The Curve of the Earth

9




Inside the main reading room, it was warm and bright. Little light penetrated through the stained-glass windows except at midday, so most of the illumination came from elaborate chandeliers decorated with thousands of crystal prisms. Electroluminescent wall hangings supplemented the downward light with their blue-white glow.

The space was high, and a circular balcony had been built to take advantage of it, self-supporting so as not to damage the stonework.

People were working up there, if lying on couches with infoshades on counted as working.

“What are they doing?” asked Newcomen. He spoke in a whisper. Perhaps he thought they were sleeping.

“Data mining. Digging into raw statistics and turning them into something people can use. It’s our biggest export. Coffee?”

Petrovitch stopped by a wooden table and touched the back of his hand to a jug on a warming plate. He nodded with satisfaction and took two mugs from the tray, filling them with a thick oil-black brew.

While Newcomen stirred and added milk, Petrovitch took his mug down to the centre of the reading room, where there was a round table surrounded by chairs. Marcus was already there, dark glasses lying on the polished wood in front of him.

When the city authorities had sold them the building, they’d left all the books inside. Maybe they thought they’d all be thrown out: not so. The Freezone had kept them exactly where they’d been shelved. The bookcases were arranged around them, the spines of the books facing outwards. Those and the coffee: it smelled right.

When Newcomen joined them, Marcus slid the infoshades across to him.

“Where do I sit?”

“Wherever you want, son,” said Marcus.

He dithered, and chose a seat two away from Petrovitch. He seemed thrown by the fact there was no subordinate position to take on a circular table.

“Put them on,” said Petrovitch. “I’ll try and explain as I go. So that you understand, I’ll do my best to make it simple enough, even for you.”

“Should I be grateful?” Newcomen unfolded the arms on the shades and slipped them over his ears.

“I’d prefer to get technical. If you’d had any science in your background, I might have been able to spare you the baby version.” Petrovitch picked up his mug and blew steam off the top of it. “As it is, you’re going to have to rely on my ability to explain complex concepts to complete ignoramuses.”

“I have a bachelor’s degree.”

“In American literature. You may as well have done media studies for all the use it is. Now past’ zebej and concentrate. I’m not going to do this twice.”

Petrovitch ran a solar system simulator and patched Newcomen into it.

“Tell me you recognise this. Please.”

“Uh, it’s the Sun.” Newcomen paused. “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. Gold star for you.”

The Sun burned bright and steady, but around its edges, the light flickered as if it were dancing to silent music. Petrovitch zoomed in on it until they could only see the corona.

“The Sun spits out all sorts of junk. As well as visible light, it glows all the way from radar frequencies to X-rays. It also ejects charged particles, bits of high-energy matter. This goes out in all directions, and is called the solar wind. When the Sun’s atmosphere is quiet, there’s less wind. When it’s stormy, we get a lot. The Earth’s magnetic field deflects the solar wind to the polar regions. When the charged particles enter our atmosphere, they excite molecules high up and make them glow. These are the aurora, or Northern and Southern Lights. Stop me if you know this.”

“I, uh, might have done once.”

“If I were you, I’d be ashamed.” Petrovitch brought up the magnetic field lines, holding the Earth like a basket would an egg. “I get laughed at because I know the value of the gravitational constant, but somehow it’s social suicide not to know who Odysseus’s mother was.”

“Anticlea.”

“Shut up, Marcus. Anyway, this stuff is relevant for later.” Petrovitch drank more coffee. “The study of the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field is a mix between geophysics and magnetohydrodynamics called auroral physics. Lucy has a PhD in auroral physics, and she was collaborating with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, testing out new sensing equipment. New equipment that she’d designed and built herself. The Northern Slope is a good place to test as it’s electromagnetically very quiet. I wanted her to go to Svalbard or Greenland instead, but Fairbanks got in first with their invitation.”

Newcomen scratched at his eyelid behind his lenses. “She was invited?”

“Yeah. And unless this is one big conspiracy, I have to assume it was genuine. Auroral research is a small community. Everyone knows everyone else, and Lucy’s one of the bright young things. They wouldn’t play with her life like that.” Petrovitch stopped and shifted in his seat. He had to be right about that aspect of the whole pizdets, because the alternative was unthinkable: he’d asked for, and received, assurances from everyone involved that his girl would be treated right. “Okay, this is where we get down to the detail.”

He spun the Earth, and closed in on Alaska. “One more thing: remember I said the Sun gets stormy sometimes? That causes us problems, even one hundred and fifty million kilometres away. As all the Sun stuff hits us, it pinches the Earth’s magnetic field. The flow of energy is enough to cause power lines to fail, compasses to scramble, and to trash satellites. If you’re in a spaceship or a high-flying aircraft, you can get a year’s dose of radiation in a matter of minutes. Got that? Okay. Some twenty kilometres east of Deadhorse, the oil company town at Prudhoe Bay, is a research station: seventy degrees ten minutes thirty-two seconds north, one hundred and forty-eight degrees five minutes and fifty-seven seconds west. That’s where Lucy was, as of last Monday night.”

The points on the map flashed as he said their names. They faded away, except for the location of the research post.

“At nine twenty-three Universal Time, twenty-three minutes past midnight local, we lost contact with her.”

Newcomen sat forward and tilted his head to one side, as if to understand the information better. “So her computer fails, or is taken off her, or she takes it off herself. I know you don’t want to discuss the possibility—”

“You’re right. I don’t,” said Petrovitch. “She’s alive. See if you can think of something that’ll kill a Freezone-designed link without killing its wearer.”

Newcomen pulled his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes with the ball of his hand. “I don’t know. You’ve done nothing but talk about it, so: solar wind?”

“You’ll have to do better than just stumble across the right answers when we’re out in the field, Newcomen, but yeah. Same process we used to nuke your bugs and my visa. An intense electromagnetic pulse will melt the circuitry of a link. It’s hardened against e-m radiation, but a strong enough burst will kill it stone dead. We can discount a solar storm, because there wasn’t one. Someone emped her.”

Newcomen held up his hand. “Wait a second. That doesn’t make sense: someone dragged a piece of equipment the size of the thing you put me in all the way out into the middle of nowhere just to ruin her portable computer?”

“Put like that, it’s clearly mad.” Petrovitch waved Newcomen’s infoshades back on his face. “So we did some checking. Turns out that the Alaskan pipeline went offline at the same time as computers all over the North Slope and parts of Canada, and after a bit of a struggle, we found out that a lot of the early-warning radar stations you’ve got out on the Dewline went belly-up too. All roughly at the same time as Lucy’s link went down. What does that sound like to you?”

Newcomen rested his head on the table. “Uh, sir. I don’t know about this stuff. I’m not an expert in whatever-it-is. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Because I want you to think for yourself for the first f*cking time in your life!” Petrovitch slammed his hand down hard on the polished woodwork. “You’ve been told what to think, what to say, what to see, what to do for twenty-eight long years. Aren’t you sick of it yet?”

He was breathing hard, and he had to restrain himself from shaking the American by the throat. Restrain himself for certain, because no one else was going to be capable of holding him back.

Newcomen’s eyes narrowed, and something resembling a spark showed behind them. “It sounds like a Sun storm. But you already said there wasn’t one.”

“Bingo.”

“Bingo?”

“Bingo,” said Petrovitch emphatically. “So: what caused the geomagnetic storm, considering it wasn’t the Sun?”

“I don’t know.”

“And neither do I.”

The revelation made Newcomen frown. “What?”

“I know, I know. I do omniscience too well. When I say I don’t know, I can give you a list of things that might have the same effects. But each one is more unlikely than the next. And your government is telling us precisely nothing.” Petrovitch pressed his fingertips to his temples and made small circular motions. “So we went back to check again. Did anything else happen in a ten-minute window around the time we lost contact, anything at all? Surprisingly enough, we found something. An earthquake.”

“And how is that connected?”

“It’s not. Alaska accounts for eleven per cent of all the world’s earthquakes. Eleven. That day alone there were seventy-three discrete events. An average of one every twenty minutes. And all of them only measurable with a seismograph. However, the one that we looked at was different from all the others: it happened a long way to the north of the usual belt, though that in itself doesn’t mean anything. But its seismographic signature was all wrong. It wasn’t an earthquake at all, it was an explosion. We can even estimate its energy. Take a look.”

The satellite image Newcomen saw was of a scar in the snow, dark against the white.

“It’s a crater, some four hundred metres across. Recent snowfall’s obscured it, but this was taken while it was still fresh: you can just about make out the crater wall. But I don’t think anything exploded on the ground. Looks like an airburst. It’s well beyond the northern limit of the treeline, so all that was damaged was rock and ice, twenty-four kilometres south-west of the research station, and thirty-two k south of Prudhoe Bay. I find it a coincidence of astronomical proportions that the two events, crater and electromagnetic disturbance, aren’t connected. Same time, same place.”

Newcomen was silent for a long time. He scratched his chin, while Petrovitch rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Does,” started Newcomen, then stopped. He gave it another go. “Does Assistant Director Buchannan know any of this?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Petrovitch waited for Newcomen to take off the infoshades again and place them warily on the table. “Sure as hell we’re not the first to work this out.”

“And in the middle of all this going on, your adopted daughter disappears.”

“Yeah. How does it sound to you now? Sound like she just walked into the wilderness and froze to death? Or did something else happen to her? What did she see that night? More importantly, what did she measure?”

“What did she… measure?”

“Keep up, Newcomen. The kit she had with her would have been able to spot someone using a light switch at a hundred k. She was recording at the time. Could be that she interpreted the results on the fly. If it was something out of the ordinary, and she had proof of it, there might be a good reason to make her disappear. Have you heard of Haarp?”

“Of what?”

“Haarp. Aitch-ay-ay-arr-pee. It’s been kicking around for fifty years as a superweapon designed to harness the Earth’s magnetic field and focus it like a laser. It’s all kon govno. I hope. But something happened that night. A nuke designed for an emp effect. Some sort of space-based particle beam gun that can punch through the atmosphere.” He blinked. “Now that would be scary.”

Petrovitch drifted off into a reverie, and was only brought out of it by Newcomen sitting up sharply.

“There might be another explanation,” said the agent. “You say she was alone in the research station.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you be certain of that?”

“She never mentioned anyone. And no one was scheduled to be there with her until two days later, on a supply run.” Petrovitch sucked at his teeth. Michael, all-knowing, hadn’t said anything either. Lucy was allowed to keep secrets from Petrovitch, from Madeleine, but not from Michael. “What are you implying?”

“How attractive is she?”

“She’s… I’m her legal father. I don’t think I’m supposed to have an opinion on that. She’s, you know,” and he threw up his hands.

“Lucy’s only four years younger than you are.”

“She’s only four years younger than you, too. You tell me, do you think she’s pretty?”

“I’m engaged to be married.” Newcomen huffed and stuck his finger in his collar. “You must know there’s about ten guys for every girl in Alaska.”

“And you must know that statistic’s bollocks.”

“Could someone have taken advantage of the fact that her link was down? Could they have decided to mount their own rescue mission because they’re infatuated with her?” Newcomen was on a roll. “Could she have not wanted to be rescued, and then been kidnapped?”

Petrovitch’s mind temporarily fused. “I… I hadn’t thought of that.”

“If this is a kidnapping, it’s federal business. She may have even gone willingly, if she thought she was going to be taken back to Fairbanks or this Deadhorse place.”

“Deadhorse,” said Petrovitch. “That’s closest by far.”

“When did the rescue team get to the research station?”

“Sunday morning. There was a snowstorm. The university couldn’t get a team out until then, and they borrowed an air force unit out of Eielson.”

“Two, three days. How far can you go in three days?”

“Twice round the planet,” said Petrovitch. “But not if the vehicle you’re trying to use has no electrics. Lucy had a snowmobile. Magnetic field strong enough to fry her link would have destroyed the ignition.”

“It should be relatively easy to check who she’d met, who might have braved a three-day-long blizzard to go and get her, and who had the means to do it. The list of suspects isn’t going to be huge. And whoever it is is unlikely to hurt her. Keep her prisoner, yes. Hurt her, no.”

“I wish I could share your confidence. If any of this is remotely accurate, they might decide that if they can’t have her, no one else will.”

“I’m sure Lucy’s very smart. She’ll know how to play for time. She must know that you’re coming for her.”

“Oh, she’ll know.” The corner of Petrovitch’s eye twitched. “We’ve done this before.”