Solar Storm (Season 1): Aftermath [Episodes 1-5] Read online

  Contents

  Title Page/Copyright Season 1

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  CME Defined

  Half title S1

  Beginning

  EPISODE 1: IMPACT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  EPISODE 2: NORTHERN LIGHTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  EPISODE 3: FAITH

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  EPISODE 4: ENDURANCE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  EPISODE 5: HOME

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Season Two

  Review Solar Storm Season 1

  Contact Info

  Author Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  SOLAR STORM

  SEASON 1: AFTERMATH

  MARCUS RICHARDSON

  © 2017 Marcus Richardson.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The people and events in this book have been written for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to living and/or deceased people is purely coincidental and not intentional.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without prior written consent by the author.

  Books by Marcus Richardson

  SOLAR STORM

  Episode 1: IMPACT

  Episode 2: NORTHERN LIGHTS

  Episode 3: FAITH

  Episode 4: ENDURANCE

  Episode 5: HOME

  Solar Storm Season 1 (Episodes 1-5)

  Season 2 coming July 2017

  *************

  THE WILDFIRE SAGA

  The Source (Prequel)

  Book I: Apache Dawn

  Book II: The Shift

  Book III: Firestorm

  False Prey (Novella)

  The Wildfire Saga Bundle

  Oathkeeper: A Cooper Braaten Thriller (Spring 2017)

  *************

  THE FUTURE HISTORY OF AMERICA SERIES

  *************

  For my complete catalog listing, please see:

  marcusrichardsonauthor.com

  Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

  —Carl Sagan

  CME defined: Coronal mass ejections (or CMEs) are huge bubbles of gas threaded with magnetic field lines that are ejected from the Sun over the course of several hours… Coronal Mass Ejections disrupt the flow of the solar wind and produce disturbances that strike the Earth with sometimes catastrophic results… Coronal mass ejections are often associated with solar flares and prominence eruptions but they can also occur in the absence of either of these processes… The frequency of CMEs varies with the sunspot cycle. At solar minimum we observe about one CME a week. Near solar maximum we observe an average of 2 to 3 CMEs per day.

  —NASA, Marshall Space Flight Center

  https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/CMEs.shtml

  Space Weather Prediction Center

  Boulder, Colorado

  ADAM PUGNEWSKI LEANED BACK in his creaky desk chair and groaned as he stretched. He hated the graveyard shift, but he supposed someone had to do it, and being low man on the totem pole, taking Third Shift at least provided him some job security. He reached for his cold cup of coffee and frowned. Adam took a quick look at the dazzling monitors before him on the wall.

  The sun, a huge luminous ball of gas and fire, glared at him on each screen in different wavelengths, from X-ray to hydrogen-alpha, depending on which orbiting observation post the screen received its feed. The sun was currently in the early stages of a low sunspot activity cycle, and just like all the predictions suggested, Sol proved not very active this morning.

  Active Region 34281 was about the only action on the surface. Another high-speed stream had opened up just north of the coronal hole, but nothing faced earth yet.

  Adam been there yesterday when the lead physical scientist had issued the updated three-day forecast for a minor G1 global magnetic storm. The sun, for the moment, looked like it was playing ball. With that prediction, AR 34281 moved at its regular pace across the surface of the sun and posed no threat to anyone for at least a few more hours.

  He scanned the bank of monitors. All the models were lining up with observed data. Adam pushed back his chair and stood, grimacing as his knees cracked. He picked up his coffee cup and took one more glance at the monitors. No change.

  Stop worrying, it's not doing anything.

  After a look at the clock which showed his Midnight to 6 AM shift was only halfway over, he strolled to the rear of the command center and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. He watched the light cream swirl in the dark liquid and wondered how long it'd be before he could join the ranks of the living again on a regular shift.

  As he stood there humming an idyl tune, the main glass door opened and Penny Little walked in carrying her oversize laptop bag. "Adam," she said, strolling by with her usual tight smile.

  Adam raised his coffee cup in salute. "Morning, Pens—you're a little early, aren't you?" he said, following her back to the computer stations.

  Penny was a higher than Adam on the experience scale and gunning for the evening shift, having just escaped the clutches of the graveyard shift herself when Adam joined the SWPC physical scientist cadre. But Dr. Penny Little had ambitions.

  She didn't want to just work at the SWPC, she wanted to run it. So every spare moment, she came in for extra time monitoring, taking notes, and pushing herself to learn everything about the sun and space weather.

  Adam admired her gumption, but he chose to put in his time, pay his dues, and move up the chain like everyone else.

  "Any action tonight?" Penny asked as she unpacked her gear at the station next to her junior colleague.

  Adam sipped his coffee and winced as he burned his tongue. "Shoot…nope, nothing yet. AR 23481 is right on track."

  Penny looked up and pointed at the hydrogen-alpha screen, depicting the feed from Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. "What's that? SOHO's picking something up…" she observed.

  Adam walked over and leaned in to examine the screen. "I don't know, that wasn't there a second ago…" He sat down at his terminal and pushed the coffee aside. Fingers flying over the keyboard, he brought up different angles from the twin STEREO satellites and magnified the region of interest. "Looks like we got a new active region forming. Fast, too."

  "Well, I guess we'll have something to keep an eye on today, huh?" she asked with a smile.

  Adam
grunted. "We'll see…it looks like another burp to me."

  Over his previous few months working at the SWPC, Adam had seen seventeen burps on the surface of the sun. Little areas of the surface that were charged to where the coronal material moved aside and left the region cooler than the surrounding surface. This caused a sunspot to form, but usually within an hour of forming it disappeared.

  Adam called them burps. The long-lasting active regions that circled the sun as it rotated—like giant scabs—were something altogether different and larger. Those were regions the senior physical scientists focused on because that was where the possibility of solar flares and coronal mass ejections lay.

  As Adam typed in a note on his screen to tag and monitor the burp, an incessant beeping started up on the monitor to his left.

  "What do you have?" Penny asked as she examined the monitors in front of her station. She pushed the glasses up her nose and rested her chin on her palm.

  Adam frowned. "I don't know. It looks like…like SOHO is picking up extra charged particles," he said, pointing at a blinking graph outlined in red. "But that doesn't make any sense because there's not any—”

  "Look at that thing grow!" Penny called out, pointing at the location of Adam's burp on the sun. The tiny black speck, which normally only blossomed into an active region over the course of many hours, spread in realtime. They zoomed in and witnessed different cells on the surface of the sun turn black as the magnetic energy forced that spot to cool.

  "Well, that's pretty fast."

  "You're damn right that's fast," Penny said, spinning in her chair and rolling to her station. "I'm recording this loop and sending it to Devlin."

  "Pens, don't get too excited," Adam said raising a hand in caution. "You remember what happened last time…look, it's already starting to shrink. See? Just another burp. Let Devlin sleep."

  "Just because it's a burp doesn't mean that something can't—”

  The image of the sun displayed by the SOHO spacecraft flared and then went white for a few seconds. The screen switched to black with a white line of text that read signal loss before returning to a static-filled normal. A dozen different alarms sounded on the computer terminals around them, and red flashing lights blinked on several screens.

  "Holy shit," Penny said. "Did that thing just flare?"

  "Okay, that happened," muttered Adam as he bent over his keyboard. "That looked like a flare. Was it a flare? It couldn't have been a flare…"

  Penny wasn't looking at the monitors anymore, she was furiously typing away and staring at the small screen in front of her. "Yes it was—initial projection looks guaranteed to be the next X-class event."

  Adam worked at shutting down the alarms. They knew what they were dealing with now, they just had to process the data.

  "Do we know the wavelength strengths?" he asked.

  "Not yet—I'm working on it. You send out the alert?"

  "Doing it now," Adam said over his shoulder as he initialized the SWPC alert system. Text messages and emails blasted to all the physical scientists and the Director of Operations, Arthur Devlin.

  "Okay so how big?" asked Adam, his hands hovering over the keyboard, waiting to log the critical details that would decide whether a half-dozen veteran scientists needed to roll out of bed at four in the morning and make their way to the Center.

  "This…this can't be right," Penny replied, shaking her head at the screen. "It says that was an X-62…" She turned and looked at Adam.

  "That's not possible, is it? Not from a little disturbance like that?"

  She shrugged. "That's what the data says." Penny turned and looked back at the updated graphs. "Forget that…now it's an X-73."

  Adam felt sweat break out on his forehead. "A seventy-three? Okay…okay, let me get the alert out." He glanced up at the clock as he hit send. "Alert sent at 0333 CDT. What was the event time?" He said filling out the logbook.

  "0329 CDT," answered Penny. She opened a reference book, flipped through several pages then changed settings on the monitor in front of her. "We have four minutes, thirty-five seconds before the flare reaches Earth." The book closed with a soft whump.

  "What do we do?" asked Adam. He swallowed, his throat dry as a bone. His eyes shifted from the glaring sun on every screen to the coffee mug next to his keyboard. People needed to know. A flare of the magnitude they detected would disrupt cell phone signals, GPS satellites, and cause radio blackouts throughout most of the sunlit globe.

  "We follow protocol," Penny breathed. She cleared her throat, then continued in a stronger voice. "Issue the alert, I'll notify Devlin."

  "Got it," said Adam, grateful for her leadership. He pulled up the boilerplate alert message, pre-written to save time in just such a situation where every second counted.

  Traveling at the speed of light, the solar flare that erupted from the surface of the sun just a few moments ago would take eight minutes to reach the earth. Adam glanced at the clock. Four minutes had already elapsed. The polarity of the wave of light and its radiation field was already 45,000,000 miles away from the sun and would affect satellite transmissions in only a few minutes.

  How severe the storm ended up depended on the speed of the flare, the angle of the trajectory, and on which way the active region was pointed. They hadn't done any calculations because it had caught them off guard. Normally the first thing they would do…

  But we had no time, Adam fumed. It just appeared and exploded. He'd never seen that before. Usually they had plenty of warning.

  "…I said, it was pointed straight at us!"

  Adam blinked and looked at Penny as she nodded for him to continue typing the formal alert. "Hurry up!"

  "Got it, got it…" he said, adding the final information and hitting send a second time. He checked his phone. "I haven't gotten the first alert yet, that's odd…"

  He stared at the Solar Dynamic Observatory monitor for a few long seconds. The active region was currently pointing at earth. The flare had been aimed directly at the planet.

  "Are we getting any signs of an ejection?" Adam asked, his cell phone forgotten already.

  Penny shook her head. "I'm getting something on the STEREO-A feed."

  Adam watched as her mouth opened and her right hand moved to cover it. He couldn't tear his eyes away from her trembling fingers to look for himself at the screen that had so scared his normally unflappable colleague.

  "Oh my God," she whispered.

  Adam slid his chair over next to hers, moving in dreamlike slow-motion, and peered at the screen she indicated. "Is that…is that real?"

  Adam swallowed. "We'll know in a few hours as it spreads."

  "Okay…" she said, her voice wavering. She blinked. "Okay." She looked at him and lowered her hand. "I'll start waking people up."

  Adam pushed back from his desk and stood, his eyes still locked on the screen showing the beginnings of a coronal mass ejection on the surface of the sun. The little orange swirls, highlighted on the otherwise yellow surface of the sun, grew at an alarming rate and quickly dwarfed the little nascent active region they'd been watching.

  He knew this was only because of the perspective angle of the satellite watching the sun. The ejection had already taken place and spread out into space, so the satellite gave a false image. Despite that, he knew it was big. Real big.

  "That thing's heading right for us," Penny whispered, the red emergency phone halfway to her ear.

  Behind him, more automated warnings chirped as the computers set to monitor the sun tried to warn their human masters that something supremely dangerous had been detected.

  Adam turned in his chair and read a screen, then frowned. "This can't be right."

  "What now?" asked Penny as she hung up the phone. "Devlin is not a happy camper, by the way, but he's on his way."

  "We lost our data feed," Adam said, pointing to the latest alert.

  "Jesus, can't you kill that alarm? I can hardly hear you!"

  Adam hit the requisite keys, and
the klaxon silenced. "There."

  "Okay, what's the problem?" she asked, rubbing an ear.

  Adam pointed at the screen, displaying a long line of red text. "It says we can't get the alerts out to anyone outside the Center—NASA, ESA…all the national agencies are offline. Or we are."

  "But…how is that possible?" asked Penny. "We have backups to the backups—we're supposed to be able to ride out one of these things…and we haven't even been hit yet!"

  "I don't know, but I'm telling you, we're cut off from the rest of the world." He looked away from the screen. "You got through to Devlin—did anyone else get the message?" He glanced at his phone. "My phone never got them."

  "Oh my God," Penny breathed, scanning her screen. She pointed. "Look at all the return-to-senders we're getting. We didn't get through…"

  Her main terminal blinked and then went black.

  "What did you do?" asked Adam, moving closer.

  "Nothing! I didn't touch it…"

  A pirate flag appeared on the screen, ragged and waving in a stiff wind. Beneath the skull and crossbones, an octagonal shape appeared. Penny frowned. "What the hell does that mean? 'We are the Proletariat'?"

  "Looks like hackers, but I've never heard of them," mused Adam. He read the text. "They're shutting us down? Why? What good does that do anybody?"

  "This is bullshit!" Penny said, slamming her fists down on the table. Adam's coffee mug jumped and splashed coffee over his workstation.

  He ignored it. "They shut us down…" he repeated. He looked at Penny. "We can't warn anyone."

  "This is bad," she whispered.

  The glass door to the command center opened with a hiss of escaping air and Adam turned. "Sir," he began, expecting to see Arthur Devlin storm into the room in pajamas. He blinked at three men in black suits and ties who walked in carrying silver briefcases.

  "Uh, excuse me?" he asked, standing. He glanced at Penny.

  "Who the hell are you guys?" demanded Penny. "You can't just barge in here—"

  "This facility is now under DHS jurisdiction. You two, come with me," said one of the strangers. He waggled his hand over his shoulder and turned, not even bothering to see if they followed him.