"Sunstorm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur Charles, Baxter Stephen)

5: Emergency Management

Siobhan was taken to the Council Room on the first floor of the Royal Society building. The room’s centerpiece was an oval conference table large enough to seat twenty or more, but Siobhan was alone here save for Toby Pitt. She sat at the head of the table uncertainly. On the wall was a slightly surreal Zulu tapestry, meant to show symbolically the rise of science, and portraits of former fellows—mostly dead white males, though the more recent animated images were more diverse.

Toby tapped at the table’s polished surface, which turned transparent to reveal a bank of embedded softscreens. The screens lit up, variously showing scenes of disaster—crashes on the road and rail systems, raw sewage spilling from a pipe onto a beach somewhere, what looked horribly like the wreck of a plane plowed into a Heathrow runway—and concerned faces, most with softscreens in their backgrounds and earpieces clamped to their heads.

One serious-looking young woman seemed to be calling from a police control room. When she caught Siobhan’s eye, she nodded. “You’re the astronomer.”

“The Astronomer Royal, yes.”

“Professor McGorran, my name is Phillippa Duflot.” Perhaps in her early thirties, alarmingly well spoken, she wore a slightly disheveled business suit. “I work in the Mayor’s office; I’m one of her PAs.”

“The Mayor—”

“Of London. She asked me to find you.”

“Why?”

“Because of the emergency, of course.” Phillippa Duflot looked irritated, but she visibly calmed herself; considering the strain she was evidently under, Siobhan thought, her self-control was impressive. “I’m sorry,” Phillippa said. “All this has hit us so suddenly, over the last couple of hours or less. We rehearse for the major contingencies we can think of, but we’re struggling to cope today. Nobody anticipated the scale of this. We’re trying to find our feet.”

“Tell me how I can help you.”

Formally Phillippa was calling on behalf of the London Resilience Forum. This was an interagency body that had been set up following the upsurge in terrorism at the turn of the century. Chaired from the Mayor’s office, it contained representatives of the city’s emergency services, transport, the utilities, the health services, and local government. There was a separate body responsible for London emergency planning, which also reported in to the Mayor. Above such local bodies were national emergency planning agencies, which reported to the Home Office.

Siobhan learned quickly that most of these agencies were talking shops. The real responsibility for emergency responses lay with the police, and right now the key figure in touch with the Mayor was a chief constable. It was the way things were done in Britain, Siobhan gathered; there was a lack of central control, but a local flexibility and responsiveness that generally worked well. But now that Britain was thoroughly integrated into the Eurasian Union there was also a Union-wide emergency management agency, based on the Americans’ FEMA, under whose auspices, some years earlier, firefighters from London had been sent in response to a chemical plant disaster in Moscow.

And today this network of disaster management agencies was buzzing with bad news. London was afflicted by a whole series of interconnected problems, whose root cause Siobhan at first couldn’t guess at. Suddenly, all at once, everything was falling apart.

The most immediate problem was the collapse of the power grid. Phillippa bombarded Siobhan with data on areas of brownout and blackout, and images of the consequences: here was an underground shopping mall in Brent Cross, its lights doused and elevators and escalators stalled, thousands of people trapped in a darkness broken only by a ruddy emergency glow.

Phillippa looked doleful. “The very first call we logged today was from a man trapped in his hotel room when the electronic lock jammed up. Since then it’s just mushroomed. Every transport system has ground to a halt. People are stranded on planes ramped up on runways; others are trapped in planes that can’t land. We don’t even have numbers yet. We don’t dare think how many people are just trapped in lifts!”

The power system was the problem. Electrical power originated in generating stations—these days mostly nuclear, wind-generated, tidal, and a few fossil-fuel-burning relics. The generators sent out rivers of current in transmission cables at high voltages, more than a hundred thousand volts. These were stopped down at local substations and transformers and sent out through more lines, eventually reaching the level of the few hundred volts that reached businesses and homes.

“And now it’s all failing,” Siobhan prompted.

“Now it’s failing.”

Phillippa showed Siobhan an image of a transformer, a unit as big as a house, shaking itself to pieces as its core steel plates crashed and rattled. And here were power lines sagging, smoking, visibly melting, and where they touched trees or other obstacles powerful arcs sparked fires.

This was called magnetostriction, Phillippa said. “The engineers know what’s happening. It’s just that the GICs today are bigger than anything they’ve seen before.”

“Phillippa—what’s a GIC?”

“A geomagnetically induced current.” Phillippa eyed Siobhan with suspicion, as if she shouldn’t have had to explain; perhaps she wondered if she was wasting her time. “We’re in the middle of a geomagnetic storm, Professor McGorran. A huge one. It came out of nowhere.”

A geomagnetic storm: of course, a storm from the sun, the same cause as the beautiful aurora. Siobhan, her brains clogged in the room’s gathering heat, felt dull not to have grasped this at once.

But her basic physics was coming back to her. A geomagnetic storm, a fluctuation of Earth’s magnetic field, would induce currents in power lines, which were simply long conductors. And as the induced currents would be direct, while the generated electrical supply was alternating, the system would quickly be overwhelmed.

Phillippa said, “The generating companies are wheeling—”

“Wheeling?”

“Buying in capacity from outside. We have exchange deals with France, primarily. But the French are in trouble, too.”

“There must be some tolerance in the system,” Siobhan said.

“You’d be surprised,” Toby Pitt said. “For fifty years we have been growing our power demands, but have resisted building new power stations. Then you have market forces, which ensure that every component we do install barely has the capacity to do the job that’s asked of it—and all at the lowest possible cost. So we have absolutely no resilience.” He coughed. “I’m sorry. A hobbyhorse of mine.”

“The worst single problem is the loss of air-conditioning,” Phillippa said grimly. “It isn’t even noon yet.”

In a 2030s British midsummer, heat was a routine killer. “People must be dying,” Siobhan said, wondering; it was the first time it had really struck her.

“Oh, yes,” Phillippa said. “The elderly, the very young, the frail. And we can’t get to them. We don’t even know how many there are.”

Some of the softscreens flickered and went blank. This was the other side of the day’s problems, Phillippa said: communications and electronic systems of all kinds were going down.

“It’s the satellites,” she went on. “The comsats, navigation satellites, the lot—all taking a beating up there. Even land lines are failing.”

And as the world’s electronic interconnectedness broke down, the smart systems that were embedded in everything, from planes to cars to buildings to clothes and even people’s bodies, were all failing. That poor man stuck in his hotel room had only been the first. Commerce was grinding to a halt as electronic money systems failed: Siobhan watched a small riot outside a petrol station where credit implants were suddenly rejected. Only the most robust networks were surviving, such as government and military systems. The Royal Society building happened still to be connected to central services by old-fashioned fiber-optic cables, Siobhan learned; the venerable establishment had been saved by its own lack of investment in more modern facilities.

Siobhan said uncertainly, “And this is another symptom of the storm?”

“Oh, yes. While our priority is London, the emergency isn’t just local, or regional, or even national. From what we can tell—data links are crashing all over the place—it’s global …”

Siobhan was shown a view of the whole world, taken from a remote Earth resources satellite. Over the planet’s night side aurorae were painted in delicate, heartbreakingly beautiful swirls. But the world below was not so pretty. Darkened continents were outlined by the lights of the cities strung along their coasts and the major river valleys—but those necklaces of lights were broken. As each outage triggered problems in neighboring regions, the blackouts were spreading like infections. Power utilities were in some places trying to help each other out, but, Phillippa said, there was conflict; Quebec was accusing New York of “stealing” some of its megawatts. In a few places Siobhan saw the ominous glows of fires.

All this in a couple of hours, Siobhan thought. How fragile the world is.

But the satellite imagery was full of hash, and at last it broke down altogether, leaving a pale blue screen.

“Well, this is dreadful. But what can I do?”

Phillippa again looked suspicious. You need to ask? “Professor McGorran, this is a geomagnetic storm. Which is primarily caused by problems with the sun.”

“Oh. And so you called an astronomer.” Siobhan suppressed an urge to laugh. “Phillippa, I’m a cosmologist. I haven’t even thought about the sun since my undergraduate days.”

Toby Pitt touched her arm. “But you’re the Astronomer Royal,” he said quietly. “They’re out of their depth. Who else are they going to call?”

Of course he was right. Siobhan had always wondered if her royal warrant, and the vague public notoriety that came with it, was worth the trouble. The first Astronomers Royal, men like Flamsteed and Halley, had run the observatory at Greenwich and had spent most of their time making observations of the sun, Moon, and stars for use in navigation. Now, though, her job was to be a figurehead at conferences like today’s, or an easy target for lazy journalists looking for a quote—and, it seemed, an escape route for politicians in a crisis. She said to Toby, “Remind me to quit when this is all over.”

He smiled. “But in the meantime …” He stood up. “Is there anything you need?”

“Coffee if you can get it, please. Water if not.” She raised her own phone to her face; she felt a spasm of guilt that she hadn’t even noticed it had lost its signal. “And I need to speak to my mother,” she said. “Could you bring me a land line?”

“Of course.” He left the room.

Siobhan turned back to Phillippa. “All right. I’ll do my best. Keep the line open.”