The suns tremendously strong magnetic field shapes the stars atmosphere, in a way that has no analogies on Earth. The corona, the outer atmosphere, is full of long sheets of gas, like the petals of a flower, that can extend many radii from the sun. The elegant curves of these streamers are sculpted by the magnetic fields that control them. The streamers are brightit is these plasma sheets that are visible around the blocked-out sun during a solar eclipsebut they are so hot, pumped full of energy by the magnetic field, that their spectral peak is not in visible light but in X-rays.
All this in normal times.
As the sunstorm subsided, one such streamer formed over the active region that had been the epicenter of the storm. In keeping with the giant instability that had spawned it, the streamer was an immense structure, its base spreading over thousands of kilometers, and extending so far out in space that its feathery outer edge reached the orbit of Mercury.
At the base of the streamer, flux tubes rooted in the suns deep interior arched to enclose a cavity. Inside the cavity, contained by the magnetic fields arches, were trapped billions of tonnes of ferociously hot plasma: it was a cathedral of magnetism and plasma. And as the storm died, this cathedral began to collapse.
As the roof gave way, immense rivers of magnetic energy flowed into the trapped plasma mass. The mass was raised up from the suns surface, slowly at first. But then as the magnetic field unwound the plasma was hurled away ever more rapidly, as a stone is hurled from a catapult. The ejected cloud, a tangle of plasma and magnetic field lines, was very rarefied, less dense than most pure vacuums manufactured on Earth. But it was not its density but its energy that counted. Some of its particles had been accelerated almost to the speed of light. Energetically it was a hammer blow.
And, just as had been planned by cool minds millennia ago and sixteen light-years away, it was aimed squarely at the suffering Earth.
47: Bad News
When Mikhail came online with the news, for a moment Bud couldnt bear it. He escaped the control room, hauled himself to his cabin, and shut the door.
On a battered softscreen spread out on his bunk, he scrolled slowly through the names of the lost. They were mostly maintenance engineers who had been out there on the shield in the thick of the stormand volunteers, like Mario and Rose, who had gone out to take their places as they fell. Bud knew them all.
In the five years of its existence the community on the shield had evolved its own culture, which Bud had done his best to foster. There had been zero-gravity sports tournaments, and music and theater, and parties and dances, and big public celebrations at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Ramadan, Passover, and every other excuse they could come up with. There had been the usual human tangle too, of love affairs illicit and otherwise, marriages, divorcesand one murder, a crime summarily dealt with. Despite all precautions, two babies had been born, apparently with no ill effects from their gestation without gravity, hastily shipped to Earth with their parents.
But now fully a quarter of this community had died, another quarter lay seriously ill, and the rest had taken a battering, including Bud himself. They all had a hugely increased chance of contracting cancer in the future, or of having their irradiated systems fail in some other way. For what they had done today they had all paid with their life expectancy, or their very livesand not one had demurred, even when called on to make that final sacrifice.
Bud had kept up a determined public face. But even before the event he had had to make gruesome calculations of acceptable casualty levels. It felt as if he had planned for these people to die. And with each bright soul he had ordered into the furnace, with each new death added to this tally, he felt as if his heart were being twisted inside him.
He still had a job to do for the survivors; up to now he had been able to comfort himself with that. After so long in microgravity the heroes from the shield would not get their medals and parades for a while. They would all return to Earth weak as kittens, and would be subject to six months or a year of rehab, massage, hydrotherapy, and programs of exercise to bring up their strength, endurance, and bone mineral levelsuntil they were fit to stand before a President or two, and take the plaudits they had earned.
That had been his plan to get his people home, fondly rehearsed in his mind. But now it looked as if none of that was going to happen. For, if he understood what Mikhail and Eugene were telling him, this huge sacrifice might all have been in vain, and they might just as well have stayed home and waited for the storm to torch them all.
He was doing no damn good here. He took a deep breath and made his way back to the control room.
Eugene and Mikhail sat side by side in some poky cabin at Clavius.
It is called a coronal mass ejection, Mikhail said lugubriously. In itself it is not an unprecedented phenomenon. In normal times there are many such events per year.
Bud asked, I thought June 9 was caused by a mass ejection?
Yes, Eugene snapped. But this is bigger. Much bigger, even than that. Nervously Eugene began to gabble through a description of the latest events on the sun: the gathering of magnetic field lines over the zone of disturbance that had been the epicenter of the sunstorm, the trapping of an immense cloud of plasma beneath those flux linesand then how the cloud had been hurled upward away from the sun.
Bud half listened to the words, and watched the two astrophysicists. They were suffering, Bud could see that. Mikhails face was grooved with weariness, the shadows deep as lunar craters around his eyes; Bud had never seen him looking so old.
Eugenes expression, creasing up that bland jocks face, was more complicated, but then so was Eugene. Rose Delea used to call Eugene autistic to his face, Bud rememberedbut poor Rose was dead now. Bud, however, had never thought of Eugene as some inhuman calculating machine, and now Bud thought he could read the emotion in those pale blue eyes, an emotion any military man would sympathize with: The operation is fucked. And I fear, dear God, that it might be me who screwed the pooch.
Bud rubbed his eyes and tried to focus, to think. After his own six-hour jaunt out on the shield, he was still in his grimy thermal long johns. He could smell the sweat and vomit crusted on a face that had been cocooned in a bubble helmet for too long, every muscle was stiff as a board, and he ached for a shower.
He said carefully, Eugene, youre telling me your models didnt foresee this.
No, Eugene said miserably.
Mikhail said gently, Theres really no reason why they should, Colonel Tooke. Oh, perhaps some such ejection might have been foreseen. The turbulence at the heart of the sunstorm was like an active region. Such regions spawn flares, and they are sometimes, but not always, associated with mass ejections too. If there is a causal link it is a deep one we have yet to untangle. We have yet to understand the basic physics, you see. And besides, our models could see only as far as the great outpouring of energy of the sunstorm itselfwhich we got mostly right. But beyond that point our models ran into a singularitya place where the curves shot off to infinity, and the physics broke down altogether.
We patched in a solution for the follow-up, Eugene said desolately. Continuous to the third-order derivatives. Over most of the sun the patch seems to be working out. All except for this vicious bastard.
Mikhail shrugged. In retrospect that anomalously high gamma flux we observed at the start of the storm may have been a precursor. But we had no time for remodeling, not then, as the storm itself broke
Bud said, You feel like the sun itself has let you down, dont you? Because it didnt behave like you told it to.