There followed some discussion of the population’s wider reaction so far. According to the reports, accidents, even fatalities, had been few. That was thanks partly to the smartness of the modern built environment, Tash saw. Just as smart cars had stopped when the light went, so had smart planes organised themselves to make safe landings at the nearest airports in orderly swarms. And so on.

  But still there was the psychological shock that no smart technology could cushion. There had been the curiosity, maybe, that had drawn many people out of doors to see for themselves – or, alternatively, the fear that had already prompted many to go home and hunker down, even to take their kids out of school. And the edginess that had caused many to go giddy, to dance and sing, drink and shoot up, even to party – or start small riots, the police representatives reported now. In many places, even though so far the power had stayed on almost everywhere, people had lit bonfires as if to defy the dark. Fires that had, predictably, in more than one place, got out of control.

  The doctors believed that even if the Sun returned immediately, they would be dealing for many years with cases of mental trauma caused in that first instant.

  All this after only a couple of hours, Tash thought.

  After a few minutes of this, the Home Secretary wrapped it up. ‘OK. Thank you. So the question is, how to go forward.’

  ‘We need more data,’ Astronomer Royal Marlowe put in immediately. ‘Data has to be the basis of all scientific understanding, which must in turn guide public policy. And that’s got to be an international effort. We must collect as much data as we can, from Earth, from space. Especially in these first hours. Share it all, of course. Including records of the vanishing itself.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The Home Secretary nodded, a little impatiently. ‘Agreed. But in practical terms, we must consider recommendations for the near future before leaving this room. The next twenty-four or forty-eight hours . . .’

  The pace of the discussion quickened.

  Tash was, at first, reluctantly impressed by the detailed discussion that followed. But, watching Fred Bowles, she saw he was growing increasingly restless – as was Charlie Marlowe.

  This was an unprecedented crisis – but the English government, like governments around the world, had over the years, or decades, learned how to cope with a stream of disasters unfolding on a world that was still hugely interconnected, hugely interdependent, and hugely vulnerable to such calamities as extreme weather events, pandemics, terrorist incidents. So this situation was new, yet old.

  And maybe the human world was a bit more resilient now, with deeper reserves of food and other essentials, shorter supply chains, less material connectivity – but with extreme connectivity of information. Extra redundancy too.

  So what quickly emerged from this preliminary discussion was a series of steps that Tash thought were clear, sensible, probably acceptable to a public used to dire governmental warnings – and yet moderate, given that nobody knew how this was going to unfold in the next days or hours.

  For instance, schools. The education secretary advised a calm approach. Schools should expect to stay open today through the normal day, as at least some pupils were already on the premises – there could be chaos if all the schools peremptorily shut and parents had to scramble through the dark to pick them up. Today was Friday; maybe they should plan now for schools to stay shut on Monday . . .

  Tash thought of Mel and her daughter Jane. She promised herself that she would send a quick heads-up to Mel about this, after the meeting, even if it bent the security protocol a little.

  Hospitals. A spate of admissions had to be expected, through accidents in the sudden dark, and the party-time stuff going on in some cities. Longer term, mental health issues to do with the coming of the dark and its continuance. Police and health officials had agreed to move to public holiday protocols for now – as if New Year’s Eve, just a few days back, had come again.

  The supply chain. Transport would be prioritised for essential goods and services, and kept running as long as possible – roads, rail, by air, by sea . . . For food and other essentials, there ought to be no immediate problem with supplies – save that people always panic-bought at the first sign of any crisis, Tash knew, even in an age of app food. The Home Secretary hesitated about imposing immediate rationing.

  People would be encouraged to stay at home, save for essential workers.

  The power would be kept on for heating, lighting, as long as possible, with phased shutdowns if necessary. The energy minister warned of spikes in demand at a time when the supply was already stretched by the midwinter. Caine agreed to buy additional megawatts from abroad, including the huge Scottish wind-power farm, New Aberdeen, on Dogger Island.

  There was some discussion of the royal family. Tash learned now that there was a pre-existing multi-agency group called RAVEC, the Royal and VIP Executive Control, tasked with the welfare of King George VII and the rest of the family in the face of contingencies like this. Anyhow most of them were still holed up in Balmoral after the Christmas break – although Princess Charlotte, formally Captain General of the Royal Marines and actually a serving officer, was with her unit in Wiltshire.

  And so on, and so on.

  This was by far the most senior meeting Tash had yet attended as part of Bowles’s staff. And she was impressed at how quickly a rough, if short term, strategy was mapped out – quickly, given the novelty of the situation, anyhow. These people were genuinely, conscientiously, and intelligently trying to protect the population who had voted them, or their bosses, into power – and those who hadn’t.

  Slowly, gradually, Tash felt herself reassured by the evident competence on show.

  Until Charlie Marlowe spoke up.

  The meeting had already started winding down. The committee agreed to issue public advisories for now, and review the situation if the Sun wasn’t back by Monday.

  ‘Thank you all,’ Caine said. She looked around the table. ‘Of course this is only the beginning. But God knows we have learned to cope with catastrophe. I am sure everybody here understands the importance of on-message speaking—’

  But Marlowe cut across the politician. ‘Oh, for – is that it? you aren’t considering breaking up this meeting with that? This isn’t enough. Debating whether to close the schools? The bloody royals? Is that really as far ahead as you can think? Then the Lord help us all. Because unless all this somehow resolves itself quickly, you will soon have to consider the longer term.’

  Caine seemed weary, as if longing for the meeting to be over. ‘Professor, I think we have all—’

  But Fred Bowles, who Tash had noticed had been getting restless himself during the detailed discussions, leaned forward. ‘Very well, Charlie. Professor. What’s the worst case? If – well, if this goes on?’

  ‘If the Sun doesn’t come back, you mean? If you can’t bear to say it out loud, I will. And I’ll try to answer the question.

  ‘Look – I am no climatologist, and there should be some in this room. But it’s going to get bloody cold,’ the Astronomer Royal said bluntly. ‘Well, you know that. The relevant questions are, how cold, and how long it will take to get that cold.’ She hefted her phone. ‘I’ve made some order of magnitude calculations while we’ve been sitting here, which would have been better with some online connectivity. Shoot me down if you know better, any of you.’

  Silence around the table.

  ‘Our environment, the environment of Earth that sustains every living thing, relies on sunlight,’ Marlowe said now. ‘Around a third of the sunlight that hits the Earth is reflected away; the rest is taken into the great planetary systems, the flows of matter and energy that sustain the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere, before finally radiating back out as waste heat.

  ‘And now that input has been turned off.

  ‘The good news is we won’t freeze immediately. The air will retain its heat, for a while. There is still water vapour in the air – well, water itself is a greenhouse gas. But – today is Friday – by Sunday, Monday, the air will have cooled enough for the water to condense out. Rain first.’

  ‘Then snow?’ Bowles asked.

  ‘Snow and frost. By the end of next week, the water vapour will all have gone from the air when it’s gone it will get colder, even faster.’

  That evoked a few uneasy frowns, Tash thought.

  ‘Then the sea will start to freeze – just the surface at first. Before that happens, you see, the relatively warm winds off the sea water will have been moderating conditions on land. But once the ocean is frozen over . . . Two weeks from now, there will be hundred-degree frosts in Britain, for example.

  ‘A month from now and the seas will have frozen down to the equator.

  ‘At that point, many of us should still be alive, actually. In industrial communities at least, as long as the fuel lasts, as long as the machines don’t seize up. Think small groups, isolated, huddling. But with the sea frozen, land temperatures will plummet.

  ‘Two months from now the air will snow out. Oxygen first.

  ‘The whole Earth will head ultimately for the temperature of interstellar space. You ask about the worst case, Minister? In sixty days’ time, it will be colder than Pluto. After a year, outside of maybe a handful of shelters covered with layers of frozen air, and maybe the denizens of the deepest seas, nothing will survive.’

  A bewildered silence.

  ‘Sixty days,’ said Fred Bowles.

  Caine seemed horrified – as well she might, Tash thought.

  ‘That’s – why, that’s the beginning of March.’ Caine shook her head. ‘It isn’t some distant abstraction. March. We can’t possibly take this to the full Cabinet. Let alone the FIS.’

  Bowles said, relatively gently, ‘I think we must, Home Secretary. And as soon as possible. Charlie – thank you. I’ll need you during the international conference calls later—’

  Marlowe glared at Caine. ‘Home Secretary, what you do is up to you. The sooner you accept the reality, the sooner you will start making realistic preparations, the better. Oh – and even beyond that, we have to consider the implications that we now know we share a universe with an – entity – capable of such a huge and malicious act. In the meantime I will try to get some useful work done.’

  And her link from Skythrust fizzed out.

  11

  1515 GMT

  ‘Is this thing on, Marina? It’s kind of hard to see under these dumb emergency lights . . . Also I can’t see you too well through the little window of the storm shelter.

  ‘I’m live? OK.

  ‘Let’s do this.

  ‘So, calling mission control at Houston, and the TsUP at Moscow, and the world, I guess. This is Al-miriykh. Jim Boyd here, and I hope you can see me. Yeah, the big lunk shivering and waving.

  ‘Our handler at TsUP – and we’re very grateful to Josef and the rest for staying at their own posts – encouraged us to make this broadcast. He said that a lot of you, around the world, were listening in to us, even while you are undergoing your own trials. We do appreciate this, very much, being so far away from home. How far? Far enough for it to take minutes, even at lightspeed, for my message to cross space and reach you.

  ‘Let me show you the layout here. So this is our hab module, a standard Jones, Inc. Shelter module, which is keeping us alive as we coast through our eight-month trajectory back home from Mars to Earth. And a darn good job it’s doing, I may say, even with the Sun going out on us. Or whatever the hell.

  ‘But, as you can imagine, we aren’t keeping too warm in here. So that’s why we have had to retreat, mostly, to this chicken coop in the middle of the floor, that we call the storm shelter. See it over my shoulder? Its main design function is so we can ride out a radiation storm – ha, ironically, the source of which would be the Sun – even if our magshield went down.

  ‘So our ship is still functioning, in the sense of keeping us alive. We are already working on a checklist to bring her back to life, if . . . In the meantime our backup systems should keep us safe. We have on-board batteries; they will last for a nominal eight hours of normal functioning, and maybe twelve. After that we will have to retreat into the storm shelter, which will keep us alive for a further twelve hours. In fact we decided to retreat into the shelter now, as much as possible, to save as much juice as we can.

  ‘Recovery, when it comes, will take some time. The first priority will be to bring the solar panels themselves back on line. Then we will begin to reboot our life support systems. Then we’ll think about other priorities.

  ‘All of which, I know you understand, is dependent on – well, the Sun coming back. Hard to think of a Plan B if it doesn’t, isn’t it? For you, too. Well, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

  ‘You might ask why I’m out here shivering my skinny butt off at all, instead of being tucked up cosy in the storm shelter. Well, like everybody else, we’re still trying to figure stuff out about this situation. And on top of all the problems of dark and cold that we share with all of you, this incident has given us an extra glitch.

  ‘When the Sun went away, we quickly found that we were drifting off course. Just a little, but enough for our very sensitive navigation suite to pick it up almost immediately. Well, that baffled us for a while, and even our mission controllers.

  ‘But it’s obvious if you think about it. Out here in the dark, coasting, we in the Al-miriykh are totally dependent on the Sun, for our heating – and also for our trajectory. So we kicked off from Mars, but we don’t blast our rockets all the way home. Instead, very soon after we are away from Mars orbit, we shut down the engines and just coast on our own orbit around the Sun, not following a near-circle like Mars or Earth, but an ellipse: a curve that just touches Mars’s orbit at the start, and will just touch Earth’s when we get there. And then we will brake into Earth orbit.

  ‘But now the Sun has gone. We lost not just its light, but its gravity field too. So we aren’t in orbit any more. We are drifting off course, you see – just a little so far.

  ‘And so, by the way, is Earth. All the planets. Which are also in orbit around the Sun, or were. And which is going to cause problems for us all, long term. All humanity.

  ‘But anyhow if this keeps up even for just a day, we will miss our target, the Earth. The longer it lasts, the wider the miss. Now, I’m sure our buddies in the space business will already be working out plans to bring us home whatever happens, but, of course, we would much rather not put that to the test.

  ‘We’re working on it too. And the one thing we do need to do is to keep tracking our position. We have inertial guidance systems, all internal, and star-sighting trackers – we use the stars to fix our position just as the first ocean sailors on Earth once did.

  ‘But we also sight on the Sun, and that’s one extra fix we need – and one we’ve lost, of course. Which has thrown the automatics somewhat. So we’re coming out here to make manual sightings of the stars and planets, and the Sun when it returns, and that’s why I’m out here just for now.

  ‘I should sign off, do my chores, and get back in that tin can with my buddies. But I want to emphasise again that we really have been touched by the interest you down there are showing in us up here, in the middle of your own problems. Why, I’m told our little adventure has attracted the highest number of visitors to a space broadcast since Jeff Kraus and Kaui Paku crashed at Imbrium, on the Moon, back in ’29, as some of you will remember.

  ‘You know, some good came out of that disaster. All the space agencies worked together to try to help Kraus and Paku, and out of that came long-lasting cooperation in space like never before, for instance in the form of the NHSA, the combined Northern Hemisphere Space Agency, which coordinates the space projects of America, Russia, and a slew of other countries. Though not China, as my fiancé Zhi would remind me.

  ‘Anyhow, unlike poor Jeff and Kaui, we can still get through this. All of us. Like all of you. TsUP – Houston – planet Earth – this is Jim Boyd on the Al-miriykh, signing out. Godspeed to us all.’

  12

  1520 GMT

  After the Cobra meeting, the formal contacts went international.

  As far as Tash could see, a whole hierarchy of meetings was to be set up, beginning with minister to minister contacts at Fred Bowles’s specialist level, first with closest allies. These would escalate to heads of government, both one to one and regionally, and finally a FIS Security Council conference call mediated by the Secretary General from Geneva. All of it virtual, of course.

  It was happening fast; Fred’s first conference, with the Americans, was called for three thirty Newcastle time. That was only a few minutes’ notice, for Tash anyhow. But they needed to make fast progress today. Progress that could be demonstrated to the public.

  And in all of this, as stressed by Fred Bowles himself, Tash was to keep open her links to Mel and the Astronomer Royal. Charlie Marlowe was the still one scientific authority Bowles felt he could rely on, and he wasn’t about to face the President’s science adviser without his comfort blanket live on his phone beside him, it seemed.

  Fair enough, Mel commented, from Skythrust Two. I’m already shielding Charlie from other calls, mostly media and pols. Meanwhile we are proceeding under lights to the north, hoping to get to Johannesburg, our home port.

  ‘No idea what the answer to all this is yet, I take it.’

  Tash, we don’t even know what the question is yet. Mel’s tiny virtual image, hovering above Tash’s phone, shook her head with a rueful smile – her smile her best feature, Tash sometimes thought, aside from her strawberry-blond hair. These bureaucrats sure hit the ground running, don’t they? Shame they ain’t so quick when it comes to grant renewal time.