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?
38
The climber picked his way with carefully selected hand-and footholds up a sheer face of naked rock; the foot soldier marched forward with pike at the ready toward a waiting enemy; the captain wrestled with the steering wheel of his ship, fighting to keep the bow into the wind while the tempest raged; the hunter tracked a wounded tiger through the deep forest.
John Hyslop, in his youthful imagination, had been all of them. Fed on stories of old adventures, he had fought and conquered a hundred dangers. The difference between early fantasies and today’s reality was simple: Then, his own actions had defined the line between success and failure. Now, as danger came closer, nothing that he did would make any difference.
The terms of engagement had been decided days and weeks ago. The defenses were the best that humans could make. They were working as well as could be expected, given the haste in creating them and the crude modifications to the old design. Now it was John’s fate to take on the role of spectator, waiting to learn who and what might survive.
But even a spectator can be in danger. John jerked away as, two meters to his left, a particle bundle blasted into and through the information center. He heard the now-familiar staccato ping and saw a blue flash of Cerenkov radiation. He glanced around to make sure that no one had been hurt, and returned his attention to the displays.
Working as well as could be expected. That did not mean perfect. Close to one percent of the particle bundles were eluding the field loops. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Someday — if all went well, and certainly not today — he would find out what had gone wrong. For the moment, he had to accept that there were going to be casualties, on Sky City as well as back on Earth. Or the other way round: On Earth, as it is in heaven. No one, so far, had been hurt in the information center, but urgent announcements had called for medical assistance on the perimeter levels of Sky City.
The perimeter levels. The exclusive levels, the expensive levels. Particle bundles drew no distinction between rich and poor, and there was no secondary form of protection that a wealthy man might buy. Once a bundle was past the defensive line, nothing could stop it.
John was aware that the information center was filling up. He saw that Maddy was here. He had watched her leave at the first onset of the storm, but he had not noticed her return. She gave him a thousand-watt smile and came closer. Will Davis and Rico Ruggiero had drifted back into the room and were hovering over by one of the main displays. If you were not involved in emergency services, looking after people who were hit, or making repairs to damaged equipment, there was little to do but watch and wait.
He noted the pulse rate of the field generators. It had reached a maximum value, and neither prayer nor tinkering could increase the frequency of the pulses.
He did not propose to advertise the fact that the defense system was at its limit, so that now too few loop pulses were being generated to provide complete protection. The defense system automatically allocated as many loop fields as were needed to ensure an acceptably low number of bundles at the detectors and field generators. That zone of relative safety covered Cusp Station and Sky City and extended a few kilometers beyond their edges. Within the zone the hit rate was constant at about one bundle per minute per ten square meters. Outside the zone, the number of bundles getting through was rising. The monitors said it was already far beyond anything seen during the blip storm. Earth must be taking a hammering, although there was no direct proof of that. Uplink and downlink communication was proceeding more or less as usual, even though the particle flux rate would go through the roof in another twenty minutes.