Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

And the Dome itself was cracked. A stupendous fiery scar reached from its top all the way to ground level, off somewhere to the north. Huge chunks of the structure, burning, broke off and fell in a steady rain. It was this curtain of fire that illuminated the scene around Bisesa.

The ground shuddered again. Much more of this and the whole Dome might come down around them. The crowd’s wisdom was right: better to take their chances outside the Dome. Bisesa pulled Myra along the road, heading for the Gate.

Myra, still half asleep, mewled at being dragged along. “What’s with the earthquake? Do you think it’s bombs?”

“Bombs? No.” Bisesa was sure the refugees and protesters who had gathered for their minor war outside the Gates of London would have been driven away by the storms by now—or more probably, she admitted to herself grimly, they were dead. “I think it really is a quake.”

“But London doesn’t get earthquakes.”

“It’s a strange day, sweetheart. The whole city is built on a bed of clay, remember. If that’s dried out there will be subsidence, cracking.”

Myra snorted. “That will play hell with property values.”

Bisesa laughed. “Come on. Just a bit farther. Look, there’s the Gate …”

The Gate had been flung wide open to reveal a red sky beyond. A shuffling crowd, converging from different directions, was forming into a queue to get through it. Bisesa and Myra stepped forward cautiously.

It was a typical London crowd, with faces reflecting origins in every racial group on the planet: London had been a melting pot for centuries before New York. And in the crowd there were young and old, kids in their parents’ arms, elderly being helped along. Crumpled-up old women or wide-eyed children rode in wheelchairs and wheelbarrows and supermarket carts. When one old man fell, exhausted, two young women bent to help him up, and then propped him up between them to get him the rest of the way.

Everybody looked as bad as Bisesa felt. Most wore nothing but flimsy clothes, soaked through with sweat; men’s hair was plastered to their heads, and women walked on painfully swollen feet. But there was no panic, no shoving, no fighting, even though there was no sign of police or military, nobody in authority. People were enduring, Bisesa thought. They were helping each other through.

Myra said, “It’s like the Blitz.”

“I think so.” Bisesa felt a peculiar surge of affection for these battered, dogged, resilient, polyglot Londoners. And for the first time that day she began to believe that they might actually live through this.

The crowd pushed through the Gate, and fanned out into the open area beyond. And Bisesa, with Myra’s hand clutched in her own, walked into a transformed world, a world of water and fire.

Above the smoke fat clouds sailed, some of them boiling visibly, and immense lightning bolts cracked. The sky beyond the clouds seemed to be on fire; it was covered by immense sheets of bright red, as if the Earth had been thrust into a vast oven. Perhaps it was another aurora.

And on the ground, London burned fitfully. The air was full of smoke, and whirling flecks of ash landed on Bisesa’s sweat-slick skin. She smelled the dirt and the dust and the ash—and something less definable, something like burned meat. But the rains, which had mercifully subsided, had left water standing on every lawn and in every gutter, and the light from the burning sky was mirrored on the roads and the roofs of the houses. It was an oddly beautiful scene, unearthly, rich with crimson light in the sky and pooled on the ground.

Myra pointed to the west. “Mum. Look. There’s the sun.”

Bisesa turned. But it was not the sun she saw, of course, but the shield, still holding its place after all these hours, still protecting the Earth. It was a dish-shaped rainbow, actually brighter away from the center, blue-violet at the bull’s-eye heart and an angry burnt orange at the rim. Beyond the edge of the shield itself a bright corona flared, laced with threads and sparks, prominences easily visible to the naked eye.

But that terrible sun was sinking toward the western horizon, and the smoke of England’s fires rose up to obscure it.

“Nearly sunset,” somebody said. “Another twenty minutes and that’s the last we’ll see of that bastard.”

There was motion at the edge of Bisesa’s vision. She saw small shapes squirming past the legs of the people. There were dogs, foxes, cats, even what looked like rats, swarming silently out of the failing Dome and dispersing into the scorched streets beyond.

A warm, salty rain began to fall, heavy enough to sting Bisesa’s bare head. She wrapped her arm around Myra. “Come on. We need to find shelter.”

They hurried forward, with a thousand others, through the ruins of London.

2105 (London Time)

Helena Umfraville stumbled across an ocher plain.

She came to a slight rise. She climbed it, but it led to nothing but more broken, rock-littered ground. Resentfully she made her way forward.

She was dog-tired, and her EVA suit had never felt so heavy. She had no real idea how long she had been walking—hours, anyhow. And yet she walked on. There was nothing else to do.

Now she found herself on the lip of a canyon. She stopped, breathing hard. It was a complex of ravines and cliffs, their slopes pocked with small craters. In the thin air of the Martian afternoon the spectacle was clear all the way to the horizon. That diminished its scale, of course; there was none of the mist-softening that gave Earth’s Grand Canyon its sense of three-dimensional immensity. She might as well have been looking at a beautiful painting, done in Mars’s constrained palette of ocher and red and burnt orange.

It wasn’t interesting. Mars was full of canyons. In fact Helena felt pissed at the canyon. It was quite unreasonable of her. After all, none of it was its fault. She sucked at the last of her suit’s water supply.

During the worst of the storm she had hidden in the Beagle, huddling under rock overhangs. It was the only shelter she had. The rover’s hull had screened her, and her suit had labored to keep her cool. So she had survived—although for all she knew she had shipped a radiation dose enough to kill her.

Which of course was now entirely academic.

And, driving on, she had tracked down the source of the signal she had come out to find.

In the end it had been just a beacon, a little unmanned three-legged lander no taller than she was, bleeping forlornly. Perhaps it had been intended to mark a landing site for a ship that had never followed. But there was no mystery about who had sent it: the markings on its equipment covers were undoubtedly Chinese.

She had made the trip for nothing. And the cost turned out to be unexpectedly high. When she had walked back to her faithful Beagle she found it had packed up, just like that. Its supposedly milspec electronics had presumably succumbed to the onslaught from the sun, leaving its essential systems, including life support, as dead as Mars.

So that was that. Without the rover, she couldn’t get back to Aurora . Her suit reserves would last only a few more hours, which wouldn’t be long enough to get another rover out to her. She was living, breathing, as healthy as she had been a sol before. But she was doomed by the cruel equations of survival on Mars.

Of course she wouldn’t be the solar system’s only casualty today.

At least she was special, she told herself. Though she hadn’t been the first person to set foot on Mars, she would become the first human being to die here. Perhaps that was a memorial worth having.