'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.
Then reached some kind of climax, some form of satisfaction, and stopped.
Seabright listened to the sound of the aircraft dying, listened to the engines winding down, the fans and circuits growing cold, saw everything electrical on board cease to function, stared at the dead dull face of the display panels, and knew this was impossible, knew that no conjunction of events could kill every circuit in the machine, every backup with it.
The aircraft now stayed aloft through momentum and the locked aerodynamic form of its ailerons and elevators alone, buoyed in the current of air 37,000 feet above central Asia, no noise in the cockpit, nothing but the slow, insistent rush of air past the fuselage. It would be different behind them, behind the closed door, back in the passenger section. The two men couldn't hear the screaming there. They didn't need to. It was bad enough in their imaginations.
Even without power the cockpit was bright. The sun streamed in through the wide, clear windows, illuminated the electronic deadness that surrounded them, made plain their relentless, uncontrolled passage through the air.
Seabright stared ahead, out the window, watched the way the horizon was now starting to slip imperceptibly upward as the aircraft settled into a slow descent, and tried to guess the rate they were falling, tried to work out how long it would take them to sink from the sky to the ground.
CHAPTER 4
Annie and Mo
Michael Lieberman wandered downstairs for breakfast just before seven, drank the best part of a pint of fresh orange juice and three strong coffees, and wondered what he'd got himself into.
In Lone Wolf, and many other little hubs around the world where the serious solar astronomers gathered, Lieberman was the 'sunspot man'. His early career as a designer of solar-powered satellite systems was largely forgotten, though not by him. Now he was the one they turned to when they needed a map of that big burning orb in the sky. Not the expert with the longest list of qualifications after his name. Not the one with more papers in the library than you could fit into a lifetime of reading. It went deeper than that; it relied as much on informed hunches and some subterranean intuitive guesswork even he felt hard-pressed to rationalize. He had a feel for this area, could look at the data, the flow of the solar tide, the jerky rhythm of the X-ray charts, and, most of all, that restless pattern of blemishes on the face of the sun that he'd made his own. He could read the way the umbras and penumbras shifted and moved constantly, then pretty much guess where they might go next. And just now, with the spot cycle coming unexpectedly to a peak two years before it should, when anyone could buy a filter to stop that big yellow ball of glass from burning out your retina, then just stare at the sun and see the spots with the naked eye, that was a talent to nurture.
La Finca was like no science project he'd ever seen, not in two decades of professional research. There was no one else down for breakfast, no gossip and hopeful flirting across the tables. The place was occupied, however. He'd seen as much when he came in the previous evening, walked from the helipad, across the yellowing, lifeless grass in heat that was still unbearable, and met Simon Bennett, who'd politely, if distantly, shaken his hand on the doorstep before making an excuse and disappearing into a big, barnlike building set next to the main mansion where everyone seemed to be staying.