The orbiter was like an isolated island, suspended in blackness. And she missed Earth. She missed having that huge sky-bright skin below the craft all the time, complex and dazzling, throwing soft, diffuse light into the cabins. She missed having home so close. She was, she was realizing belatedly, a true creature of Earth; she just wasn’t designed to be out here, in all this emptiness, with only the hard, pitiless light of the sun around her.

And so she spent as much time as she could afford here, in this little bubble of light and life, ignoring the huge dark beyond the walls.

Angel pushed buttons to open up the protective doors over the various solar telescopes. The cameras provided images of the sun at a variety of wavelengths, each generated by a different temperature, and so corresponding to a different depth in the star. In the H-alpha wavelength the sun was a fat, roiling sphere of white gas, peppered with black specks that churned, slowly and grandly, like some huge bowl of boiling oatmeal. In the extreme ultraviolet, the sun was a disc of irregular patches of color, without pattern or meaning he could detect. And in X-ray the sun was a fantastic landscape of blue, black and orange, showing up the areas of greatest activity and heat.

As soon as he brought up the X-ray image he could see what the problem was.

There was a big fat dark blue patch, like a bruise, right in the middle of the sun’s disc. That was a coronal hole, a part of the solar surface where the corona — the sun’s outer atmosphere — was less dense. Magnetic field lines could sprout vertically out into space, gushing out heavy particles at twice the normal velocities, like a hose. And that powerful jet was slamming into the slower-moving solar wind that lay between the sun and the spacecraft, churning it up into vast disturbances with tangled magnetic fields.

And all that shit was coming down on Discovery.

Angel hit the master alarm. The hab module was filled with a loud, oscillating tone, and four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

A second later the automatic flare alarm joined in, triggered by the radiation pumping against the hull of the ship.

Benacerraf came stumbling out of her quarters. She was in her underwear, and Angel could see the curves of her small, blue-veined breasts. Her hair was stuck to the side of her face, and her eyes were huge.

Angel hit a button to kill the alarms.

“What? What is it?”

“SPE,” he said. Solar proton event: a solar storm. “We got to get everyone in here.”

“Rosenberg is supposed to be asleep, and Nicola is in the centrifuge.” She looked about. “Siobhan must be in the farm—”

“She’ll be safe if she stays in there,” Angel barked. “You bring Nicola in. I’ll talk to Siobhan, make sure she stays put for a few hours.”

As he snapped out the orders, he felt exultant. At last, they were going to see some action; at last, after these months of dullness, he could do something.

Angel tried the squawk box, but got no reply from Libet. So he went back to the science station to try to get more data on the SPE.

Soon, four of them were here: Angel, Benacerraf, hastily dressing, Rosenberg looking sleepy and confused, and Nicola Mott, still sweating from her time in the centrifuge.

Angel found his gaze wandering over Mott’s body, what he could see of it inside her shapeless Beta-cloth clothes. She was sunk in on herself, but she was cute as hell, dyke or not. It would be interesting to make her sweat some other way, he thought.

“How come those assholes on the ground didn’t warn us about this?”

Benacerraf shrugged. “They probably didn’t know themselves. We’re a lot closer in than they are; the storm may not have reached them yet.”

He tried the squawk box again. “Damn it. I still haven’t spoken to Siobhan.”

Mott looked horrified. “Then she mightn’t know what’s going on. Maybe I should go find her. You know what she’s like. She spends hours in that farm with her earplugs in—”

Benacerraf said, hesitant, “The access tunnel isn’t shielded. Wait until the storm passes. Anyhow, even if she has her plugs in she should see the alarm lights.”

Mott frowned, and started to chew at her fingernail, industriously.

Angel tried the squawk box again; there was no reply. “Ah, the hell with it. If there’s nothing you can do, make the best. Right? I’m hungry. Who wants to eat? Paula, who’s on chow detail?”

Rosenberg sounded disgusted. “I’m going back to bed. You asshole, Bill.”

The women turned away from him. Benacerraf said, “Keep trying Siobhan, Bill.”

Chicken-livered dykes,he thought.

He turned once more to the X-ray image in the monitor, and watched the grey-black coronal hole work its way across the boiling surface of the sun.

When her work was done, Libet stowed away her tools and cleaned her hands with disinfected wet-wipes. She was due for her daily four hours in the centrifuge; her legs seemed to ache in anticipatory protest.

She stripped off her coverall and hat, and stowed them away. She opened the hatch to the connecting tunnel which would take her back to the hab module. The tunnel, a few yards long, was light, flexible.

Unshielded.

She had to dog closed the hatch behind her. The hatch was heavy and tended to stick, and had taken some shifting; by the time she had it closed she was tired and felt ready to rest, briefly, in the tunnel.

She let herself drift in the air, and she could feel her relaxing muscles pulling her into the usual neutral-G foetal position.

She closed her eyes. After the breezy farm, the tunnel was cool and still and comfortable. Maybe she could nap for a few minutes; it wouldn’t do any harm.

A line of light streaked across her vision, a tiny meteor against the dark sky of her closed eyelids.

In the farm module, unnoticed, a red lamp was blinking.

There were no alarms in the access tunnel.

Benacerraf drifted in her sleeping bag, her reading light on, listening on the squawk box to the reports from JSC.

Solar plasma was buffeting the Earth’s magnetic field, making it shudder, and huge electric currents were surging around the upper atmosphere.

The power grid serving the Canadian province of Alberta had gone down. In Britain, the northern lights were visible as far south as London. The Global Positioning System was breaking down; navigational fixes from the GPS satellites were unreliable because of the changing properties of the atmosphere. The Chinese had lost Echostar 3, a communications satellite. The energetic electrons racing around the Earth had caused a build-up of charge; a spark had generated a fake command to turn Echostar’s solar panels away from the sun. After a couple of hours, its batteries ran down, and it was lost. The energy of the storm was also heating up the outer atmosphere, making it expand; satellites as high as two or three hundred miles were experiencing a twenty-fold increase in atmospheric drag…

She fretted about Siobhan. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do until the storm passed.

Discovery was designed to shield them from the radiation hazards of deep space — hazards from which Earth’s magnetosphere and thick layer of atmosphere sheltered the rest of mankind.

The system had to cope with three kinds of ionizing radiation, high-energy particles and photons which could knock apart the atoms of the body as they sleeted through it. There was a steady drizzle of solar cosmic rays — the regular solar wind, a proton-electron gas streaming away from the sun, boiled off by the million-degree temperatures of the corona — and galactic cosmic radiation, GCR, a diffuse flood of heavy, high-energy particles from remote stars, even other galaxies, which soaked through the Solar System from all directions. And then, in addition to the steady stuff, there were SPEs — solar proton events, the kind of storm they were suffering now, intense doses of radiation which persisted for short periods, a few hours or days.