Solstice Read online

  He could picture this. He could see this angry scene in his head, and match it against all the others he'd seen since this particular heat wave began. This was the age of the frayed temper. Sometimes it felt as if the heat were just peeling off some outside layer of humanity from your body and letting the sky take a long look at the beast that lived underneath.

  'People get mad in cities these days, Sara,' he said, and hoped he sounded convincing. 'Hell, they always did. What's new? How long did the burst last?'

  'Peaked at nine seconds or so. That's all, and look what it did. You believe that?'

  The day was getting brighter by the second. It beckoned him.

  'We're scientists, Sara. It's our job to accept anything that happens provided there's some proof it exists. Are these emissions just magnetic or are you seeing X-ray activity too?'

  She stared at him, looking a little blank. 'Search me, Michael. We're still waiting on the data. Like I said, most of the links were down and these things don't just come back up again like a dog begging for a bone, not after they get hit that bad. Once we get it, once it's been through analysis, we'll post it. You take a look. See if it makes sense to you.'

  'Yeah. You bet. Some coincidence, huh? You and me getting lumped together on the same job like this? I'm really glad it happened.'

  Sara was scared, he thought, and even if he didn't have the words to chase away the demons, he could just try a little old-fashioned courtesy.

  'I guess this is our field, Michael, and it's a pretty specialized one. Who else are they going to drum up?'

  Sara felt flushed, wondered if he was going to embarrass them both. But when she looked he was back running his fingers through his hair again, not thinking about her at all, or even noticing the impatient way she was watching him from the monitor.

  'True,' he said. 'It's nice to be wanted. Why don't you go eat, Wong girl? You look hungry. Jesus, you look starving.'

  Her face came back at him from the monitor, so open, so truthful, and she didn't need to point out how very wrong he was.

  'You think anyone knows what's going on here, Michael? All this climate change, all this unpredictability. Why don't these things fit the way they should? Why are we going through this stuff now? Not in two years' time when this solar cycle is supposed to peak? What the hell's happening?' 'Sara,' he said, and wished his voice didn't sound so grown-up, 'nature's happening, and we're just baffled because we're too dumb to understand it. There's no evidence this is anything other than the usual chaos we have to deal with the more we understand what's going on around us. What bugs us is that it's out of our control. This isn't global warming. We don't just persuade Gillette to take CFCs out of their shaving cream, pay the Chinese to burn gas, and then wait for the ozone hole to close. All that kind of stuff is just a kid's game here. We're dealing with the sun, and whatever it's planning to do, it will do. I know some people find it hard to believe there can be anything in this universe that human beings don't control, but the sun is one of them. We don't write these rules, we never did, and if something out there feels like changing them from time to time, then that's its business.'

  Mistake, he thought immediately, as soon as he saw the heightened fear in her face.

  'B — but don't get me wrong,' he stuttered. "There's nothing here that suggests we're seeing more than a few climate changes that have been going on unnoticed for centuries. The thing that's changed is that we can kid ourselves we understand a little more this time around. Welcome to the circus.'

  'Yeah, I guess you're right,' she said, not sounding convinced. 'Take care, Michael,' she added, sighing. She blew him a kiss down the screen, her big almond eyes examining him in a way he didn't even begin to want to think about.

  'You too, Sara.' He watched the video panel collapse back into the monitor, leave a soft grey blankness in its wake.

  Lieberman got up from the desk and walked over to the window. Out to the east dawn was marching in, good and yellow, none of the pretty colours associated with smog and pollution, just plain old sunlight, which was (he guessed; no one had actually said as much) one of the reasons the project had chosen La Finca in the first place. All this isolation helped when you wanted to measure the stuff that poured from the heavens: There was no pollution, no radio interference, no ground lighting to ruin the night sky. Just pure data, and whatever else the heavens wanted to rain down on you.

  Nice, he thought, and wished to God he could shake that last picture of Sara out of his head. She looked unhappy, scared, which wasn't like her. It wasn't like anyone who worked in Lone Wolf, which — until he got fired for taking a drunken poke at Sam Smith, the director, at that Christmas party three short years before — had been as close to paradise as he was ever likely to find.

  'Work,' Michael Lieberman said quietly into the room. Then he buried himself in the pile of reports sitting on the computer.

  CHAPTER 3

  Turbulence

  Central Siberia, 0421 UTC

  The man was about his own age, Seabright reckoned, and probably out of condition. He was marginally overweight, with a round, flabby face, receding hairline, and bright blue staring eyes. They'd reclined the seat in business as much as they could, let him lie back, bleeding all the time. It was everywhere, on his jacket, on the seat, and, most of all, on his face. The scarlet gore was still pumping out of his nose, fast and furious, big sticky bubbles of it, coming through his fingers whenever they took away the wet paper towels to let him snatch some extra air.

  Seabright didn't let anything show, not on the outside, just noted inwardly, in a little wrenched portion of his stomach, that this man thought he was dying. It was in his eyes. They stared back at him, pleading: Why me? Why me?

  Seabright gave him a thin-lipped smile, then took Ali by the arm, led her to the window by the central bulkhead, and ran through the possibilities.

  'What's his name?'

  'Weber. German businessman. Travelling on his own.'

  'Does he have any previous medical history?'

  She shook her head. 'He says not. My guess is maybe high blood pressure — when he got on he had a florid complexion, was puffing and wheezing. But then we all were. It was hot.'

  'There's no evidence of heart failure?'

  'I'm a flight attendant, Captain,' she answered quickly, then cursed herself for letting it come out like that. 'Sorry. What I meant to say was, all I know is what I got from the training courses. I don't think there's any evidence of that. On the other hand, I've never seen anything like this before. One minute he was fine, a little red in the face, the next he's complaining of a headache, right out of the blue, pushing the button and asking for an aspirin. Before I could get it to him, this happens. It was just pouring.'

  'Yes.' He could see that for himself. 'But it's slowing down now, isn't it?'

  'Not much. He's been bleeding for thirty minutes now. I let it go on for a while without bothering you. But you saw the state he's in. He's lost a lot of blood. And he's still losing it. There's nothing…' She looked furious with herself. 'There's nothing I know how to do. Or anyone else we have on board, for that matter.'

  'No.'

  She looked at him and he knew what she was thinking: This was why you had a captain.

  He ran through the options. His calmness, his reassurance, was as important to her as to the sick man behind him.

  'I'll see if there's a diversion we can make. We're not exactly within spitting distance of a great hospital out here. Moscow might be the best bet, and that's maybe two hours out or more.'

  'He can't go on like that for two hours.'

  'This is a nosebleed, Ali. It has to stop sometime.'

  She said nothing for a moment, just stared at him with an expression he found infuriating, as if there were something here he ought to understand better.

  'Yes, sir. Just a nosebleed.'

  Seabright wanted to get away from this, wanted to get back to the closed, secure cockpit and not look at the agony in her face.
r />   'Is there something else?'

  She didn't answer.

  'Ali?'

  'It's stupid. It's crazy.'

  He could get bored by this, he thought. And he could get angry too. His forehead was throbbing. His temper was bubbling beneath the surface.

  'If you've got something to say, say it.' She hesitated, not wanting to appear foolish. 'He's not the only one.' 'What?'

  'When he started ringing for the aspirin he wasn't the only one. I've got three back in economy with nosebleeds. Not so bad as this. But bad enough, enough to scare them. Scare me. And more than I can count screaming about headaches. What's going on, sir?'

  Seabright couldn't take this in. It made no sense. 'It's the crowd thing,' he said. 'They see one person doing it, they just follow.' Even as he said it, he knew it was feeble. 'No.' She wasn't just scared, she was angry too, and somehow this seemed to be directed at him.

  'When it started, some of these people couldn't even see each other, sir. And it happened all at the same time. As if someone pressed a button or something and we all started hurting. And the blood too. Hell, I've got a headache.' She gazed straight into his face. 'Haven't you? Sir?' 'I have now,' Seabright lied quietly. Then thought about all the things he'd read and never really absorbed, about how an individual received more radiation in a three-hour plane journey at 37,000 feet than during an entire month working inside a nuclear power station. The German's face came back to him: big red gouts of blood, clotting, full of mucus, pouring down his face. But there was nothing in the records about a spontaneous event like this. Nothing he could remember.

  He felt a sudden need to be back up front. 'You know what to do, Ali. Keep me posted.'

  Then he marched back to the cockpit, not too quickly, not showing anything that any of the people in business or first, most of them looking a little more grim than usual today, could even begin to think of as panic.

  You can't see inside a person's head, he thought, and added, as a postscript: Thank God for that. Because right then he was seeing exactly what would be waiting for him once he opened the security door.

  He smiled at the front-row passengers in first, two sleek-looking Japanese moguls in dark silk suits, sipping their champagne, picking at little plates of caviar, both sweating uncomfortably. Then he pushed open the door, closed it quickly behind him, and stared at Jimmy Mulligan.

  The little Irishman was slumped up against the yoke, just conscious, aware enough to look back at him with the same scared eyes he'd seen two minutes before. His face was red with blood, still pumping down onto his white short-sleeved officer's shirt, a steady liquid stream, thick and livid.

  'Couldn't move,' Mulligan mumbled, his voice a drunken slur. 'Sorry, sir.'

  Seabright stepped back through the door, picked up a half-full champagne bucket and a couple of cloth napkins, returned, and placed them in Mulligan's lap, then leaped into the left-hand seat and strapped on the shoulder harness.

  'Clean yourself up, Jimmy. Get some water on your face.'

  Seabright punched up the moving map display. He'd give it fifteen more minutes before making a decision, and if there was time, then Moscow it would be. But just in case, he pulled up the database of local airports, a string of names he didn't recognize. In a little under forty minutes they could be down somewhere that was supposed to have the facilities to handle this kind of emergency. If he was willing to take the risk on a backwoods airfield and a medical system that was probably primitive even by Russian standards.

  He stared ahead, out of the wide-view screen of the cockpit, watching the empty land roll slowly underneath them, not a city, not even a small town in sight anywhere. And not a cloud either. It was so sunny and clear he felt he could see straight off the edge of the earth.

  'Sir?'

  Seabright had let his mind go blank, and mentally chided himself for the slip. Too much to do, too much to think about. He knew all the symptoms of the cockpit malaise that let your head drift off into nowhere just when the going got tough.

  To his relief, Mulligan looked better. He wasn't slumped in his seat any more, his hands seemed steady. The bleeding was stopping. He'd be okay. Maybe the same thing was happening with the stricken German back in business.

  "There was a call,' Mulligan said, and his eyes were still scared. Seabright wondered why he'd not seen that. 'Air Force One put out a Mayday. I got half of it, then I must have blacked out.'

  'Shit.'

  Seabright dialled the frequency and tried to listen through the white noise screaming through the speakers. There was half a voice there, then it stopped. From what little he heard, he could detect a low note of growing terror in the pilot's voice. They weren't the only ones trapped in this invisible storm in the sky.

  'Air Force One,' Seabright yelled, 'we have your Mayday and will relay. What's the problem?'

  The white noise diminished a little.

  'Damned if I know,' said a shaky voice through the din. 'But we're losing systems here, we're losing everything, and…'

  The sea of electronic screams came back.

  'Sir!'

  He'd almost forgotten about Mulligan. This situation was so bizarre.

  'The lights…'

  Seabright glowered at the LCD panels and what he saw there made his heart freeze over. It wasn't just the main gear any more. There were sinister little yellow and red lights flashing in places he'd never seen before, not even in training, warnings about pressurization, control servos, heating, and fuel flow, digital screams for help from systems that had nothing to do with each other, could not be connected by anything except their presence in the great electronic nervous system of the machine.

  He punched the emergency button on the moving map, located the closest airfield, mentally registered that it was pretty much close to dead ahead, but 130 nautical miles away. He keyed the radio to the distress frequency and started to read out something he had committed to heart many years ago, in a two-seat tandem Chipmunk trainer, learning to fly in an RAF base in the Highlands of Scotland.

  'Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Dragon 92…'

  And when it was over he really didn't know if he'd reached the end of the message or not. There wasn't sufficient space left by the pain for that kind of thought. Somewhere through the routine little chant a hole had opened in his head, and into it had flowed white-hot molten metal, the colour of the centre of the sun, and it had roared and raged through every neural quarter it could find, screaming all the time, in his voice, in Jimmy Mulligan's too, with a deafening loudness that shook this small enclosed world, flying 37,000 feet above the earth, rattled it so hard he felt his body straining against the straps of the shoulder harness, so hard he thought it would shake everything, the aircraft, his mind, his being, into pieces.

  It was impossible to gauge how long this lasted, or the amount of time, after it was over, it took him to come back to some form of consciousness. The aftermath was almost as painful as the experience. His head felt as if it had been hit with an iron bar. There was blood in his mouth, and he felt it streaming hot and sticky from his nose. He turned his neck — such agony there too — and strained to look at Mulligan. The first officer was awake, conscious, not the slumped, dead form he'd expected to see. He could move. Pretty soon, he thought, the man might speak.

  The aircraft had settled down too. After the worst moment of clear-air turbulence he'd ever encountered, they were safe, they were flying, held in place by the checks and balances of the autopilot that kept them on course and never stopped for headaches, sudden haemorrhages, or any other frailties of the human species.

  Out of nowhere, the pressurization circuits popped. There was a slight bang — one he knew from all those hours running through the drill — and the oxygen masks dropped down from the overhead panel.

  This was where the training came in. This was where you acted first, thought later, and these instincts never left you, always clicked into place, sent you scrabbling for the mask, got it firmly in your hand, pulled the
clear plastic mouthpiece around your face, adjusted the elastic retaining straps around the back of your head, stayed calm, stayed cool, then, when everything was okay, got your breathing back to normal, let your pulse rate slow down somewhere into the lower reaches of anxiety.

  The air tasted stale and metallic, but he could live with it. In a moment or two he'd try taking the mask off anyway. This was another trick of the lights, an errant circuit going haywire, not some massive depressurization of the aircraft. He looked at Mulligan. The first officer had his mask on too, the mouthpiece stained by blood. He was breathing with a regular rhythm. There was no need for worry there. Aft, the stewardesses would be earning their pay ten times over, fighting to keep the cabin calm, making sure the masks had dropped on schedule, were on and working. This had happened to him once before and Seabright remembered it well. No great depressurization then either, just some hot turbulence rolling off the Karakorams.

  He reached for the transmit button to resend the Mayday message, then stopped, found he could hardly bring himself to take a breath of the stale, tinny oxygen coming through the mask, could hardly dare to look at this sight, so strange, so terrifying in front of him.

  Every tiny cell of every LCD panel on the display was now alight, screaming furiously for attention in ways that couldn't be true, couldn't make sense, cycling madly from green through amber to red and back again, beating to some internal rhythm that just got faster, more manic, as he watched.