Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“But what about Earth?” Amanda scanned the flow chart and saw only in-space activities. “What will people do there?”

“Dig. Hide below the surface, or stay under water. The new defense isn’t ready, and the old shield won’t stop the particle bundles. People down on Earth should be all right. Lots of fireworks for about twelve hours, but this pulse packs less than a hundredth of the energy of the main one. I’m a lot more worried about things out here.”

“I thought Sky City had ample shielding.”

“For individual particles, yes, but I’m not sure about particle bundles. Maybe they’ll be stopped, maybe some of them will pass through Sky City like it’s not there. I’m expecting a few to get through no matter what we do; statistically that’s inevitable. But too many of those and our field generators and computers will stop working. Problem is, I don’t know how many is too many. I’ll ask Lauren to try another calculation — she’s the least busy of the group.”

John glanced at the clock. “Two o’clock. She’s going to have a fit. Bruno Colombo, too. I’ll have to wake him up.”

“Hmph.” Amanda made a face. “Good luck with that one. I wouldn’t dare.”

“Bruno will have to make worse calls than any of mine. He’s got to wake Nick Lopez and Urbain Tosca, and tell them that the WPF and the UN have two days to organize the whole planet.”

“What about me? I’ll call Nordstrom, and I’ll work on the other anomaly I mentioned. What else can I do to help?”

John studied Amanda’s unlined face. “Not tired?”

“Fresh as a daisy.”

“Then go and wake up Star Vjansander. She’s been pestering me for weeks to let some bundles through the defense system so she can capture and study them. Tell her that her wish was just granted. By the time this peak has been and gone, we’ll have more than enough bundles.”

“Should I wake her right now?”

“Might as well. Everyone else is going to be up; why not Star? Oh, and Amanda.”

She was already standing up to leave the information center. She turned. “Yes?”

“Tell Star that no matter how pleased she is with all this, she’d better not show it.”

“Or else?”

“Or else she’s going to find that everyone in Sky City engineering is too busy to make a capture-and-contain device for particle bundles.”

“Isn’t it easy? The bundles are all charged. You just slow them and contain them with electromagnetic fields. Star must know how.”

“She undoubtedly does. But knowing how and making it happen are two different things. Star is no engineer.”

Amanda nodded. “Wilmer Oldfield says that Star can’t make coffee without breaking the jug.” She grinned at John. “You’ll probably kill me for saying so, but I’m sort of enjoying this. It’s interesting and it’s exciting”

“I’m glad you think so. But while this first pulse may be a small one compared with the main hit, people are going to die. Remember the old curse: May you live in interesting times.”

As she hurried out John stared again at the display of the particle counts, with its innocuous-looking little side peak. That blip looked like nothing, but it derived from the huge stellar energies of a whole exploding star. He had told the truth to Amanda: People were undoubtedly going to die, if not here then down on Earth.

And yet Amanda was right, too. John felt worry, he felt nervousness, he even felt fear. But underneath everything, deep down, the excitement of the challenge was growing.

They were weeks away from the peak. They had not yet reached the first of the foothills. The hardest times surely lay ahead. But there, visible in the distance, loomed the mountain.

Maddy’s dinner with John Hyslop had been a great success. A success, that is, if you didn’t mind being with a man apparently impervious to any form of romantic suggestion. They had talked, with the ease of old friends, about everything on Earth and off it. They had compared Gordy Rolfe and Bruno Colombo as bosses, they had laughed, and they had lingered. He had agreed, instantly, to meet with her and Seth Parsigian the next day, without even asking her the subject — score one for Seth. And then, at the end of the evening, he had escorted her to her rooms, kissed her on the cheek with a chasteness and formality you might expect from a legal guardian, and left. He told her he had to work.

Surprisingly, after that Maddy had slept comfortably and easily. Apparently that made her a Sky City oddity, since the next morning every other person at breakfast claimed to have been up most of the night, making preparations for the “blip storm,” an unexpected particle squall only a couple of days away. No one else had managed more than a couple of hours in bed. John Hyslop, according to Star Vjansander, had slept not at all.

Maddy and Seth were on John’s schedule for ten o’clock in the morning. Last night it had seemed an excellent choice, an hour when John should be fully awake but not yet weighed down with the problems of the day. Now you could hardly pick a worse time. If he had been up all night, John would be too exhausted or too overwhelmed with work even to listen. And Seth Parsigian — the louse who had talked Maddy into the meeting with John Hyslop in the first place — would not even be present.

The voice message had been waiting for her after breakfast. “Hey. I gotta little problem to take care of down on Earth. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone, ’cause flights to an’ from Sky City are gonna be tight as hell ’til the blip storm excitement dies down. You go ahead and handle John Hyslop. Tell him anythin’, but make him say yes.”

Didn’t Seth realize that the same particle storm that could maroon him down on Earth would probably ruin all their chances of a meeting with John? The whole inside of the space city thrummed with energy and activity. For the first time in many months, worries about the Sky City murders had been pushed into the background.

Maddy went first to the plant engineering test facility, the meeting place that John had suggested. It was no surprise to find that he was not there. She sent a message over the Sky City general telcom channel. Ten minutes later she still had no reply.

Where was he? In one corner of plant engineering Maddy found Jessie Kahn and a slew of new attendant rolfes. A distracted Jessie, dictating rolfe assignments that yesterday would have been far above her level of seniority, waved a vague hand at Maddy. “Try the generating plant — they’re going loony there because the bundles interfere with the control circuits, and that might shut everything down. Or the engineering information center; John was there most of the night. Or Bruno Colombo’s office — I know a major flap was going on there. Maybe even Cusp Station. That has to be battened down before the storm hits. He could be there.”

Jessie’s tone said more than her words. Go anywhere, Maddy Wheatstone, but get the hell out of my hair.

Maddy went to the power-generation facility, on the axis beyond the main body of Sky City. Panic, yes, but no sign of John Hyslop. No one seemed to be expecting him. The engineering information center was deserted except for Torrance Harbish, who provided even less than Jessie Kahn: a gloomy shake of the head and a “Could be anywhere.” At Bruno Colombo’s outer office, guardian-of-the-inner-sanctum Goldy Jensen greeted Maddy with a snarl like a rabid wolf and a curt “Of course he’s not here. And he’s not on Cusp Station.”

“Then where is he?”

“How should I know? Am I John Hyslop’s keeper?”

Not John Hyslop’s, lady; Bruno Colombo’s. Maddy politely thanked Goldy and retreated.

Where? Maddy felt increasingly useless. Her wanderings through Sky City had made one thing evident: The space facility was in total turmoil. People were trying to cram weeks of labor into days, and it wasn’t working. They didn’t have a moment to spare.