After eight minutes the photon shockwave reached Earth.
Chapter 86
Officer Rob Trant was on duty, cruising the east side of New Prudhoe, Alaska.
He was well aware of the date, and the time. This was when the Nail was due to strike Mercury, as his mother Monica had warned him. But despite having this inside channel he didn’t know much more about the international crisis than any other cop in the country.
They’d been briefed about fears of a backlash on Earth, whatever happened up in space: a rising by ethnic Chinese types in the cities, maybe, or some kind of revenge attacks taking place on them in turn. Whatever. Rob had seen nothing untoward so far, in the ruined suburbs he patrolled. But he knew the news of even the most dramatic events on Mercury would take long minutes to crawl out here at lightspeed.
Personally he didn’t think anything would come of it. The whole Chinese winter thing had been a kind of bluff, after all.
He knew his mother was in the centre of it, on Mercury he could never have persuaded her to come away. She had opened up to him more in recent days than for a long time, in fact more than since the moment he’d finally rebelled at his life under a dome on Mercury, and had cashed in his partially completed ISF training to become a cop on Earth. It was hard to have a decent conversation with the long minutes of light delay between the worlds. She’d promised him some kind of message today, a long missive. But the message hadn’t come, not yet.
He missed his mother. He admitted it, in lonely moments. He was forty-two years old, had come to Earth in his twenties, had always been too much of an alien to make close friends, to fall in love. He missed his mother’s company, but he didn’t feel concerned for her right now. He concentrated on his job.
New Prudhoe was a sprawling conurbation less than seventy years old, the historic plaques and markers you saw everywhere told you that, a product of the great northern migrations of the last century. It felt like it was a lot older to Trant, especially in the neighbourhoods he worked, which had once been prosperous middle-class suburbs, thriving on the post-Jolt prosperity of this Arctic ocean coast. But now the Chinese winter had come and it went on and on, and the stores were closing, and people were losing their jobs and heading south for the duration, leaving behind only various deadbeats who couldn’t move or wouldn’t, and those who preyed on them, and cops. And then some other types had started coming back, with their own novel vices: most recently, hothead kids who had got addicted to Asgard and other live-action games, but had got bored with the simulation, bored with dying every day, and now wanted the thrill of the real thing. Well, today Rob felt relatively safe, in his armoured cruiser with its powerful weaponry and super-smart, ever-alert AI. Besides, it wasn’t long since the National Guard’s last clear-out, after a set-to confrontation when whole districts had burned.
The Nail arrival time must have come and gone. He checked his watch, trying to remember how long the time lag was between Earth and Mercury just now.
That was why he was thinking about his mother, when it came.
The car had just turned down a long avenue, once the centrepiece of the new city in the post-Jolt recovery days, now with only a handful of cars, all automated, cruising its length. So, as it happened, he was looking south when the photon shockwave washed over Earth. Rob saw it as a wave of blinding light coming up from below the horizon, but soon filling the car, and his head.
And suddenly his eyes felt like they were burning out of his head, and his vision went from dazzling white to utter black. He threw his arm over his face, crying out. He fumbled for the slate mounted on the dash, to call this in, this nuclear attack, whatever. He had to call it in. His eyes were pits of agony. He felt warm inside, like he’d been stuffed inside a microwave cooker…
On the long, mostly empty highway, the cars cruised on quietly, calmly, in their straight lines, their onboard AIs taking over the controls from drivers who threshed and screamed, tearing at sightless eyes. Until the radiation began to fry their electronics, and they slewed aside.
This was only the beginning. The particle storm, travelling slower than light, would not arrive for another two hours.
Chapter 87
Earthshine’s bunker remained calm, the staff working at their monitors and slates, recording, analysing, as the bad news from the sky filled the screens. Sir Michael King, walking stiffly with the aid of his stick, went around the staff individually, to reassure them that they were free to take a break, to try to contact family on the surface if they needed to. Most of them stayed where they were, as if by keeping on working, sticking to the routine, they were somehow holding the greater horror at bay.
Now the screens showed a darkening, a thickening smog, cutting off the unbearable brilliance of the sky.
King stormed into Earthshine’s central sanctum. “So what now? We had the flash—what next?”
“Massive particles,” said Earthshine—or at least the semi-transparent partial copy the primary had left behind when he fled on the Tatania. “The ozone layer is already gone. Ultraviolet and gamma rays are battering the surface of the Earth. As for life, basic cellular functions are being compromised.” The virtual looked thoughtful. “People are being cooked. Animals too. And now the cosmic ray storm. The last surviving satellites, shielded by Earth’s shadow from the flash, told us that much. The high-energy particles will be knocking atmospheric molecules apart, oxygen, nitrogen, to produce nitrogen dioxide. Some of which will combine with rain to produce nitric acid, acid rain, while the rest lingers in the air to block out the sunlight which—”
“It’s an extinction event,” King breathed.
“Indeed. As if a gamma-ray burster had gone off in the heart of the solar system.”
“And the people?”
“The flash will have the most immediate effect. The radiation will kick in soon; cancers will take most of the survivors of the short-term cull.”
“Cull? What the hell kind of a word is that? And you, you bastards? You Core AIs?”
“Oh, we will survive in our deep shelters. I certainly in my central bunker, with this store as a primary backup, and the partial I sent offworld with Penny Kalinski as a secondary.”
“And then what?”
Earthshine shrugged. “A new domain of life will eventually populate the Earth. Perhaps we will have some influence on the future. Not myself, of course. I have fled…”
“I feel like hurting you.”
“It’s not my fault. We tried to broker peace through the Council of Worlds. Yet I understand how you feel.”
“Then whose fault is it? Ours, the Chinese?”
“Maybe neither. Some reports have emerged about the beginnings of this, at Mars, at Ceres. Although I doubt if any historians will survive to piece together a full account. I am uploading what I can to my partial twins in the deep store and on the Tatania…”
“Some bastard pulled the trigger, right? That’s what it boils down to. Without waiting the few minutes it would have taken to get confirmation from Earth. Christ. That was always the fear in the first Cold War, you know. That a commander of some nuclear sub, out of touch with his government, would take matters into his own hands.”
“But even now the events that followed are uncertain. There have been fragmentary reports of mutinies on the Nail itself, by captive UN crew, and counter-mutinies by the Chinese, even as it fell towards Mercury. There may have been no control, in the end; as it came plummeting in for the strike the Nail was a war zone itself. There was nobody in a position to deflect it, even if the order had come to do so. How appropriate, that the end should come this way. A war nobody wanted, and thought would be kept at bay by sentimentality. A war triggered, not by any single command, but by foolishness, arrogance, and poor communication.”