Charles Sheffield - Starfire

Maddy stared around the room, with its score of working engineers and data analysts. She wondered again: How far had the word spread of Wilmer Oldfield and Star Vjansander’s worst-case prediction? Did they all know?

She herself had told no one — but news, especially bad news, leaked out no matter how you tried to contain it. Yet she had seen no small groups closely-knit in conversation, and she had overheard not a dropped word.

On the other hand, she knew that John had heard Wilmer’s worst-case assessment — she had been with him at the time. And he now showed no hint of interest in anything beyond the task at hand. In fact, she was beginning to wonder if he had forgotten to make a promised announcement on a quite different subject. In the circumstances, that would be more than reasonable. A dozen murders must seem like nothing in the face of billions of deaths.

But John had not forgotten. When he finally spoke he was terse, almost casual. He addressed the room at large, his gaze intent on the displays. “We’re at zero minus two hours forty-one minutes, and are approaching one-tenth flux maximum. By the way, the particle storm seems to have produced an unexpected result. Because of it, they’ve found Doris Wu’s body.”

He seemed ready to leave it at that, leaning over the control panel and monitoring the final countdown, but Will Davis whistled loud through his front teeth and said, “You can’t stop there, boyo. Where, and how?”

“One of the last up-leg shuttles to Sky City. A million-to-one chance. If we hadn’t moved to our present position, the body might never have been found. The shuttle passed within forty meters, and a passenger made visual contact. They took her body on board and brought it here. It’s sitting in Cargo Bay Fourteen.”

Maddy was standing inconspicuously at the back. She said under her breath, Go on, go on. But John seemed intent on the controls.

“Did they find anything that might tell who killed her?” Torrance Harbish asked. Engineers from all around the center, their tasks for the moment ignored, looked up or moved closer.

“I don’t know,” John said. “I doubt it. Until this is all over, the security staff must have other things on their mind.” He looked up. “And so do we. Lauren, do you have those capture rates? Wilmer Oldfield is panting for them.”

“Right here. Shall I transmit?”

“Waste of time. Wilmer won’t look at the feed. Do you have time to take it to him?”

“I’ll find time. Where is he?”

“At the back of the water buffer. He and Star want to compare the bundles they get now with what they caught during the blip storm.”

“I hope the results they’re getting make more sense than mine do,” Amanda Corrigan said. She had three separate displays running in front of her. “We have a set of quickie Sniffers a few light-days out, and they’re showing a stronger storm convergence toward Sol than we’ve ever seen. But the counts I’m making locally fail to confirm. Both sets of data can’t be right. Take a look. Where are the bundles?”

The first display was a simple two-axis graph. The horizontal axis showed distance from Sol in astronomical units. The vertical axis was estimated beam area. As the storm approached the solar system, the area decreased dramatically. The. Alpha C storm was homing in on the solar system.

The second display was a table of total beam area versus predicted particle count per second at Sky City. The third display was another graph, with time as the horizontal axis and particle count as vertical axis. Both predicted and observed counts were shown. The predicted count rose rapidly at the time of maximum flux, and fell away as fast beyond it; the observed count went only up to the present time, but at the moment it was close to constant over time and looked nothing like the predicted peak.

John Hyslop gave the curves and tables in front of Amanda a cursory glance. “I’ve no time to look at them now. Get them to Wilmer and Star, let them figure it out. Matching predictions and observations isn’t our business. Our job is to deal with whatever arrives.”

He caught Maddy’s eye. She wondered if he could possibly be as calm as he looked. She surveyed the whole information center, with people constantly hurrying in and out, and found everyone busy and preoccupied. But she saw no sign of nervousness. The only nervous one was Maddy herself — maybe because she had too little to do.

She waited a few more moments, then quietly slipped out of the room. She was no help here, an engineering nonentity surrounded by the pick of the solar system’s engineers. But somewhere on Sky City there must be someone who needed assistance. If it was not true now, it would be when the storm arrived.

When the storm hit Earth, regardless of intensity and duration, one thing seemed sure: The sky would seethe with electromagnetic energy, and during the final few minutes all forms of radio communication might be lost.

Temporarily lost? Celine had posed that question to Benedict Mertok. He shrugged and gave a less-than-useful reply: “Madam President, we need to define temporary. Nothing lasts forever.”

But some things seemed to. Pressure on a President to hide away from every form of danger was one of them. Celine had refused all suggestions that she retreat to a deep underground refuge.

“Didn’t you tell me that there is no chance of direct bundle impact this far north?” It was early morning on what she secretly thought of as doomsday, and she was sitting in her specially designed padded chair in the Oval Office.

Ben Mertok frowned. “Well, yes, I did . . .”

“Then that’s good enough for me. I’ll wait out the particle storm right here. You can go now.”

“I think maybe I should—”

“I said you can go now, Ben. I need privacy.”

It was wrong to take even a mild pleasure in Mertok’s discomfort. But at times like this pleasures were few and far between, and you took them wherever you found them. As soon as she was alone Celine tilted her chair back and stared up at the ceiling. She had displays all around her, hooked up through ground-based fiber-optic feeds to every country on the planet, but the one link she wanted might be blacked out. The front line of battle was nowhere on Earth; it was up on Sky City and Cusp Station. Already the view of the shield seemed grainy, and the speckling of random points of light that she saw might be transmission noise, nothing to do with the detection of particle bundles. On the other hand, there was a good chance it was all her imagination, and the image of the shield looked exactly as usual.

“The Honorable Nicholas Lopez is on line eight,” said the calm voice of the autocom. Celine sighed and returned her chair to its upright position.

“Nick? Where are you?”

“At the airfield in New Rio. Waiting for takeoff.”

Celine glanced at the clock. Two and a quarter hours to flux maximum. “You’re cutting it fine.”

“Not from choice. The space defense can’t stop a hundred percent of the bundles, and a few are already getting through. At our longitude they are coming in close to horizontal, but they’re still coming in. Nothing like the way they will be in another couple of hours, but we already lost a suborbital to an unlucky hit on the flight control box. This is the last flight out, then everybody who’s left here heads for the deep shelters.”

“I thought that was your plan.”

“I thought so, too.” The visual feed finally kicked in, and Nick’s face appeared on the display. He was smiling ruefully and smoothing his gray hair back with one hand. “The trouble is, the shelters have only energy-sensor contact with the surface. When it comes right down to it, I’m too curious to know what’s going on.”