“I was afraid you would, yes.”
On the softscreens Mikhail and Eugene wore carefully grave expressions. Athena’s grasp of human psychology was as weak as her sense of ethics, if she thought that she could ever be some kind of recompense for Bud’s isolation from his son. But now wasn’t the time to tell her.
Bud felt his battered heart tear a little more. Poor Athena, he thought. “Girl, I would never stop you doing your duty.”
There was a long pause. “Thank you, Bud.”
Mikhail said gently, “Athena, just remember that there is a copy of you, encoded into the Extirpator’s blast. You might live forever, whatever happens today.”
“It might,” Athena said. “The copy. But it isn’t me, Doctor Martynov. Less than thirty minutes to go,” she said calmly.
“Athena—”
“I’m properly positioned and ready to go to work, Bud. By the way, I have sent distributed commands to my local processors. The shield will continue to function even after my central cognitive functions have broken down. That will give you a few more minutes’ protection.”
“Thank you,” Mikhail said gravely.
Athena said, “Bud, am I one of the team now?”
“Yes. You’re one of the team. You always have been.”
“I have always had the greatest enthusiasm for the mission.”
“I know, girl. You always did your best. Is there anything you want?”
She paused for more than a second, an eternity for her. “Just talk to me, Bud. You know I always enjoy that. Tell me about yourself.”
Bud rubbed his grimy face and sat back. “But you know a lot of it already.”
“Tell me anyhow.”
“All right. I was born on a farm. You know that. I was always a dreamy sort of kid—not that you’d have known it to look at me …”
It was the longest twenty-eight minutes of his life.
48: Cerenkov Radiation
Bisesa and Myra followed the crowd to the river.
They arrived at the Thames not far from Hammersmith Bridge. The river was high, swollen with rain runoff. They were lucky not to be flooded, in fact. They sat side by side on a low wall and waited silently.
Pubs and tony restaurants crowded the riverbank here, and in summer you could drink cold beer, and watch pleasure boats and rowers in their eights sliding along the water. Now the pubs were boarded up or burned out, but in their riverside gardens a crude tent city had been set up, and the flag of the Red Cross hung limply on a pole. Bisesa was impressed by even this much organization.
It was deepest night now. To the west, outer London still burned, and plumes of smoke and sparks towered into the air. And to the east, flames licked fitfully at the great shoulder of the London Dome. Even the river wasn’t immune. Its surface was a carpet of debris, some of it glowing. Perhaps there were bodies in there, slowly drifting toward the final graveyard of the sea; Bisesa didn’t want to look too closely.
She was vaguely amazed that she was still alive. But mostly she felt nothing at all. It was a wrung-out sensation that she recognized from her military training: delayed shock.
“Oh,” Myra said. “Thank you.”
Bisesa turned. A woman laden with a tray of polystyrene mugs was working her way through the listless crowd.
Myra took a sip and pulled a face. “Chicken soup. Made from powder too. Yuck.”
Bisesa drank some of the soup. “It’s a miracle they’re this organized so quickly. But—yes, yuck.”
She turned back to the battered city. She wasn’t really used to cities, and had never much liked London life. She had grown up on that Cheshire farm. Her military training had taken her to the wastes of Afghanistan—and then her jaunt to Mir had dumped her in an all-but-empty world. Her Chelsea flat had been a legacy from a fond aunt, too valuable to turn down, too convenient a home for herself and Myra; she’d always meant to sell it someday.
But since returning home she had rarely left London. After the emptiness of Mir she had enjoyed the sense of people around her, the millions of them comfortingly arrayed in their offices and flats, in the parks and the roads, and crammed into Underground tunnels. And when the threat of the sunstorm had been raised, she had become even more deeply attached to London, for suddenly the city and the human civilization it represented was under threat.
But this was a deep-rooted place, where the bones of the dead lay crowded a hundred generations deep in the ground. Against that perspective, even the sunstorm’s wrath was nothing. Londoners would rebuild, as they always had before. And archaeologists of the future, digging into the ground, would find a band of ash and flood debris, pressed between centuries-thick layers of history, like the bands of ash left by Boudicca and the Great Fire and the Blitz, others who had tried and failed to burn London down.
She was distracted by a faint blue glow in the air above the Dome. It was so faint it was difficult to see through all the smoke, and she wasn’t even sure it was real. She said to Myra, “Do you see that? There—there it is again. That blue shining. Can you see?”
Myra looked up and squinted. “I think so.”
“What do you think it is?”
“A Cerenkov glow, probably,” Myra said.
After years of public education about the sunstorm, everybody was an expert on this kind of thing. You’d encounter Cerenkov radiation around a nuclear reactor. The visible light was a secondary effect, a kind of optical shock wave given off by charged particles forcing their way through a medium such as air, faster than the local speed of light.
But in the sunstorm’s elaborate physical sequence, this wasn’t supposed to happen, not now.
Bisesa said, “What do you think it means?”
Myra shrugged. “The sun’s up to something, I suppose. But there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? I think I’m all worried out, Mum.”
Bisesa took her daughter’s hand. Myra was right. There was nothing they could do but wait, under the unnatural sky, in air glowing faintly blue, to see what happened next.
Myra drained her mug. “I wonder if they have any more soup.”
***************************
Part 6
49: Pacific
The platform in the sea, some two hundred kilometers west of Perth, was unprepossessing. To Bisesa, looking down from the chopper, it looked like an oil rig, and a small one at that.
It was impossible to believe that if all went well today, this place would become Earth’s first true spaceport.
The chopper landed, a bit bumpily, and Bisesa and Myra clambered out. Bisesa flinched as the full force of the Pacific sun hit her, despite the broad hat strapped to her head. Five years after the sunstorm, though fleets of aircraft day and night patrolled the skies towing electrically charged grids and pumping out chemicals, the ozone layer had still not fully recovered.
None of this seemed to bother Myra, though. Eighteen years old, she was as sun-creamed as her mother, but somehow she wore it elegantly. She was actually wearing a skirt today, uncharacteristically for her, a long billowy creation that didn’t impede her at all as she clambered out of the chopper.
A red carpet striped across the rig’s steel surface to a cluster of buildings and unidentifiable machinery. Side by side, mother and daughter walked along this path. Press reporters lined the carpet, cameras hovering at their shoulders.
Waiting to greet them at the end of the carpet was a small, round woman: the Prime Minister of Australia, and the first Aborigine to hold that position. An aide murmured in the Prime Minister’s ear, evidently informing her who these peculiar-looking people were, and her greeting was generous.
Bisesa didn’t know what to say, but Myra chatted confidently, charming everybody in sight. Myra had her heart set on becoming an astronaut—and there was every chance she would make it; astronautics was one of the world’s biggest growth areas. “And so I’m fascinated by the Space Elevator,” she said. “I hope I’ll be riding up it someday soon!”