Eugene froze the image. Heres the most recent spike, the June 9 event. One side of the core was flaring bright with false color. The observational data confirms my preliminary modeling, and validates my future projections By observational data, Siobhan thought ruefully, he meant a devastating storm that had cost thousands of human lives.
She asked, And whats to come?
He ran the model forward at a greater pace. The patterns of oscillation shifted and swam in Siobhans vision, too rapid to follow in detail.
Then, suddenly, the image flared bright, all over the core, almost bright enough to dazzle. People flinched, briefly shocked.
Eugene shut down his graphics. He said laconically, Thats it.
Rose Delea said dangerously, What do you mean, thats it?
At this point the model breaks down. The oscillations become so large that
Your damn model! Delea shouted. Is that all you can think about?
Lets take it easy, Siobhan said, thinking fast. Eugene, were looking at another event here. Correct? Another June 9.
Yes.
But more energetic.
He looked at her, puzzled by her ignorance once more. Thats obvious.
Siobhan glanced around the table, at wide-eyed, uncomfortable faces. Evidently Eugene hadnt shared these results with anybody before, not even Mikhail.
Bud asked, How much more? And how will it manifest itself? How will it hit us, Eugene?
Eugene tried to answer, but he descended quickly into technicalities.
Mikhail laid a hand on Buds arm. I dont think he can say. Not yet. Ill work with him on it. He went on thoughtfully, But you know, this isnt unprecedented. We might be looking at another S Fornax.
S Fornax?
For decades the astronomers had been studying middle-aged stars of the suns class, and on many of them had noticed cycles of activity similar to the suns. But some stars showed rather more variability than others. An unspectacular star in the constellation called Fornax had suddenly flared up one day, shining twenty times as bright as usual, for maybe an hour.
Mikhail said, If the sun erupted like S Fornax, the energy input would have been something like ten thousand times as bad as our worst solar storms.
And what would that do?
Mikhail shrugged. Disable the whole satellite fleet. Destroy Earths ozone layer. Melt the surfaces of the ice moons
Siobhan remembered dimly that the constellation name, Fornax, meant furnace. How appropriate, she thought.
But Eugene actually laughed. Oh, this core nonlinearity will be much more energetic than that. Orders of magnitude worse. Dont you even see that much?
That crack brought him looks of resentment, even hatred.
Siobhan studied him, baffled. It was as if all this were no more than a mathematical exercise to him. He was just a boy who saw patterns, she thought, patterns in the data; the patterns meaning in human terms was invisible to him. She felt almost frightened of him.
But she must concentrate on what he had said, not the way he said it. Orders of magnitude. To a physicist, indeed to a cosmologist, an order of magnitude meant a factor of ten. So whatever was coming would be ten, a hundred, a thousand times worse than June 9, worse even than this S Fornax event of Mikhails. Her imagination quailed.
And there was one obvious question that had yet to be asked. Eugene, do you have a date for this event?
Oh, yes, Eugene said. The models already good enough for that.
When, Eugene?
He tapped at his softscreen and gave a date in Julian days, an astronomers date. It took Mikhail to translate it into human terms.
April 20, 2042.
Bud looked at Siobhan. Less than five years.
Suddenly Siobhan felt hugely weary. Well, I guess Ive found out what I came here to know. And maybe now you can see the need for security.
Rose Delea snorted. Security, my arse. We could all run around naked with bags on our heads for the next five years and it wouldnt make any difference. You heard him. We, she said concisely, are fucked.
Bud said firmly, Not if I can help it. He stood up. Lunchtime. I guess you might want to call your Prime Minister, Siobhan. Either of them. Then we get back to work.
14: Missing in Action
Too soon, time ran out for Bisesa.
Myras school reopened. The headmistress understood that for some families, bereaved, displaced, shocked, or simply frightened, more recovery time was needed. But as the weeks wore by a note of insistence crept in. Disaster or no disaster, the education of the young had to go on: that was the law, and it was up to parents to fulfill their obligations.
For Bisesa, the pressure was mounting. She was going to have to release Myra before the social services came looking for her. The cocoon she had built around the two of them was starting to crack.
But it was the British Army that finally broke her out into the daylight. Bisesa received a polite e-mail asking her to report in to her commanding officer.
As far as the Army knew Bisesa had simply disappeared from her posting on June 8, before the solar storm, and her five-years-too-old ident chip making her untraceable, she had not been heard of since. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the Army, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had had other things to think about. But now the services bureaucratic patience was running out.
Her bank accounts hadnt been frozen, not yet, but her salary had been stopped. Linda was still able to draw on the funds for shopping and bills, but Bisesas level of savings, never high, was quickly dropping.
Then, still unable to find her, the Army switched its assessment of the cause of her vanishing from possibly AWOL to missing in action. Letters were hand-delivered to her next of kin: her own parents in Cheshire, and Myras paternal grandmother and father, parents of the childs deceased father.
Bisesa was lucky that the grandparents reacted first, and called her flat in a great flurry of concern. Their call gave Bisesa the chance to contact her parents before they opened their own letter. She wasnt close to her parents; the family had fallen out when her father had sold off the farm where Bisesa had grown up. She hadnt even contacted them since June 9, though she felt a little guilty about that. But they certainly didnt deserve the shock of opening such a letter, with its grave Ministry of Defense language about how all efforts were being made to trace her, and her effects would be returned to them, with deepest sympathies expressed et cetera, et cetera.
She was able to spare her parents that. But shed had to give away her location, and when the authorities came looking for her seriously she wouldnt be hard to find.
So she braced herself, and asked Aristotle to put her through to her commanding officer, in the UN base in Afghanistan.
While she waited for a reply, she continued to worry at her peculiar memories.
Of course there was one obvious explanation for it all. She did have scraps of physical evidence for her adventures on Mirher own apparent aging, the scrambling of her ident chip. But all she really had to rely on were her own recollections of the event. And it didnt need the construction of a whole new Earth to explain that. Perhaps she had gone through some kind of episode that had scrambled her mind, impelled her to go AWOL, and brought her home to London. She might, after all, be crazy. She didnt think so, but it was a simpler explanation, and in the mundane calm of London it was a hard possibility to discount.
So she looked for verification.
She had known Abdikadir Omar and Casey Othic, her companions on Mir, before the Discontinuity, of course. Now she used Aristotle, and a not-yet-canceled password, to hack into Army databases and check out their service records.