors. An Antarctic reporter had taken a direct hit. After a twenty-second delay, a substitute circuit closer to the South Pole cut in with images of bare rocks and steaming, desolate ice cliffs.

She went to the window and stared southeast toward the Sun. She was in the supposedly “safe” Northern Hemisphere. But the gold circle of Sol was dimming, minute by minute, overlaid by a grid of dark lines. They were wider and more numerous than during the previous storm, and as Celine watched the Sun faded steadily in a cloud-free sky. Soon it became a ghostly gray cutout against a black background.

As the Sun dimmed to extinction, the first lightning bolt split the sky. It ran not between Earth and heaven, but cut a jagged path across the overhead blackness from east to west. The flash was so bright that Celine flinched away from the window. She automatically counted, waiting for thunder that never came, and at last realized that she was observing something in the highest reaches of the atmosphere, eighty to a hundred kilometers above her head. Before that realization, a second and a third bolt had streaked across her field of view.

As the lightning continued, the aurora began. Faint at first, it strengthened gradually to intense yellow-green streamers of light. The background of the sky turned ice blue and salmon pink. In that false dawn, plant leaves became dark purple and human skin took on the unpleasant green of the undead.

Celine glanced at her watch. Twenty-eight minutes to flux maximum. She turned to face her desk and said, “What’s the situation on Sky City?”

“We still have good contact.” Vice President Auden Travis’s reply came at once. He and the Cabinet were, following Celine’s orders, in the deep shelters. Celine had insisted that the President must stay in the White House, providing an example to the country by rejecting protection unavailable to most of the people. But the nation had to function after the particle storm, no matter what happened to her, so others must go below. Auden Travis had agreed — reluctantly. Celine was sure that he understood the real motive, which was her desire to see what happened firsthand. But he had gone, and he was undoubtedly monitoring everything that happened in her office. If the VP saw anything dangerous, Celine suspected that security staff would appear to drag her below, her orders notwithstanding.

“The amount of electronic activity in the atmosphere is incredible,” the Vice President went on. “We’re handling it all right, with tightly focused beams and repeat patterns with high redundancy. If it doesn’t get worse than this, we’ll keep transmission right through storm maximum. On the other hand, twenty minutes from now we may get nothing but gibberish.”

“How are the space defenses performing?”

“Working at full capacity.”

Travis said no more. It sounded like good news, but Celine knew better. If the defenses were at full capacity and the storm had yet to reach its maximum, then in the next half hour something had to give. What that something would be was quite clear, and it had been agreed to ahead of time. The first priority of Sky City and Cusp Station was to preserve — in order — the integrity of the particle detection system, the computational facilities, and the generators for loop field interceptors. Without them, there was no defense system at all. To keep those units functioning, the number of particle bundles hitting the immediate neighborhood of Sky City had to be as low as possible.

There was, of course, an inevitable but unspoken implication: If the number of bundles exceeded the capacity of the defenses to handle them, then other portions of the defenses, those farther from the axis of the cone of the shield, must suffer more collisions. The damage that caused would decrease their effectiveness. In turn, a steadily larger fraction of the storm would strike Earth.

It seemed as though Sky City was getting the better part of the deal, but their advantage would be only temporary. The space city could not survive for long without supplies from Earth.

Celine returned to the window. The sky was all fire. In the minute or two while her attention had wandered, the yellow streamers had turned solid, dimming the lightning itself with flaming lances of light along precise north-south lines. It hurt her eyes to look at them. She turned, and the afterimage of gold bars burned on her retinas. Her office was brighter than noon on a summer’s day, yet it seemed dim.

Celine glanced again at her watch. She had to blink water from her eyes several times before she could make out its face.

Twenty-five minutes to go.

The optimist in her said, Only twenty-odd minutes, a third of an hour, and Earth and I are still alive.

The pessimist said, Yes, we are; but for how long?