Earth hung low over the shield itself, and its pale blue light glistened from a glassy floor that stretched to a horizon that was already vanishingly distant. The emerging shield had yet to be positioned so that its face was correctly turned toward the sun; that would come in the final days before the sunstorm was due.
It was an astounding, beautiful sight, and it was almost impossible to believe that mere humans had made this thing, here in the depths of space.
On a warm impulse she turned to her press secretary. “Nicolaus, forget the damn cameras. You must see this view …”
He was cowering against the rear bulkhead of the chamber, his face twisted with an anguish she had never seen in him before. He rapidly composed himself. But it was an expression she would think of again, three days later, as Boudicca made its last descent to Earth.
On the way out of the observation deck, Miriam noticed a plaque, hastily carved from a bit of lunar glass:
ARMAGEDDON POSTPONED
COURTESY OF
U.S. ASTRONAUTICAL ENGINEERING CORPS
25: Smoking Gun
For the reentry into Earth’s atmosphere aboard the spaceplane, Nicolaus chose to sit beside Miriam. He seemed stiff and rather silent, as he had been all the way back from the shield, and indeed for much of their time up there.
But Miriam, though she knew she was exhausted on some deep level, felt good. She stretched luxuriously. The big softscreens around her showed the broad blue-gray face of Earth below, and a pink glow building up at the leading edge of Boudicca’s stubby wings as they bit into the thickening air. But there was no real sense of deceleration, only the mildest of vibrations, a tickle of pressure at her chest. It was all remarkably beautiful, and comfortable. “After seven days in space I feel wonderful,” she said. “I could get used to this. What a shame it’s over.”
“All things must end.”
There was something odd in Nicolaus’s tone. She looked at him, but though his posture remained stiff his face was blank. A distant alarm bell rang in her head.
She looked past Nicolaus across the narrow aisle to see Captain Purcell, who had been quiet for a while. Purcell’s head was lolling like a puppet’s.
Immediately she understood. “Oh, Nicolaus. What have you done?”
*********
______
Siobhan arrived at the Chelsea flat, with Toby Pitt at her side. It was an ordinary place, Siobhan thought, and this was an unremarkable March day. But there was nothing unremarkable about the woman who opened the door.
“Thank you for coming,” Bisesa said. She looked tired—but then, Siobhan reflected, two years out from sunstorm day, everybody looked tired.
Siobhan followed her through the flat’s short hallway to the living room. The room had the clutter you would expect: a soft-looking sofa big enough for three, occasional tables littered with magazines and rolled-up softscreens. The main feature on which money had been spent was a big kid-friendly softwall. Bisesa was a single parent, Siobhan knew, with her one daughter, Myra, now eleven, at school today. The other tenant was Bisesa’s cousin, a student in bioethics who was now working on a pre-sunstorm conservation program run by an alliance of British zoos.
In a suit and tie, out of his natural environment in this domestic scene, Toby Pitt looked uncomfortable. “Nice softwall,” he said.
Bisesa shrugged. “It’s a bit out of date now. It kept Myra company when her squaddie mum was away. Now Myra has other interests,” she said with a mother’s fond exasperation. “And we don’t watch so much. Too much bad news.”
That was a common pattern, Siobhan knew. Anyhow, today the softwall was now hooked up to a government comms channel, and was showing the flickering images of Mikhail, Eugene, and others, images relayed from the Moon and Earth orbit to this living room in a flat in Chelsea.
Bisesa bustled away to make coffee.
Toby leaned toward Siobhan and said quietly, “I still think this is a mistake. To be pursuing theories of alien intention behind the sunstorm—people are becoming too disengaged as it is.”
Siobhan knew he had a point.
The impending sunstorm itself was bad enough for the public mood. Now the preparations for it were starting to bite significantly into people’s lives. Immense construction projects like the Dome were causing monumental traffic problems. Across the city routine work was being rushed or neglected, and that was starting to show; just the lack of fresh paintwork on London’s major buildings was making the place look shabby. Aside from the huge diversion of resources to the Dome, everybody was stockpiling, it seemed, and there was a continual plague of shortages in the stores. A recent upsurge of global terrorism and the subsequent wave of paranoia and security clampdowns had made things worse yet. It was a time of fretfulness and anxiety, a time from which people increasingly wanted to escape.
All the major news organizations reported catastrophic slumps in ratings—while sales of synth soap operas, which allowed you to pretend the outside world didn’t exist at all, had boomed. The world’s leaders were becoming concerned that if there was more bad news of any kind, everybody would just hide away at home until the dreadful dawn of April 20, 2042 finally put an end to all their stories.
“But,” Siobhan said slowly, “what if Bisesa’s right?” That was the slim, disturbing possibility that had guided her actions since the day Bisesa had first bluffed her way into the Royal Society, already more than a year ago, and why she had diverted a small percentage of the energies at her command to looking into Bisesa’s ideas. “If this is the truth, Toby, there’s no hiding away, whatever it costs.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “You have my full support. You know that. It’s just that I’ve always felt that putting Bisesa I-was-abducted-by-aliens-and-fell-in-love-with-Alexander-the-Great Dutt in touch with Eugene the-greatest-mind-since-Einstein-if-only-you-would-listen Mangles was asking for trouble.”
She forced a smile. “Yes, but what fun!”
Bisesa returned with a tray of coffees, and a pot for refills.
“There’s nothing you can do about it, Miriam,” Nicolaus said, his voice thickened by stress. “The plane’s communications are cut off, and anyhow we will soon be isolated by reentry plasma. Even Aristotle is out of touch. The fact that the plane is automated actually made it easier. The device is on a tamperproof timer, which, even if we could get to it—”
She held up her hands. “I really don’t want to know.” She glanced at the wall softscreens, which now showed a broadening glow, escalating through pink to white. It was like being inside a vast lightbulb, she thought. Must her life really end amid such beauty?
She searched for anger, but found only emptiness, a kind of pity. After years of strain she was fundamentally exhausted, she thought, too tired to be angry, even about this. And maybe she had thought that something like this was inevitable, in the end. But she did want to understand.
“What’s the point, Nicolaus? You know the polls better than I do. In six months I would be out of the way anyhow. And this really won’t make any difference to the project. If anything it’s likely to strengthen everybody’s resolve to get it done.”
“Are you sure?” His grin was tight. “This is quite a stunt, you know. You are Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. And nobody has taken down a spaceplane before. If confidence in flying into space is dented, even just a bit—if people on the shield start looking over their shoulders when they ought to be getting on with their work—I’ll have achieved what I set out to do.”
“But you won’t live to see it, will you?” And neither will I … “You’re just another in a long line of suicide bombers, as careless of the lives of others as you are of your own.”