With great caution she turned her head to look at her grandmothers carriage clock. Twelve noon. Over London, the sunstorm must be at its height.
An immense crack of thunder split the tortured sky, and it felt as if the whole Dome shuddered.
43: Shield
1512 (London Time)
Bud Tooke could see the flaw in the shield long before he got to it. You could hardly miss it. A shaft of unscattered sunlight poured down through the skin, made visible by the dust and vapor of the very fabric it was scorching to mist.
In his heavy suit, rad-hardened and cooled, he was skimming under the shields Earth-facing surface. He was suspended beneath a vast lens; the whole shield was glowing, full of the light it scattered, like a translucent ceiling. Bud took care to stay in the shadow of the network of opaqued tracks that snaked over the shield, designed to protect him from the storms light and radiation.
As he hauled himself along the guide ropeno thruster packs allowed herehe looked back over his shoulder at the maintenance platform that had brought him here, already shrunk to a speck in the distance beneath the vast roof of the shield. He could see no movement, no pods, no robot workers; there was nobody else within square kilometers of him. And yet he knew that everybody available was out and working, as hard as they could, hundreds of them in the greatest mass EVA exercise in the history of spaceflight. It was a perception that brought home to him afresh the scale of the shield: this was one big mama.
Youre there, Bud, Athena murmured. Sector 2472, Radius 0257, panel number
I see it, he groused. You dont need to hold my damn hand.
Im sorry.
He took a breath, gasping. His suit must be working; if its systems failed, he would be poached in his own sweat in a second. But he had never known a suit to be so damn hot. No. Im sorry.
Forget it, Athena said. Everybody is shouting at me today. Aristotle says it is part of my job.
Well, you dont deserve it. Not when youre suffering too. So she was. Athena was a mind emergent from the shield itself; as this terrible day wore on the heat was seeking out the tiniest flaws and burning its way back through panels of smartskin, and with every microcircuit that fritzed, he knew, Athenas metaphorical head was aching a bit more.
He hauled himself through the last few meters to the rip. He started to deploy his repair kit, a gadget not much more sophisticated than a paint spray applicator that he cautiously poked out into the light. How is Aristotle anyhow?
Not good, Athena said grimly. The worst of the EMP seems to be over, but the heat influx is causing more outages and disconnections. The fires, the storms
Time for Plan B yet?
Aristotle doesnt think so. I dont think he quite trusts me, Bud.
Bud forced a laugh as he worked. The spray was wonderful stuff, semi-smart itself; it just flowed up over the rent, disregarding the sunlights oven heat. Painting this stuff on was easier than customizing the hot rods he used to soup up as a kid. You shouldnt take any shit from that creaky old museum piece. Youre smarter than he is.
But not so experienced. Thats what he says, anyhow.
It was done; the rogue beam of raw, unscattered sunlight dwindled and died.
Athena said, The next breach is at
Give me a minute. Bud, breathing hard, drifted to the limit of his harness, with the repair gun floating from its own tether at his waist.
Athena said, with her occasional lumbering coquettishness, Now whos the museum piece?
I wasnt expecting to be out here at all. But he should have expected it, he berated himself; he should have kept up his fitness. In the last frantic months before the storm there had been no damn time for the treadmill, but that was no excuse.
He looked up at the shield. He imagined he could feel the weight of the sunlight pressing down on the great structure, feel the immense heat being dumped into it. It defied intuition that it was only the carefully calculated balance of gravitational and light pressure forces, here in this precise spot, that enabled the shield to hold its position at all; he felt as if the whole thing were going to fold down over his head like a broken umbrella.
As he watched, waves of sparkling fire washed across the shields surface. That was Athena firing her myriad tiny thrusters. The storms light pressure had been more uneven than Eugenes models had predicted, and under that varying force Athena was having to labor to hold her position. She had been working harder than any of them for hours, Bud reflected, and all without a word of complaint.
But it was the deaths of his workers that was breaking his heart.
One by one Mario Ponzos maintenance crew had gone down. In the end it wasnt heat that was killing them but radiation, the nasty little spike of gamma and X-radiation that had been unanticipated by Eugene Mangles and his endless mathematical projections. They had scrambled to cover the gaps. Even Mario had suited up and gone out. And when Mario himself had succumbed, Bud had hastily handed over his role as Flight Director to Bella Fingalthere was nobody left on the Aurora bridge more seniorand pulled on his own battered old suit.
Without warning his stomach spasmed, and vomit splashed out of his mouth. It had come from deep in his stomachhe hadnt eaten since before the storm had brokenand was foul tasting and acidic. The sticky puke stuck to his visor, and bits floated around inside his helmet, some of them perfect, shimmering globes.
Bud? Are you okay?
Give me an update on the dosages, he said warily.
Command crew have taken a hundred rem. And that was with the full shielding of the Aurora2 around them. Maintenance crew who have been outside since the storm started are now up to three hundred rem. You are already up to one hundred seventy rem, Bud.
A hundred and seventy. Jesus.
After his experiences in the ruins of the Dome of the Rock, long ago, Bud knew all about radiation. Preparing for today, he had boned up afresh on the dread science of radiation and its effect on humanity. He had memorized the meaningless regulatory limits, and the dreary terminology of blood-forming organ doses and radiation type quality factors and the rest. And he had learned the health effects of radiation dosages. At a hundred rem, if you were lucky, you were looking at queasiness for a few days, vomiting, diarrhea. At three hundred rem his people were already being incapacitated by nausea and other symptoms. Even if they shipped no more than that, twenty percent of them would die: two hundred people, of the thousand he personally had ordered out here, of the radiation alone.
And some had soaked up a lot more. Poor Mario Ponzo, beard and all, had let himself get caught. Bud knew the words for what had followed: erythema and desquamation, a reddening and blistering of the skin, and then a peeling away, a scaling, an exfoliationalong with less visible damage within. Mario had died horribly, alone in his suit, far from help, and yet he kept reporting on his situation to the end.
Bud glanced down, away from the shield, toward the open face of the full Earth. It was like looking down a well, a well with a brightly lit floor. The home world, the apparent size of the full Moon as seen from Iowa, was mercifully too remote for him to make out details. But it looked as if the air and oceans down there had been stirred up with a giant spoon, like creamy coffee. They had been battling the sun for twelve hoursthe day was only half doneand everything was fraying, the shield itself, the people who struggled to maintain it, and the planet it was supposed to protect. But there was nothing to do but carry on.
He checked over his suit. The sluggish air-cycling system had removed most of the floating puke, but his visor was smeared. Shit, he groused. There is nothing worse than throwing up inside a spacesuit. Okay. Where next?