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believable: if this was just a thousandth, what would the full force of
the storm have been like?
The wrapping blew off Sigiriya in a minute, Perdita yelled
miserably into the phone. And half the trees have blown down,
and
How did you get out of that damn mine? Do you have any
idea of the strings I had to pull to get you in there?
Mother, this isn t doing any good. I m here now.
S U N S T O R M " 2 6 5
She could sense Siobhan trying to be calm. Okay. Okay. Find
shelter. Stay there. Keep your phone on. I ll make some calls. Some
of the GPS is down, but they may be able to locate you
The wind picked up even more, punching her like a great
damp fist. Mother
I ll contact the military on the island the British consulate
Mum, I love you!
Oh, Perdita
But then the phone sparked in her hand, she dropped it, and it
was gone.
And the wind lifted her clean off the ground.
It picked her up the way her father used to when she was very
small. The air was hot, wet, and full of debris, and the wind tore so
fast she could barely breathe. But, oddly, it was almost relaxing, to
be blown like a leaf. She never even saw the great teak trunk, a bit
of debris flung into the air as she was, which ended her life.
42: Noon
1023 (London Time)
On the Moon, Mikhail Martynov sat with Eugene Mangles.
Its walls plastered with softscreens and comms links, and now
populated by patient workers murmuring into microphones, this
had been Bud Tooke s office when he was in command here at
Clavius but now, of course, Bud was up there at L1 risking his
life, while Mikhail sipped coffee and watched pretty pictures.
There is absolutely nothing we can do now, Mikhail said.
Nothing but watch, and record, and learn for the future.
You said that before, Eugene groused. With an impulsive
movement he pushed back his chair and stalked around the office.
Mikhail considered calling him back, but thought better of it.
He had spoken more for himself than for Eugene. Besides, he had
no real idea what Eugene was feeling. The boy remained enigmatic
to him, even now, after they had worked together so closely and so
long. As so often, Mikhail was consumed with a desire to hold Eu-
gene, to comfort him. But that, of course, was impossible.
As for Mikhail himself, his dominant emotion was guilt.
He turned to the big softscreen at the head of the room, with its
portrait of the full Earth. Assembled from more than a hundred
data feeds, this was an immense and detailed image of a planet, even
better than Bud s imagery on the shield, and really quite beautiful,
Mikhail thought sadly. But it was a portrait of a planet in torment.
As the Earth helplessly rotated, the subsolar point had been
S U N S T O R M " 2 6 7
tracking west. It was as if the planet were turning into a blowtorch.
Right now the dry face of Africa was turned toward him, the conti-
nent s familiar outline clearly recognizable. But an immense storm
system thousands of kilometers across lay sprawled over the Sa-
hara, and the continent s green heart was streaked by vast black
plumes of smoke: the last of the rain forests will die today, Mikhail
thought desolately. And as the vegetation burned off the land, the
oceans gave up huge volumes of moisture to the clouds.
By now no part of the world, even those regions still in the shel-
ter of night, had been spared the effects of the sunstorm. Clouds
boiled all across the visible face of the Earth, and as they streamed
away from the equator and hit the cooler air over higher latitudes
they dumped their water in ferocious rainstorms, and as snow at
the poles. Meanwhile, as solar energy poured into Earth s brimming
heat reservoirs, the ocean currents, huge saltwater Amazons, were
stirring and churning, and even while an unprecedented load of
snow landed on Antarctica, all around the edge of the southern con-
tinent billions of tonnes of ice were breaking away from ice sheets.
And over the poles aurorae crackled, an eerie fire visible even
from the Moon.
Seven hours into this horror, Mikhail thought. And many more
hours to go, if Eugene s final models proved accurate. There had
been some modeling of the long-term effects of all this on Earth s
climate, but unlike Eugene s models of the sun, no precision was
possible. Nobody knew what would come of this or even if any-
body could survive on Earth to see it.
But no matter what became of Earth, Mikhail could confi-
dently predict that he would live through the day and that was
the source of his guilt.
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