She stepped to the platform’s edge and looked down. The roof of the Dome was as smooth and reflective as polished chrome, and the aurora light returned complex, shimmering reflections from it. Though the bulk of the Tin Lid obscured her view, she could see the landscape of Greater London sprawled around the foot of the Dome. Whole swaths of the inner suburbs were plunged into darkness, broken by islands of light that might have been hospitals, or military or police posts. But elsewhere, just as inside the Dome, she saw splashes of light in areas where people were still defiantly ripping up the night, and there was a distant pop of gunfire. It was anything but a normal night—but it was hard to believe, gazing down at the familiar, still more or less unblemished landscape, that the other side of the world was already being torched.

One of the soldiers touched her shoulder. “Ma’am, it will be dawn soon. It might be better to get below.” His accent was a soft Scottish. He was very young, she saw, no more than twenty-one, twenty-two.

She smiled. “All right. Thank you. And take care of yourself.”

“I will. Good night, ma’am.”

She turned and made for the elevator. The aurora was actually bright enough to cast a diffuse shadow on the concrete platform before her.

In Bisesa’s flat, another alarm beeped softly. She glanced at its face by the blue light of the useless softwall.

“Nearly five,” she said to Myra. “Time for dawn. I think—”

The beeping stopped abruptly, and the watch face turned black. The wall’s blue glow surged, flickered, died. Now the only light in the room was the dim flickering of the candle on the floor.

Myra’s face was huge in the sudden gloom. “Mum, listen.”

“What?—oh.” Bisesa heard a weary clatter that must be an air-conditioning fan shutting down.

“Do you think the power has gone off?”

“Maybe.” Myra was going to speak again, but Bisesa held up her finger for hush. For a few seconds they both just listened.

Bisesa whispered, “Hear that? Outside the flat. No traffic noise—as if every car stopped at once. No sirens either.”

It was as if somebody had waved a wand and simply turned off London’s electricity—not just the juice that came from the big central power stations, but the independent generators in the hospitals and police stations, and car batteries, and everything else, right down to the cell batteries in the watch on her wrist.

But there was noise, she realized: human voices calling, a scream, a tinkle of glass—and a crump that must be an explosion. She stood and made for the window. “I think—”

Electricity crackled. Then the softwall blew in.

Myra screamed as shards of glass rained over her. Bits of electronics, sparking, showered over the carpet, which began to smolder. Bisesa ran to her daughter. “Myra!”

41: The Palace in the Sky

0704 (London Time)

Siobhan had spent the two hours since dawn in the big operations center that had been set up on a middle floor of the Euro-needle. The walls were plastered with giant softscreens, and people worked at rows of desks, their own flickering screens in front of them. Here the Prime Minister of Eurasia tried to keep tabs on what was going on across his vast domains, and around the rest of the planet. There was an air of frantic energy, almost of panic.

Right now the big problem was not the sunstorm’s heat but its electrical energy. It was the EMP, of course: the electromagnetic pulse.

The shield’s design had been optimized to handle the worst threat facing Earth, the storm’s big peak of energy in the visible spectrum. But along with that visible light had come flooding at lightspeed a dose of high-frequency radiation, gamma rays and X-rays, against which the shield could offer no protection. The invisible crud from space was hazardous for an unprotected astronaut; Siobhan knew that Bud and his shield crews were taking shelter where they could. Earth’s atmosphere was opaque to the radiation, and would save the planet’s population from the direct effects. But it was secondary consequences that were causing the problems.

The radiation itself might not reach the ground, but the energy carried by all those vicious little photons had to be dumped somewhere. Each photon smashed into an atom of the Earth’s high atmosphere, knocking free an electron. The electrons, electrically charged, were trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, soaking up more and more energy from the radiation falling from space, and they moved ever faster—and at last gave up their energy as pulses of electromagnetic radiation. So, as the Earth relentlessly turned into the sunstorm’s blast, a thin, high cloud of tortured electrons migrated across the planet, raining energy down onto the land and sea.

The secondary radiation would pass through human flesh as if it weren’t there. But it induced surges of current in long conductors like power lines, or even long aerials. Appliances suffered surges of power that could be enough to destroy them or even make them explode: power failed in every building across London, every stove or electric heater became a potential bomb. It was like June 9, 2037 all over again, even if the root physical cause was subtly different.

The authorities had had years’ warning of this. They had even dug out a set of dusty old military studies. The EMP effect had been discovered by accident, when an atmospheric bomb test had unintentionally knocked over the telephone system in Honolulu, more than a thousand kilometers away. Once it had been seriously suggested that by detonating a massive enough nuclear bomb high above the atmosphere over a likely battlefield, the enemy’s electronics could be fried even before the fighting started. So there were decades of experience of military-hardening equipment to withstand this sort of jolt.

In London, government gear had, where possible, been toughened to military specifications, and had been augmented by backups: optical cables, for instance, were supposedly unaffected. Those Green Goddess fire engines were back in action tonight, and London’s police were out patrolling in very quaint-looking vehicles, some of which had been brought out of retirement in museums. It was easy to fuse modern integrated circuits, full of tiny gaps ready to be breached by sparks, but older, more robust gear, such as antique cars built before about 1980, could handle the worst of it. The final precaution in London had been the “blackout order.” If people just switched their equipment off, there was a better chance it might survive.

But there wasn’t time to fix or replace everything, and not everybody was going to sit at home in the dark. There had already been vehicle collisions all over London, and beyond the Dome there were reports of planes, which shouldn’t have been flying anyhow, dropping out of the sky like flies. Modern planes depended on active electronic control of their aerosurfaces to keep them in the air; when their chips failed, they couldn’t even glide home.

Meanwhile, only one in a hundred phones was going to live through this, as were few exchanges and transmission stations, and far above, satellites were popping out of the electronic sky. Soon the great electronic interconnection on which much of humankind’s business depended was going to fail—in the end the disruption would be far worse than June 9—and just when they needed it most.

“Siobhan, I’m sorry to interrupt—”

Siobhan knew that as an entity emergent from the web of global interconnection, Aristotle was peculiarly vulnerable tonight. “Aristotle. How are you feeling?”

“Thank you for asking,” he said. “I do feel a little odd. But the networks on which I am based are robust. They were designed in the first place to withstand attacks.”

“I know. But not this.”