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expecting it to happen at this stage of the sun’s cycle anyhow.” Except, she made a mental note, that lone astronomer on the Moon.
    Phillippa prompted, “So this mass of gas headed for the Earth—”
    “The gas itself is sparser than an industrial vacuum,” Siobhan said. “It’s the energy contained in its particles and fields that has done the damage.”
    When it hit, the mass ejection had battered at the Earth’s magnetic field. The field normally shields the planet, and even low-orbiting satellites, but today the mass ejection had pushed the field down beneath the orbits of many satellites. Exposed to waves of energetic solar particles, the satellites’ systems absorbed doses of static electricity that discharged wherever they could.
    “Imagine miniature lightning bolts sparking around your circuit boards—”
    “Not good,” Phillippa said.
    “No. Charged particles also leaked into the upper atmosphere, dumping their energy on the way—that was the cause of the aurorae. And Earth’s magnetic field suffered huge variations. Perhaps you know that electricity and magnetism are linked. A changing magnetic field induces currents in conductors.”
    Phillippa said hesitantly, “Is that how a dynamo works?”
    “Yes! Exactly. When it fluctuates, Earth’s field causes immense currents to flow in the body of the Earth itself—and in any conducting materials it can find.”
    “Such as our power distribution networks,” Phillippa said.
    “Or our comms links. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of conducting cables, all suddenly awash with fast-varying, high-voltage currents.”
    “All right. So what do we do about it?”
    “Do? Why, there’s nothing we can do.” The question seemed absurd to Siobhan; she had to suppress an unkind impulse to laugh. “This is the sun we’re talking about.” A star whose energy output in
one second
was more than humankind could muster in a million years. This mass ejection had caused a geomagnetic storm that went far off the scales established by the patient solar weather watchers, but to the sun it was nothing but a minor spasm.
Do,
indeed: you didn’t
do
anything about the sun, except keep out of its way. “We just have to sit it out.”
    Phillippa frowned. “How long will it last?”
    “Nobody knows. This is unprecedented, as far as I can make out. But the mass ejection is fast moving and will pass over us soon. Only hours more, perhaps?”
    Phillippa said earnestly, “We need to know. It’s not just power we have to think about. There’s sewage, the water supply . . .”
    “The Thames barrier,” Toby said. “When is high tide?”
    “I don’t know,” Phillippa said, making a note. “Professor McGorran, can you try to nail down a timescale?”
    “Yes, I’ll try.” She closed down the link.
    “Of course,” Toby said to Siobhan, “the sensible thing to do would be to build our systems more robustly in the first place.”
    “Ah, but when have we humans ever been sensible?”
             
    Siobhan continued to work. But as time wore on the comms links only worsened.
    And she was distracted by more images.
    Here was an immense explosion in the great trans-European pipeline that nowadays brought Britain most of its natural gas. Like cables, pipelines were also conductors thousands of kilometers long, and the currents induced in them could increase corrosion to the point of failure. Pipelines were grounded at frequent intervals to avert this problem. But this pipeline, a very modern structure, had been made of ethylene for economy’s sake, and was a good deal easier to ignite. Numbly Siobhan studied the statistics of this one incident: a wall of flame a kilometer wide, trees felled for hundreds of meters around, hundreds feared dead . . . She tried to imagine such horror multiplied a thousandfold around the world.
    And it wasn’t just humans and their technological systems that were affected. Here was a random bit of news of flocks of birds