Aftermath: A Novel

“Sheffield clothes the most advanced speculations of modern science in alluring forms of beauty and danger.”—The Washington Post Book World

It's 2026, and catastrophe has struck from an unexpected source. The Alpha Centauri supernova has risen like a second sun, rushing Earth toward its last summer. Floods, fires, starvation, and disease paralyze the planet. In a blue aurora flash of gamma rays, all microchips worldwide are destroyed, leaving an already devastated Earth without communications, transportation, weaponry, or medicine.

The disaster sets three groups of survivors on separate quests. A militant cult seizes the opportunity to free their leader, known as the Eye of God, from the long-term coma to which a court sentenced her. Three cancer patients also search for a man in judicial sleep: the brilliant scientist—and monstrous criminal—who alone can continue the experimental treatment that keeps them alive. From a far greater distance come the survivors of the first manned Mars expedition, struggling homeward to a world that has changed far beyond their darkest fears. And standing at the crossroads is one man, U.S. President Saul Steinmetz, who faces a crucial decision that will affect the fate of his own people . . . and the world.

“Charles Sheffield is one of the very best hard science fiction writers in the world.”—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy and Antarctica

The weather on takeoff from L.A. was as freakish and wild as Tom had ever seen it. Strong gusts at random, from every direction. Blame events in the Southern Hemisphere for that. But once you were above the atmosphere, the weather problems all went away. The six-passenger ship flew itself--or rather the automatic pilot made the decisions. Human pilots were a passenger courtesy, about as necessary to this flight as feathers. Which was fine with Tom Wagner, because it left him free to entertain his special VIP, the woman who had been brought aboard incognito and at the last moment.

"No, ma'am. You won't see the supernova from here." She was sitting next to him, and he leaned across her to point south. "It's thataway. But we're flying a great circle suborbital between L.A. at thirty-four degrees north and Washington at thirty-nine degrees. What you want to see is down at sixty degrees south. To get a peek at it we'd have to go a lot higher than a suborbital flight."

Janet Kloos stared south anyway, taking her cue from his pointing finger rather than his words. She looked to be in her late thirties, but Tom knew she was a fair bit older than that. As he recalled it from the last campaign, the Vice President was pushing fifty. Apparently political life agreed with her.

"And it can have these terrible effects on the weather," she said. "Even from so far away."

"Yes, ma'am. It certainly can." Her words confirmed his first impression. Janet Kloos was a certified pilot, qualified to fly a ship like this one. Her naive questions about the suborbital jump had been for Tom's benefit. She wanted him to feel comfortable, and the easiest way was to make it clear that in spite of her status, he, not she, was in charge here.

Which was fine with him. Know-it-all passengers on the flight deck were the hardest of all to deal with.

"It will get worse before it gets better," he went on. "According to the forecasts that I've seen, the effects should peak in another couple of weeks. After that it will gradually dim, and then things ought to head back to normal."

"Not in some places." She stopped staring south and leaned back in her seat. During this portion of the suborbital trajectory the ship was close to a free-fall condition. "I see the State Department reports, and I'm not giving away secrets when I tell you that we've been lucky. There are major storms crawling up and down South America from Tierra del Fuego to Panama. Australia is waterlogged. South Africa's being washed away into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, fifty percent of the topsoil already gone. There's never been anything like it since they started keeping records. The East Indies, too. The Sulawesi trade delegation back in L.A. were just telling me that they cannot possibly make their export shipments. They can't even feed themselves."

Tom nodded, but he was hardly listening. He cast his eye quickly over the banks of instruments--all normal--and then stared north. If there was nothing to see to the south, there was plenty to look at in the opposite direction. It was an aurora, and like none that he had ever seen. He checked their height. Eighty miles, close to maximum and right in the middle of the main altitude of auroral activity. Soon they would reach apogee and begin their downward glide. That was a shame, because the display was worth watching from this vantage point for as long as you could.

He caught her attention and pointed to the left. In the north, the sky was on fire. Streamers of pink and red and yellow-green trailed across the starlit heavens.

"Aurora borealis," Tom said. "Northern lights. The strange thing is, I've heard nothing from the solar observatories about a big flare."

"It's absolutely gorgeous. I've seen the aurora before, on transpolar flights. But nothing like this.

"Ahhh!" She had suddenly gasped. Tom came close to doing the same. Overlaid on the trailing wisps of the aurora the whole sky had lit with an intense flicker of blue.

"What is it?" Janet Kloos had been leaning over Tom for a better look at the aurora, but now she sat straight. "It's everywhere, in front and behind and overhead. What's causing it?"

Tom did not answer. When the flash of blue came he had felt a tingle through his whole body. In the next moment he thought that he had gone blind. He was staring at the instrument panels, and seeing nothing. At the same moment as he stabbed the controls for a general systems reboot and circuit breaker reset, he heard a warning whir of gyros.

"What is it?" Janet Kloos said again. He noticed a harder note in the Vice President's voice.

"I don't know. But we've lost the computers, main and auxiliary. I'm trying to bring them back up."

Trying, and failing. All the lights on the panel and in the cabin had died, that was why he had at first thought that his sight had failed. But lights were not the worst problem. Tom knew every control, even in the dark. He was working the correct switches. The trouble was, nothing responded. Lights would not come on, servos sat lifeless. When he pulled on the control stick it responded sluggishly. It felt as though the hydraulics were working, but every electric amplifier had failed.

The ship was slowly turning, dipping at the nose. Tom knew the cause--there had been a slight forward pitch at the moment when the controls failed, and it was continuing. He would have to correct it manually.

"Can you fly it like this?" Janet Kloos, thank God, had her fear under control. Tom was not sure that he could say the same for himself.

"Sure. But I may need you to take the dual controls and give me a hand. I'm feeling a lot of resistance."

For the moment that didn't matter. The problems would start in another few minutes. At that point they would be flying at more than four thousand miles an hour, returning to the atmosphere. The angle for reentry had to be just right. The automatic pilot normally took care of that, but it was dead.

How could it fail, with triply redundant logic and servos at every stage?  But it had. The flight had become his responsibility, to work the hydraulic controls himself with no power-assist.

The door in the rear of the cabin opened. "What the hell are you doing up here?" It was a male voice, slightly intoxicated. "You've switched all our goddam lights off. Oops." He was peering at the turned face of Janet Kloos, pale and greenish in the glimmer of the aurora. "Ms. Vice President?  I'm sorry. I hadn't realized that you were on board. Can we get lights back there?"

His smug expression suggested that he had known very well who was in the cabin. He had come forward to complain on a dare or a boast--"See, I went up there, and I told the Veep . . ." He had no idea that there was real trouble.

"Return to your seat, please." Tom guessed that the seat belt sign was not working, along with everything else. "We have an electrical problem. Tell everyone to buckle up until we're sure it's fixed."

As he spoke he was working the attitude controls, getting a feel for the level of resistance of the mechanical gyros. He could correct their attitude, with a good deal of physical effort. But that was only the beginning. For a landing--any landing, anywhere--he needed engine power. Without thrust the suborbitals had the gliding angle of a lead brick. He had already tried for a preliminary one-second engine burn, without success. He couldn't ask for ground assistance on possible landing points, because the communications circuits were dead.

The ship's environment was still close to free fall, but...