Galaxias, page 4
Now, Jim saw, his two crewmates were reacting to the alarm as he would have expected. Both of them, like Jim, were checking the lightweight pressure gauges they wore on their belts. The most dangerous plausible event that might have triggered the alarm would have been a catastrophic hull breach, maybe through some collision or seal failure, and a rapid loss of air. At the same time Ito Katsuo was confirming readings at the main displays.
And Marina Petko already had the storm shelter open. She glanced back regretfully at the dinner she had been preparing, a thick Russian cabbage soup.
Jim looked around further, wondering what they were missing. Nothing visibly wrong with the structure of the habitat itself.
He slammed a green button to shut down the alarm. ‘OK. I’ll call it in. TsUP, Al-miriykh. Ah, mission clock shows 1302 your time. We just had a master alarm. Cause unknown. Rapid depressurisation ruled out. Seeking the cause.’
The comms set was smart enough to turn itself on when it heard such a structured message, and transmit it.
Of course there would be no immediate reply. The Al-miriykh was in interplanetary space, having left Mars back in August, and was not due to reach Earth until April, months away – all this after a landing on Mars as far back as May 2055, the start of their fifteen-month tour at Curiosity Base.
April. If they got that far. For now, they were light-minutes away.
All spacefarers – especially American astronauts, Russian cosmonauts – studied dramatic space accidents of the heroic past. Apollo 13 was the most famous, of course, but there had been other incidents. Such as during the flight of Gemini 12 in 1966 when, after a rendezvous radar failure, Buzz Aldrin had hand-calculated thruster burns to get the craft aligned with its target for docking. And the time in 1997 when the Russian space station Mir had collided with a rogue resupply vessel.
The difference was, those crews, even Apollo 13, had had the benefit of support and advice from the mission controllers, in Houston or Moscow, at most only a couple of seconds’ time lag away. Jim knew he was shouting into the void; it would be long minutes before support of any kind could come from the controllers at TsUP or Houston.
In the meantime the crew were on their own, facing this problem. But what problem?
‘Jim? You OK?’
Marina Petko drifted in the air before him, before the open storm shelter. She was thirty-five years old, short, wiry, compact, dark hair shaved neatly close to her skull, her Russian accent light – her English was better than his Russian. Ito, Japanese, was similarly short, sturdy. No coincidence. Good astronaut-candidate build, he thought.
‘Sorry. Thinking too fast – or too slow.’ He glanced around the humming habitat. On good days, it reminded him of a kind of modern kitchen, full of smart, helpful state-of-the-art gadgets. But you didn’t get master alarms on good days.
And now the alarm sounded again.
Jim punched the off-button again. ‘Not another bloody one.’
6
1016 GMT
Once her confidence had come back, somewhat, Tash Brand had run back from the Millennium Bridge to House. So much for sleep.
The streets had been safe enough. The smart-car traffic had all just stopped when the light failed and pedestrians began wandering around over the roads, so accidents in the immediate aftermath must have been rare – not so rare that she didn’t hear the wail of ambulances, though, perhaps caused by people less smart than their cars. Meanwhile, people emerging from brightly lit shops and offices into sudden night seemed to be just as bewildered, if not existentially shocked, as everyone out in the open had been at the moment of – well, nightfall.
It had got a little easier after the first few minutes, when canny managers in council offices began to order the streetlights on. Soon the place had the feel of a sudden, strange but friendly event, and Tash had started to hear laughter, of wonder, even excitement. ‘Like a bloody late-night Christmas fair for some folk,’ one older man had muttered as he pushed past her.
Still, it was gone quarter past ten before she got back to Government House.
The moment she walked through the big revolving door into the entry lobby with its sign-in desks and security processes, her eyes were briefly dazzled by the brilliance of the light.
And she found herself in a crush of people. Most were trying to get in and back to work, as she was, and chafing at the usual scans and bioscreens. But a handful were heading the other way. Some, maybe, were on official errands that couldn’t be entrusted to the net. Others were just heading home. Anxious-looking, probably parents. Tash couldn’t remember if the attendance schools had gone back yet from the Christmas break. Home schooling, of course, never let up, and those parents might be worried about kids being left alone in homes smart enough to be trusted when things went well, maybe not so much when some weirdness like this closed over the world. Kitchen. Put the sunshine back on . . .
She felt somewhat disoriented too, she admitted to herself, to be back in what felt like her own normality. As if the whole weird scene outside had been some kind of dream.
The resulting crush, though, was a slow-moving tide. Growing anxious herself, Tash pushed steadily forward, waving her security card, keeping her phone clamped to her ear, listening for updates from Mel and others. She learned that Mel had even got through to Zhi on the Lodestone, thanks to a friend at TsUP in Moscow, and heard about his problems with positional drift, and his fears for his fiancé Jim, even further out in space.
When she finally got in front of a guard, with a security gate and DNA scanner, she tried to pull rank. ‘Natasha Brand. Adviser to Fred Bowles. The science minister . . .’
That title wasn’t strictly accurate. Bowles had a lot more responsibilities than just science, but whatever was going on today was obviously science-y, and that was the card she played. It worked to an extent, at least getting her some attention.
And it got better yet as a woman – heavily built, dark complexion, dyed-blonde crewcut, in her thirties – emerged from a secondary scrum behind the security line. Grinning sardonically, she grabbed Tash’s arm, pulled her forward.
She was dragged through a door at the back of the lobby, and hurried into a warren of corridors, wood and steel. Heading, Tash guessed immediately, for Situation Room 5, right at the multi-layered core of the building, one of the obvious choices in the middle of an event like this. Not that she had ever been through an event quite like this.
They all but jogged to the first turn, with the woman still holding Tash’s arm painfully tight, after which she let go and they merely walked quickly.
Her guide glared at Tash. ‘Where in the chuff have you been?’
‘Morning to you too, Grace.’
Grace Butterworth was a personal private secretary to Fred Bowles, officially, and bodyguard, unofficially. The gossip was she had once served as a marine.
Tash went on, ‘Since you ask, I was on my way home. After a twelve-hour shift on the university bursaries thing. When it . . .’
Grace glanced at her with a trace of sympathy. ‘I know. We don’t even know what to call it yet. But like I say. You took your time.’
Tash glanced at her watch. It was gone 1040 already – it must have taken her all of twenty minutes to get through the crush. But still, less than an hour since that astounding moment of darkness. ‘How was I supposed to know? I should book myself a double shift just in case the Chinese block out the Sun?’
Grace gave her an odd glance. ‘Watch your language.’ She tapped an ear bud. ‘There’s already a lot of panicky talk like that. So my buddies tell me.’
More special forces types, a network of minders like Grace, Tash imagined. Maybe they had nights out arm-wrestling.
Grace was right, though. In a crisis you didn’t want anyone remotely connected with government to feed the disinformation memes that always popped up. Such as by naming a potential enemy without any evidence.
‘Anyway, I’m here now,’ she pointed out to Grace.
‘Good job. He asked for you specifically. By name.’
‘Why? Because I’m one of the few advisers the science minister has who actually knows some science?’
Grace snorted. ‘Flatter yourself. Because he thinks you know the Astronomer Royal. Or you know somebody who knows her. You do, don’t you? And this is obviously an astronomy type of thing, isn’t it? I know he spoke to her to get some sensible advice when the MOD wanted to spend that fortune on asteroid deflection. Now he can’t get through to her. You might. If I were you I’d start making that call now.’
Tash thought about that for one second, as they trotted along. She pulled out her phone. ‘Right. Thanks, Grace.’
‘You owe me one. Another one.’
‘I know, I know.’ She tried to call Mel, on Skythrust.
When they got there, Situation Room 5 was already crowded, noisy, the walls covered by huge, glowing screens. There was a central table for the principals, with rows of seats behind for their advisers. People sat, or wandered between the rows, shouting into phones or pressing buds into their ears.
Tash had been in this or similar rooms many times before, whenever a swift response had to be formulated to some sudden crisis – mostly terrorism or cyber-crime or a virus or a weather event, or some combination. Once, the attempted assassination of a junior royal. Nothing, she realised now, on a scale to be compared to – outside. To whatever was going on today. Nothing of the nature of this weird, huge phenomenon either.
Still, she did at least recognise the symptoms of an early stage of crisis management in the chaos before her, which was basically a scramble for information. On an interconnected planet of ten billion people, ten billion viewpoints, the problem was generally too much data, not too little. And the first default source of information – of some kind of interpretation, rather than just raw data – was always the professional news outlets. That was certainly true today, she saw immediately. On the smart walls, screen after screen showed a lit-up talking head set before darkness, or before a star-spattered sky, depending, she supposed, on whether or not the weather happened to be cloudy at said talking head’s location. She did make out a few prominent location labels: London, Dublin, New York, Beijing, Moscow, New Paris . . .
Black skies everywhere, then. Whether it was local day or night. She shivered. It was a shock to have the global scale confirmed so graphically.
And here came Fred Bowles, bustling into the room and through the crowd. Forty-eight years old, his hair grey and thinning, he was a little overweight, a little pale, and looked as if he had slept in his suit. But he always looked like that. And he spotted her.
‘Tash. About bloody time. Do you have her yet? The AR? I’m trying official channels of course, but that bloody ship she’s on seems just as chaotic as everywhere else this morning.’
Tash had kept her phone clamped to one ear and a bud in the other; she explained quickly that she was trying to make contact through her friend on Skythrust. ‘My contact’s trying, but the Astronomer Royal is the centre of attention up there too, sir. As you might imagine. So – not yet.’
‘Then get a bloody move on. Tell her it’s bloody urgent.’
Tash murmured into her phone, trying again to reach Mel.
Grace stepped forward. ‘Let me bloody help, sir?’
‘How?’
‘I’ll see if there’s an off-duty copper on that airship.’
Tash said, ‘It’s not strictly an airship—’
‘Shut up. Or ex-military. You often find them, places like that. Security guards, for the ship itself or celebrity bodyguards. Get one of them to fetch the Astronomer Royal over. That should sort it.’
‘Good thinking,’ Bowles said. ‘Do it.’ He turned to Tash. ‘Can’t think who else to call, to begin with. But you start with the right person and it all cascades, you find. The right contacts. If you have some kind of astronomical event going on, you call the Astronomer Royal. As long as that’s Charlie Marlowe anyhow. And I do need to have some kind of brief ready before the Cobra meeting.’
‘What Cobra meeting?’
‘Hasn’t been called yet. Will be. Apparently the Home Secretary is in Newcastle; she’ll chair it. Got to have some kind of handle on this by then. Across the country the chief constables are already calling local major incidents, roping in their emergency response partners – the NHS and WHOCare, the councils, fire, rescue, the environment agency. The usual Gold Command set-up. But mostly doing it without a clue about what they are dealing with, in this . . . we don’t even have a name for it yet. Just local efforts, we’ve yet to formulate a national response. Which is what the Cobra is for.’
‘Yes. Well, I suppose it is still . . . unravelling.’
‘Quite so. Were you outside when it happened? I was in a meeting. We were shown it on TV. It looked to me like, I don’t know, a bally awful special effect from some forty-year-old superhero movie. My mother doted on those when I was a kid; could never stand the things . . .’
He seemed to run down, appearing briefly helpless. He sat at the head of the big table, thumbing his phone. Tash just stood there, trying to support him, if silently.
Fred Bowles, Oxford graduate in Displaced Persons Studies, wasn’t a bad science minister for the English federal government to have appointed, Tash had long thought. Especially since she had heard that as a postgraduate in the 2030s he had gone out to see for himself the post-volcanic Greenland Melt, with its catastrophic flooding and displaced-person consequences from the eastern seaboard of the United States to the north European plain. Out there he had certainly witnessed the role science played in predicting and mitigating disasters. Even so, there was nothing in his educational background that had prepared him for the job – but that wasn’t unusual in any modern government system Tash had yet encountered, in her own slowly widening experience.
The real problem was that he wasn’t just the science minister. Officially speaking he was Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation. And in the government bureaucracy, ‘science’ itself was buried even deeper, in the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. So on the rare day when he had to deal with what was clearly, at first manifestation at least, a scientific issue, it was hard for Bowles to focus on the matter.
But if Bowles had a talent at all, Tash thought, it was to surround himself with roughly the right people, from all the disciplines under him, and then ask roughly the right questions – as if on a hunch, and at least giving himself an edge before the shit hit the fan, as Grace Butterworth had once put it.
So asking Tash to find the Astronomer Royal for him was far from the worst start he could have made. Even if, as Tash knew, Bowles had the support of whole committees of government-assembled advisers of various sorts – such as, in this instance, SAGE, the venerable Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies – all of which Charlie Marlowe adamantly refused to join. Which was probably why Bowles picked her out now.
He seemed to pull himself together, and eyed Tash. ‘In the interim, you’re the tame scientist, Ms Brand.’
Just as Grace Butterworth had remarked.
‘Any ideas?’
‘Well, strictly speaking my study area was the sociology and communication of science in the post-2030s era—’
‘You’re the scientist, Ms Brand. Any ideas?’
‘Not really, sir.’
‘There’s wild speculation flying around. Maybe you can shoot some of it down, at least. The solar eclipse gone wrong?’
She smiled. ‘I thought of that. I asked Mel – the Astronomer Royal’s assistant on the Skythrust. Sounds impossible, sir – well, but I suppose the whole thing is impossible. An eclipse is just the sunlight shadow of the Moon crossing the Earth. In this case, the totality was over the Southern Ocean – south of South Africa.’
‘Well, then, could – I don’t know, could the Moon have drifted out of position somehow?’
She said ruefully, ‘Not a bad guess, sir. Well, we can still see the Moon from its shadow against the stars; it hasn’t moved away from its expected orbital path.’ As Mel had told her. ‘And even if it had moved, the eclipse shadow would just have shifted across the face of the planet. You wouldn’t get the total, global blackout we have experienced.’ She thought further. ‘Of course, longer term there would be much more dramatic effects. The tides—’
With a wave of his hand he cut off that thread of speculation, which was fruitless for now, she realised. He said, ‘Some kind of weather effect, then? I’ve been on to the Met Office.’
She shrugged. ‘I doubt it.’ She looked around at the screens. ‘Again, it seems to be globally observed, doesn’t it? It’s hard to believe some weather system could wrap itself around the whole planet simultaneously. And besides, it’s a phenomenon that’s been observed under clear skies, hasn’t it?’ She thought of that eastern horizon, glimpsed over the North Sea. ‘Even here. Where the sky’s clear you can see the stars.’
‘Umm.’ She saw that even as he spoke to her he was accessing information from the screens around him, the phone on the table. ‘There do seem to be global weather consequences, at least, if not causes. The Met Office are saying it’s already starting to get colder than it should for the time of year. The loss of sunlight – I suppose you’d expect that. And if this goes on . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Come on, Fred. Focus on the here and now. Might all be over in an hour. If not . . .
‘What can be causing this, then? Something beyond the atmosphere? What, though? What can block out the sunlight? Some bloody great shield, like the geoengineering experiments the Chinese used to tout? Screening out the sunlight to reduce global heating?’
She was impressed by that imaginative line of thought. ‘Perhaps, sir. Well, that’s about the most realistic guess I’ve heard so far. But you’d need a pretty big shield to cut out all the sunlight, across the planet. We’d have seen the thing being built, or approaching its position . . . And then there’s the precision of the thing.’ And, she thought, the weird, unprecedented effects like the corona fade-out that Mel had mentioned in her calls. ‘Sir, I just don’t know.’
