There was a consistent, unbroken line of reporting from only a single point in the chain, Learmonth, in Australia. Everywhere else was down, either through a direct storm effect or because somewhere in the chain of digital command that ran through to La Finca the line had snapped. Did it matter? Probably not. Just now, Learmonth was all they had.
And the data was incredible, outside the bounds of anything anyone had ever seen.
Learmonth recorded the temperature of the photosphere, the sun's outer layer, at 7,000 degrees centigrade, a thousand degrees higher than its previous record. The fire at the core was constant at a steady 22 million degrees, 2 million above its historical peak, and a temperature which, she guessed, a physicist might believe theoretically impossible, if theories made sense any more.
You didn't need to rely on the observatories in any case. Those who were rash enough to wander out into the day could, with the naked eye and a suitable filter, see most of the disc of the sun obscured by a single giant blemish. Soaring flares were visible without a telescope, like a halo around the burning core, and on the earth there was a stream of reports about freak atmospheric conditions involving sundogs, false coronas, and strange lights in the sky that were so bright they blotted out even the sun itself.
Schulz walked over and interrupted their frantic keying. 'We need to give them the news,' he said, and the sound of his voice made both of them jump. The power of what they had seen on the screen was so magnetic nothing else seemed to matter.
'We're ready,' Lieberman said with a nod. In La Finca, three heads appeared in a video window at the top of the screen: Helen Wagner, Dan Fogerty, and the dark, complex face of Tim Clarke.
'We were following your reports,' Helen said quietly. 'That's excellent work, and I know it must be harrowing too.'
Mo and Lieberman had painstakingly painted the major incidents on the screen, recording every confirmed event that came in over the wires, marking it with a little electronic flag coloured for the seriousness of the effect: pale yellow for minor, bright yellow for substantial, red for an emergency-level disaster. The markers ran in a curve, following the true circle route across the northern hemisphere, rising in the Pacific east of Japan, then moving slowly with the rising sun, through the eastern provinces of Russia, through China and Mongolia, on relentlessly into Kazakhstan and the Urals. The yellow flags disappeared long before the sweep of the storm reached the Caspian. From then on there was only red, sporadic, and they all knew why. When the effects grew more serious, it was harder to report them. They could only stare at these blank spaces on the map and wonder what was going on there, guessing how long it would take to cross into Western Europe, which sat in the path of the maelstrom.
'What's the worst we know of?' Clarke asked. 'What's this?' He pointed to a red marker near Sapporo in northern Japan.
'There's been a rapid trigger of earthquake activity in the region,' Lieberman said. 'Most of it offshore, fortunately, but that's led to tidal wave activity. There's hundred-foot tsunamis reported, major damage, serious casualty figures. We've also got seismic readings from several stations around the world that indicate quakes around Beijing and some activity in central Asia, close to Samarkand.'
'Communications?' Helen asked.
'Patchy. We're getting a surprising amount out of Japan and the Far East. Maybe that's because a lot there is based on cellular technology already. They never got around to building physical wired systems, so there's less infrastructure to be knocked out. I don't know. It's just a guess. The way things stand now, I guess we're looking at a national emergency that beats anything we've seen in Japan in living memory, certainly the Kobe quakes back in '95. The rest of it, we just don't know. The TV news is also running stories about political uncertainties in some of the central Asian states, even Moscow too. You must have something through diplomatic channels.'
'Not that you can rely on,' Clarke replied. The President looked hard at the map.
"This is all really northern. Yesterday you people said we were getting reports of hits way down to the equator, in the southern hemisphere even. Now they seem safe.'
'It's what you'd expect,' Lieberman said. 'Yesterday the storm was more diffuse. It was weaker and it covered a greater area. Today the alignment is more effective. So everything is more focused. More powerful. And confined to a smaller area.'
'I didn't realize that would happen,' Clarke said. 'It's a blessing of a kind, I guess.'
'Not really,' Helen added. She looked at Lieberman and knew he was thinking the same. 'We can't be fooled into thinking the effects are confined to the vicinity of the storm. Tsunamis can have a wavelength of several hundred miles. We haven't seen any volcanoes triggered yet but if that happens the collateral damage can be huge, a really long way away.'
'Yeah,' Lieberman added. 'And these earthquakes? You know what kind they are yet?'
'From what we've seen they're all strike-slip faults,' she replied quietly. 'That seems to be the type that is more likely to be triggered by the storm.'
He closed his eyes for a moment. 'Don't tell me. Let me guess. The San Andreas. This is a strike-slip?'
'Yes. We are going to put out a full-blown quake alert from north of San Francisco to south of San Diego, the length of the fault, pretty soon.'
'Jesus.' He hated the very idea of an earthquake — that something you took for granted, something that lived beneath you, the rock you walked upon, should suddenly give up the ghost, shrug its shoulders, and collapse into chaos.
'Well,' Clarke said finally, watching them all, 'is someone going to try to answer the big question?'
The La Finca team was silent.
'Professor Bennett,' Helen said, 'you're the expert here. How much of this is Gaia? And how much would we be getting anyway? What will we gain by taking Sundog off-line when we find them?'
Bennett shook his head. 'I can't answer that precisely. We have no way of knowing. Without Gaia, these would be extraordinary circumstances. This bad? It's hard to believe. They're orchestrating this, even if they don't understand the detail any better than we can.'
Clarke nodded grimly at the team around him. 'This information stays with us for now. Understood? I don't want those people out there shoving those damn papers at me all over again.'
'Sir.' Fogerty nodded. 'But they will be back.'
'Then get inside that damn farmhouse and make sure they got no reason.'
'Right,' Fogerty said. 'The earliest we can hope to secure this is two-thirty am.'
'What?' Lieberman's face stared at them from the screen, contorted with disbelief.
'You heard,' Fogerty snapped.
'That's more than two hours from now. That's like ninety minutes or so from the zenith.'
Fogerty looked exasperated. 'We have the one chance here. I don't want it to go wrong.'
'Michael,' Schulz said. 'If we get back control even fifteen minutes before zenith, that's enough. We can switch off whatever input the Children have.'
'Great. One chance. And this may decide whether we wake up tomorrow with a world we recognize or not.'
'Correct,' Tim Clarke said. 'Do you have any other suggestions?'
Lieberman fell silent. He hated the way people in authority had this effect on you. 'Yeah,' he said, just as he felt someone was starting to reach for the off switch. 'Why don't we use our brains instead of racing around chasing our asses?'
'Meaning what, Michael?' Helen asked.
He looked at her face on the screen and was shocked by the impatience, the momentum in her face. 'Mo,' Lieberman said, taking her hand. They both stared into the monitor.
'You see this woman, Mr President? They sent her here to help them. She didn't. She's getting treated now like she's some kind of pariah. Like she's your old man, Helen. And you know what? Even though she didn't help them, and they know that, these people still seem to be running rings around us. You get that? You understand why we always seem to be one step behind?'