Chapter 38

I peeked past Sheila’s shoulder as she looked over the semicircle of women from the Science Team gathered around Jennifer as the Dark Lady of Data studied the computer screen in front of her workstation. Her fingers flew across the keyboard while she scanned hundreds of files, crunching numbers and extracted the information she needed.

The thirty-four-year-old Boston descendant of Zulu warriors became a legend within the Society as a math prodigy with an uncanny ability to ferret out hidden trends and meaningful information hiding in the shadows of bewildering numbers. As an ace statistician, she wore her African heritage with pride in the form of an exquisitely trimmed afro, worthy of any high-end fashion magazine. Like the forty-niners and prospectors of yore, she panned rivers of data in a relentless search for nuggets of golden truth.

“We have no way to directly measure the strength of a solar storm. We know it was big, but we don’t know how powerful,” Jennifer said without turning away from her duties. Her slender black fingers were a shadowy blur as they danced across the keyboard. “Let’s see what kind of footprints this critter left.”

Jennifer glanced over her shoulder and, for a moment, she locked eyes with mine and gave me a curious grin. I nodded my head and returned her smile as I recalled the sensual memory of inappropriate lust. Nice to see the memories were mutual.

“We record and monitor the output of our solar array, twenty-four/seven. Like a movie camera, the system takes a snapshot of the line voltage once a microsecond. I can manipulate the results in dozens of different ways, including visually. I can turn it into a song, a movie, or a graph. Maybe the last string of numbers has something to tell us.”

She mouse clicked the auto-save file and opened it in her Excel spreadsheet. Digits drifted across the monitor’s screen in a blizzard of numbers before freezing in place at the end of the transmission.

“Interesting, let’s go visual.”

Two or three fast mouse clicks transformed the row of numbers into a three-dimensional emerald green bar graph twinkling against a black background. “Ah-ha! Got it!” She whooped with glee as she zoomed to the final moments before the data went offline.

“See?” she cried the instant the panels’ flat-line trickle of sunset power started to spike. “In the final tenth of a second, we captured the first moments of the event.” Her long slender finger traced the nearly vertical slope of the bar graph. “Death was not instantaneous; it took one-twentieth of a second for the line to die. The last five frames of our digital movie tell us a story. In the thin sliver of time, current surged from nine to over seventy volts.”

She pointed at the monitor. “Note, in these final images, or bars, the voltages are increasing at an exponential rate, nine volts, eighteen, thirty-six, seventy-two volts. My gut told me that it ain’t where it topped out. I guessed the surge likely occurred more like a tsunami wave than a spike.” She tapped her finger on the top of the last bar on the screen. “We need one more bit of evidence to finish the picture.”

A few moments and a dozen clicks later, the graph vanished beneath a dark spectrum, false-color image of our solar system’s central star as seen from the Solar and Hemispheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite orbiting the sun.

“Let’s see what the old lady was up to over the last twenty-four hours; we’ll fast play the day in sixty seconds.”

She pushed start, and we watched in morbid fascination as a few degrees beneath the equator, a collection of huge sunspots merged into one gigantic tempest, several dozen times the diameter of the Earth. A few seconds later, a massive chunk of the sun’s surface vented into space as the new sunspot erupted in a brilliant M-Class flare. The tremendous flash momentarily overloaded and blinded the satellite’s camera in a wash of white light. Nine minutes later, the current from the array spiked as the burst of electromagnetic radiation slammed into the Earth’s magnetic shield.

“Big and fast. We were lucky; the plasma cloud mostly missed us.” She advanced to a spike in strength fifteen hours later. “If it had been a direct hit rather than a passing blow, the network would have been seriously damaged.”

She suddenly yelped. “Look! There’s a second one!”

Nineteen seconds into the video, eight hours in real-time, another flash of white light sparked into existence, ejecting billions of tons of celestial mass into space on a collision course with the earth.

“X-Class is reserved for the strongest flares. It’s a speedy little bastard. It hit us nine-point-three hours later as an X-20.” She shook her in disbelief. “Velocity and mass determine the strength of an event. The faster the particles travel, the higher is their kinetic energy when they collide with us.”

She focused our attention on a third blip, three times as large as the previous spike. “That one made the grid wobble, but we didn’t fall down. It’s not the big one, no way close.”

Near the end of the broadcast, another enormous sunspot exploded in a flash which overwhelmed the satellites’ capacity to process. Jennifer extended her arm and tapped the spike at the end of the feed from the collectors.

“There is our assassin! Transit in five hours, fifty-two seconds.” She hesitated and punched her keyboard and let out a long whistle. “The CME hit Earth at over five-thousand miles a second, damn close to maximum theoretical velocity. It is improbable, but not impossible. Mass from each ejection struck us with at least a glancing blow. The killer hit us dead center along a pathway already cleared by the preceding two storms.”

The Zulu Number Warrior rose from her seat and turned to face us. “Net result? Three days ago was a Carrington Level Event times two. And the shit outside? It’s at least several orders of magnitude stronger than the first one.”

She murmured something which could have been a prayer in an African-sounding language.

“Tech is dead. The first storm killed him. This one?” She looked around. “This one is cremating the corpse.” She paused, inhaled deeply, paused for a second, and shivered as a single tear streamed down her coal-black cheek. “My dear friends, I fear the Gods of the SkyFire have stolen our future.” She choked back a sob and turned away from us as her shoulders shook to the sound of weeping.

“It only took yesterday’s tomorrow.” Sheila thrust her clenched fist high above her head and roared like a lioness. “We are the future! Can I get an echo?” she called.

“We are the future!” I howled as I hiked my paw above my head and my voice joined the defiant choirs.

Count on the boss to turn bad news into a pep-rally. Crap! She was good.

On the morning of the seventh day, I was jolted out of bed by the sharp, bright notes of reveille echoing from the rafters of the great room. It took a dozen heartbeats and a deep breath to reconcile the martial medley with the time and place of now. Ahh, yes! Today, I would be riding with the Commander’s search party. We were going into town to find Darlene and Seraina.

I opened my bedroom door as naked as a newborn and looked down from the balcony at the Society’s supply officer as she allowed the final call to fade into silence before her cheeks puffed out and her face flushed purple as she sounded, “CHARGE!” The colony’s transition from civilian to a soldierly society was complete.

“What happened to the pagan pipes?” I shouted down to Brenda.

The Society’s day usually began with a Celtic-sounding something I had been told was a Wiccan chant for bounty and blessings. The boom-box substituting for the dead speaker system was missing in action, replaced by a human. Fate favored us with a supply sergeant with a secondary MOS as a company bulger.

“Our first mission deserves a proper send-off, don’t ya think?” She smiled as she gave me a thumbs-up.

“Great idea! Make it a tradition,” I laughed. Start the day with a morale boost and a reminder we ain’t in Kansas anymore.

“Don’t worry, looney tunes will back in the morning.” She sent a playful note in my direction.

I shaved and showered in a rush. I tend to leave on the installment plan. To avoid a return to quarters to recover a forgotten item of necessity, I made a quick to-do list in my head of the personal junk I would need for three or more days in the bush: three packs of smokes? Check. Disposable lighters? Check. Weed for a week? Check (no sense running short). Eyeglasses and microfiber cleaning cloth? Check. Change of socks and underwear? Double-check. I was good to go.

I selected a functional wardrobe: camo cargo pants, an olive drab surplus army shirt with epaulets, and a pair of used Desert Storm combat boots wrapped up in a vintage M-60 government-issued field jacket. Standing before the full-length mirror, I repositioned the contraband eagle feather in the hatband of my brown fedora and gulped before I burst out laughing. Trick or treat anyone?

On my way to the armory, I slipped into the kitchen. Caffeine is the genie in the java. I warmed my hands as I rubbed Aladdin’s mug, inhaled a fragrant cloud of coffee steam and wished the butterflies in my gut would go back to sleep.

Pre-mission jitters; I didn’t want to screw-up.

“Cutting it a bit close, aren’t we?”

Sheila nodded at the antique pendulum clock on the armory wall as the second hand clicked to the twelve o’clock position and the 1890s era timepiece chimed the hour. I smiled and said nothing as I took my place beside my teammates. Barely on time lived in the twilight zone between punctuality and tardiness. At least I wasn’t late.