Chapter Eight

LIGHT FROM A SUNSPOT

Twenty minutes, ten seconds until Ignition Sequence Start,Drayax told herself, as if she didn’t know. But only two minutes left to call a wave-off, if need be. And that damned red light was still on. She debated calling Power Shunt again, but then she changed her mind. All they could do would be to call Power Reception down on Greenhouse and relay her queries. There was no time for such niceties. She had to cut out the middlemen. She set her comm to call Power Reception directly.

“Reception, this is Control. Drayax speaking. We need—I need—your best guesses, your best call. Are we going to get that sensor swapped out in time?”

“We’re—we’re, ah doing, doing our best, Madam Drayax—Control.”

Plainly they were rattled as hell down there. They needed a little backbone enhancement. “Never mind all that, Reception. Just answer the question. Can we get that sensor repaired or replaced in time? Yes or no?”

She heard a drawing-in of breath on the other end of the line, and she imagined the young technician whose name she did not know, whose face she had never seen, standing a little straighter, throwing his shoulders back just a little. “No, Control. I do not believe we can.”

She had thought as much—but she needed them to admit it as well before they could go to the next step. “Very well,” she said, speaking slowly and calmly, struggling to ignore the way the countdown clock was shedding seconds at an alarming rate. “I need your best, your very best estimate, based on all your experience with your systems. Do you have a sensor failure, or a good sensor reporting a true misalignment?”

Silence on the line, and seconds melting away. Then, at last: “Control, I would put it at 85 percent likely we have a blown sensor sending bad data.”

“Very well.” One last question to ask, and she had to phrase it in neutral terms. “Again, based on your experience with the systems involved, and the last reliable data you received, please report on your opinion: What do you believe is the alignment status of the reception grid?”

More silence, more seconds draining off to nothing, and at last a strained, quiet voice, struggling to keep itself calm. “Control,if the sensor is in fact bad, based on last good data received, I would say there is a 95 percent probability that we still have a good alignment.”

The silence was at her end, now. She had the best data she was going to get, and now it was up to her to decide.So, an 85 percent chance of a 95 percent chance, she thought.What did that work out to? Work the numbers and they had a hair over 80 percent confidence that the grid alignment was still within tolerance. The kid was telling her he thought it would work, but he couldn’t be sure.

She checked the clock. One minute, fifteen seconds remaining during which she could call a wave-off.

“Thank you, Groundside Power Reception,” she said. “Stand by for initial power shunt sequence.” She switched over to the general comm channel. “This is Ignition Control.”Not the “voice” of Ignition Control, she thought to herself. No flacks, no public affairs officers for this.I’m the only one who can say this. “We are go for Ignition. All systems showing green, or have red status overridden by me. No wave-off. Repeat. We are go. There will be no wave-off.”

She stepped back from her display panel and folded her arms in front of her chest. She herself wondered if it was a gesture of finality, of determination—or whether she was subconsciously putting her arms up to protect herself, to shield herself, and hold on tight through whatever was to happen next.

She flipped to the public affairs channel and listened in as that damned “voice” calmly talked them all through it as the last of the seconds smoked away.

“That was Project Director Berana Drayax providing the final approval for the Ignition Sequence to start. That sequence will begin in twenty-five seconds, as the old SunSpot powers down to 5 percent of capacity, then refocuses and retargets its light cone for the Power Shunt operation.”

He makes it sound so simple,Drayax marveled. She knew how much work had gone into planning that one sequence, into rebuilding the SunSpot controllers to make it possible, into surveying the ground target precisely, into constructing Groundside Power Reception, into rehearsing and simulating everything, over and over again.

“On my mark, Ignition Final Sequence begins with SunSpot power-down in fifteen seconds. Mark. Minus fourteen and counting. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven—”

The soothing voice faded into the background as Drayax stared at the main display screen. The graphics and simulated images were gone, replaced by a split view, with the daylight surface of Greenhouse as seen from space on the left and a shot of the SunSpot on the right. Even an elderly SunSpot put out a hellacious amount of light energy, of course, and the image adjusters had accounted for that, so that what was really a blinding flare of light appeared in the screen as a comfortably warm yellow bloom of luminance.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One.Mark, Sequence start.”

That comfortable warm bloom of light suddenly began to dim, guttering down to a faint red glow. Drayax knew better than to trust to the corrected images, however. It was impossible to control all the biases. The auto-adjustment system would inevitably try to make the light look the way the adjuster’s algorithm thought it ought to look rather than as it was. Far better to go by the meters and sensors, the numbers. She flipped that view onto a side display, and nodded to herself as she watched the numbers change, saw the graph line move down the intended path.

The world that had been lit, at least in part, by a still-bright torch was now illuminated by a dying ember. She looked toward the image of Greenhouse and watched the surface of the planet, or at least its equatorial regions, fade, not quite to black, but down to a dark grey-black red. The landscape was cast in dim yet lurid tones darker than blood.

Darkness. The final blackout. That’s where we’re all headed, if we’re not careful—and lucky,Drayax thought.

In a disturbingly short span of time, the blazing light of SunSpot had guttered down to a weak red glow. But massive power still lurked inside the truncated sphere that was the heart of the SunSpot—power that was going to come out, sooner or later. Either it would be released under control—or else the damping fields would give all at once, and the SunSpot would flashover in a heartbeat, and for a few brief moments would outshine the local star, Lodestar. Unfortunately, those aboard the ship named for that star,Lodestar VII, would not have time to admire the phenomenon, as they, and the ship itself, would be vaporized milliseconds after the lightblast reached the ship.

Drayax checked the telemetry from SunSpot, and was relieved to find the damping fields appeared to be in good health.

With the SunSpot safely powered down, the next task was refocusing and retargeting the SunSpot’s light cone, tightening it down to as small a focus as possible and aiming it as precisely as possible at the Power Reception Array that was still showing a red panel and serious misalignment.

If the Power Reception Array wasn’t precisely aligned as it tracked the SunSpot in its orbit, either the SunSpot’s tightened light cone was going to melt large portions of the Array—and the hopes of survival for everyone in the star system—down to slag, or else the Array simply would not receive enough power for the job ahead. Drayax was tempted to call into Power Reception Control again, but she knew it would be pointless at best, and likely counterproductive. They were doing everything they could down there, and another call from the boss could do nothing but distract them.

Now it was out of her hands, out of human control altogether. The next part of the Sequence was in play, the automated fusion controllers and beam focusers taking over.

Seconds, minutes, passed. Drayax watched the surface of Greenhouse as the light cone was tightened down.

Generations ago, SunSpot had been bright enough to light an entire hemisphere of Greenhouse, providing the whole world with a reasonable approximation of a day-night cycle. As the SunSpot’s power had ebbed, the beam had been focused down, and focused down again, until it was merely a broad oval cross section, centered on the equator. The poles were left in darkness, the higher latitudes received far less light and heat, and even the equatorial regions received fewer hours of light than they once had. Now that broad oval of light had become nothing more than a dark red glow that spanned much of the visible face of Greenhouse. And then Drayax saw something that made her heart beat just a little faster. Something washappening to that dim and angry glow. Something that whispered that maybe, just maybe, it was all going to work.

The light cone was contracting, focusing the beam down tighter and tighter. As it shrank, the dim red oval of light on the surface grew brighter, as the SunSpot’s minimum power input was focused down onto a smaller and smaller area. The spot of light on the surface shifted its shape, rounding into a perfect and steadily shrinking circle of light, the SunSpot aiming an ever-smaller, ever-brighter spotlight down onto the planet.

The point of light began to shift color as well, as SunSpot Control shifted the output frequencies upward in preparation for the next phase. The bright red dot turned orange, then yellow, then blazing white, even as it shrank down past the point of visibility.

But Berana Drayax knew the SunSpot’s light beam was still there, even if she couldn’t see it from space. One of her displays switched itself to the feed from one of a series of groundside cameras, this one atop a three-hundred-meter tower, built a kilometer from the planned ground track of the light beam.

The beam was very definitely visible from there—a blazing hot circle of brightness, a hundred meters across, and still contracting as the targeting system in orbit swept the beam forward, and it made its final approach to the Power Reception Array.

The surface of Greenhouse was in theory a vacuum. In practice, the barest trace of atmosphere—some small fraction of the gases leaked and purged from domes over the years—remained near the surface. That residue never quite dissipated altogether, with the result that there were at least detectable amounts of oxygen and nitrogen. Still, any human caught outside a dome without a pressure suit would not have gained much by trying to breathe the stuff in the few moments left of his or her life.

Though the intense human activity over the centuries had produced the trace atmosphere, it had never been enough to matter, never enough to signify, let alone generate, weather.

But then came the moment when the concentrated power of the SunSpot’s light beam struck in one spot. Power enough to light half a world, however dimly, suddenly smote the earth in one small patch of ground. Smoke and dust boiled up out of the superheated soil, the land itself exploding, rocks and soil suddenly blown up into the sky by the violent outgassing. In the blink of an eye, there was atmosphere, and a lot of it, and it was very active, at least locally.

The light beam marched across the landscape, and as it moved, the heat of its passing boiled all the volatiles out of the soil. Every bit of moisture, every stray organic chemical that had ever bonded with the sands and rocks and dirt of the surface of Greenhouse, was abruptly cooked out of the mix, boiled off into steam and smog. Jets of dust and grit were blasted up out of the surface and kicked kilometers high. The dust and debris were caught in the light beam, making it visible, a flame-bright sword slashing down out of the sky, cutting deep into the vitals of Greenhouse.

The dust cloud weakened the light beam, absorbing much of its power before it reached the ground. But even the attenuated beam was a fearsome thing—and the clouds of dust would not trouble it for much longer. The beam was approaching the start of the guide path, a perfectly paved, arrow-straight, jet-black roadway a hundred meters wide and ten kilometers long.

It was there to provide the beam with a dust- and debris-free final approach to the Power Reception Array. The guide path thus protected the Array from being damaged by falling debris, but, just as important, it prevented the Array from losing 20 percent of its effectiveness because dust chanced to settle on the receptors, or because too much dust was suspended in a puff of temporary atmosphere over the Array.

As she watched, the view shifted to a camera alongside the far end of the guide path, looking down its length at the beam as it marched straight toward the viewer.

Drayax had ordered that the guide path be built, then ordered it doubled in width and length. She had done so more because she was worried about the near certainty of dust contamination if they took no precautions and less because she feared a one-in-a-million strike by an improbably large chunk of back-falling debris.

The simulator teams all assured her that there was little need for the guide path, and certainly no need to make it so large. But no one had ever done anything remotely like this before—so how could she know how far to trust in simulations? Nor were they going to get a second chance at this if they got it wrong. Better to build better, bigger, and stronger, just to be sure. They were going to need the Array to absorb every watt of power it could, and Berana Drayax was damned if she was going to go down in history as the woman who allowed the Solacian system to die because she economized and did not defend against a few cubic meters of dust.

The beam struck the forward edge of the guide path and continued its steady march toward the Array. The dust and debris whirled away into the darkness, and all that was left was the beam of light on the guide path, marching straight down its centerline toward the Array. Then even the beam itself faded away as the finest of the dust and the last of the trace gases blew off into the surrounding near vacuum. The guide path blocked any further generation of gas and dust, and thus the beam turned as invisible as any other light ray in vacuum. Only a sun-bright disk of orange light remained, slowly crawling down the center of the path.

But being lost to sight did not mean the light beam’s power was diminished—quite the contrary. Drayax shifted her gaze from the remote-imaging cameras to the telemetry from the thermal sensors built into the guide path. That jet-black surface was absorbing a hellish amount of power—several percentage points above projection. She glanced back at the camera view and was startled to see a spot on the guide path showing a dull and angry glow of red. The guide path was made of material that could absorb and diffuse tremendous amounts of energy. The SunSpot would have to be generating significantly more power than projected for the guide path to show any outward sign of heating.

Good. They would need all the power they could get. But then Drayax frowned. Or was that true? They had spent precious little time worrying about what to do with toomuch power. They had worked up some contingency plans, but they had not been rehearsed more than a few times.Too late now, she told herself.Besides, it’s a better problem to have than too littlepower.

Assuming they got far enough along to worry about that problem. TheGROUND STATION ALIGNMENT light was still glowing red. Was it an instrument problem—or was the Reception Array off axis, and off by enough to cause problems—or a disaster?Too late now, she told herself again. Her fists were clenched, and she could feel the sweat trickling down the small of her back. There was a cold, dark pit in her gut, down where her stomach had been a few minutes before. But some part of her knew that she was showing even less outward sign of stress than the guide path. She knew she looked as calm as if her gravest worry were running short of orange crumbbake bread for the reception. Good. That was the way she wanted it.

The main viewer switched to a camera with a good view of the Ground Reception Array itself, and the ranks of deep blue hexagonal receptor plates, each angling over toward the light beam, an endless field of weirdly identical robotic flowers, all pointing themselves precisely at the rising sun.

Precisely.That was the key word. The receptor plates used a system of collimated microlenses, so that their surfaces, when viewed up close, resembled nothing so much as the eye of an insect. The microlenses focused and concentrated the infall of light, and greatly improved reception efficiency—at a price. They could absorb energy from nearly any angle, but their efficiency was vastly better if they were aimed precisely at the power source. That improvement had meant the difference between success and failure in all the simulations. But if the alignment was off by so much as two-tenths of a degree, the microlenses would lose a quarter of their efficiency—and that severe a power loss would mean the game would be over and lost. There simply would not be enough energy to generate the necessary temporal confinement field.

The light beam slowly tracked into the center of the Receptor Array. It did not touch any of the receptors as it moved, but instead moved down a narrow continuation of the guide path. The beam was focused too tightly to allow it to strike the receptors. The receptor panels would not have absorbed its energy but merely vaporized or exploded.

At last the beam came to rest in the precise center of the receptor. The SunSpot itself was still low in the east as seen from the Receptor Array, not far at all above the horizon. Drayax watched her displays and nodded as they confirmed that the beam-aiming system aboard the SunSpot had locked on to the center of the Array. It should be able to hold that lock for at least ten hours—which ought to be long enough for the Receptor Array to accumulate the power it needed—if, if, if all went well.

Having made a good lock-on, Beam Control prepared to widen the beam back out from a few meters in diameter to a full kilometer across and to crank up from 5 percent back up to full power. At full power output, even when spread over that far larger area, the light beam would be ferociously intense.

Once the SunSpot had lit half a world. Even now, decrepit as it was, it packed more than enough power to turn a few square kilometers into a hell-hot nightmare.

Drayax frowned, and wished the termnightmare had not come to her so easily. That red light was still glowing—and there were thousands of other problems that could still happen, flaws and faults that were not so kind as to warn of their existence through the diagnostic systems.

This was the moment, as the SunSpot’s power beam bloomed outward and struck the Receptor Array. Now they would know if the alignmentwas actually off—or if the sensor and telemetry systems had been giving them all needless fits.

Drayax switched her displays to show a new set of data reports. No more need for beam-transit trajectory. Now she needed to know power input, Array temperatures, accumulator status. The beam jumped from ten meters across to a thousand in less than a heartbeat, and the SunSpot’s power level began its climb to maximum output. She watched the charts and numbers spike from nothing at all to nearly off the chart.

There was a sudden noise behind her, a high roaring noise she did not recognize at once. She looked up, startled, to realize it was the sound of people cheering, of every person in the room clapping and yelling as the accumulators successfully engaged.

Berana Drayax did not allow herself to take part—not at once. That one red light was still on—even if it was in disagreement with every other display on her board. All the other numbers were good, very good, showing the power receptors working at peak efficiency, the madly complicated system smoothly draining off the SunSpot’s remaining power, precisely as intended. She flipped her comm system. “Groundside Power, this is Project Director. We’re showing good power accumulation across the board, but my board still shows a bad alignment. Do you have any updates for me?”

“Project Director—we’re showing the same thing. With the power shunt in progress, I had to pull three engineers back to their operations-monitoring station. That leaves me with only two people working the problem directly. They’ll do their best, but there are no new data yet.”

“But we’re showing good power accumulation,” Drayax objected.

“Yes, ma’am. For now, we are. It all looks good—but we’ve got to get through the whole power shunt process. And westill don’t have hard numbers on alignment itself. If the Array starts to drift, we could have problems later.”

“I thought you said it was an instrumentation problem,” Drayax said.

“I said ‘probably,’ ” the voice in her ear replied. “But we have to work on theassumption that it’snot the instruments and the alignment system is slightly off somehow. That’s why I need to start working contingencies, working on ways to run the alignment manually if the automatics do fail.”

“You’re not making me happy, Groundside Power,” Drayax said.

“No, ma’am. That’s not my job.”

“I’m coming to understand that, Groundside Power. Keep me informed.” She switched off.

It’s never straight and smooth,she thought.Never simple or direct. Just as she had never really considered the possibility of an instrumentation failure forcing a wave-off, it had not occurred to her that the status of the Power Shunt alignment might still be uncertain even after they had started. It should have been either/or, fail or succeed, live or die. But no. Once again, it was the fretful doubt of the middle ground.

And even if this all works—if the accumulator does its job, and the timeshield works, and the NovaSpot and the SunSpot both behave—if, if, if—then what? What have we bought ourselves?

A little more time. Perhaps that was all. Berana Drayax was privy to the inner secrets. She knew that the planet Solace was well along a path of irresistible decline. Nothing could stop the crash—but perhaps, with a little more time, they could soften the blow, save a few more lives, or perhaps a few more million lives. Perhaps the best they could do would be to add a day, a month, a year, to some unknown number of lives.If, because of their efforts, a million people all had six months more of life, then that would be a victory—of sorts. And time, after all, was hope. Buy the people of Solace six months, a year, five years—and there was no telling what might happen.

And no telling if it would be good news—or further disaster.

Berana Drayax settled in, along with everyone else in the Solacian system, to wait out the SunSpot’s orbital pass over the accumulator.