Free After: First Light (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 0) by Scott Nicholson

 
     
    CHAPTER ONE
     
    The sun looked like a cheese pizza that had been broiled in hell’s hottest oven.
    Dr. Daniel Chien frowned at the monitor, concerned less with the rippling cheese than the rising bubbles of red sauce. Each bubble erupted with a force equaling 100 billion megatons of TNT, spewing electromagnetic radiation across the solar system. Chien was intellectually aware that the pizza was really a massive star around which Earth and other planets revolved, but technology had reduced it to little more than a commercial-free reality-TV show.
    Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself staring at the sun, and I can do it from the comfort of my air-conditioned cubicle.
    The images recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory were a marvel of modern technology. Not only was the space-based observatory performing a continuous, real-time monitoring of solar activity, it used an array of solar panels as its energy source. In turn, the data allowed Chien and other researchers to study the sun’s electromagnetic fluctuations, solar wind, sunspot activity, and particle radiation.
    The sublime beauty of the system had lured Chien from a faculty position at Johns Hopkins. Even as a boy in Vietnam, he’d been fascinated by the sun as the giver of life. The Earth’s precarious position at just the right orbital distance counted as something miraculous, although Chien was careful to avoid debates over science and faith. To him, wonder was wonder and did not require further complications. Let the glory hounds like Newton clog the pages of scientific history while Chien and his fellow grunt workers added to the pool of knowledge bit by bit.
    But his role as a researcher didn’t diminish his appreciation of solar myth. After all, there was hardly a more apt metaphor for human hubris than Icarus flying too close to the sun and having his wings melt.
    The sun, as Chien liked to tell his friends, was cool.
    He still took childlike delight in the real-time images of the sun captured in a variety of spectra, available to the public via the NASA website. The array of sophisticated instruments measured multiple wavelengths and offered two dozen ways to observe and measure solar phenomena. The main image was the one now commanding his attention, and although he was fully aware of the sun’s petulant temperament, he didn’t like the erratic pulsations appearing on its surface.
    Somebody’s burning the pizza.
    “Katherine?” he said, calling to the other on-duty researcher at the SDO’s offices in the Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr. Katherine Swain was several years his senior, a 20-year veteran of NASA, and a woman who held no romantic notions of the sun at all.
    “Yes?” she said, in an annoyed tone, looking up from her laptop. She’d confided to Daniel that she was having “family problems,” and Daniel had projected a polite pretense of concern without pressing for details. Which meant avoiding her unless something important was happening.
    “It looks like some irregular plasma activity.”
    “We’re in an irregular phase,” she said, not clicking away from whatever she was working on. “The moon’s having its period.”
    Much like a woman, or the moon, or any other natural object, the sun went through nearly predictable cycles of behavior. Solar cycles lasted about 11 years, and the study of radionuclides in Arctic ice had allowed researchers to map an accurate history of the sun across geological epochs. Although the cycles followed identifiable patterns, the general agreement was that the current cycle was among the most active on record.
    “It’s not just regularly irregular,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
    “Ah, here comes the big one?” Katherine teased. “Guess they should have listened to you, huh?”
    As a member of a commission asked to assess the nation’s vulnerability to electromagnetic pulse attack, Chien had testified before an Armed Services subcommittee. He’d warned of the impact of massive