Secrets of Liberty Mountain (Final)

"Aye." Martha raised her right hand to the sounds of silence from the table.

"Those in opposition, please say 'No,'" the leader called after a few moments with no additional votes.

"Abstentions?" The Chair's eyebrows wrinkled with puzzled curiosity while three hands from the three members rose into the air to a chorus of ,"I abstain."

"Um, the vote being one in support, none in opposition, and three members in abstention, the ruling of your commander, is affirmed." Sheila shook her head and brought the gavel down with a crash as she muttered under her breath, "That was interesting."

The reverberating thunder of the gavel smothered her next words: "What the hell?"

For a brief moment, the room reeled in stunned silence before erupting in whispering conversations between the gathered women of the Sisterhood.

"What just happened?"

"Did you see that?"

"What kind of vote was that?"

The room buzzed with questions and confused uncertainty. Change was no longer in the air; it was all around us like an avalanche.

"Order! Order in the house!" Sheila repeatedly rapped the meeting hammer on its polished oak sounding block. "We have more people than places, meeting stands in recess. We'll reconvene in ten minutes in the amphitheater."

The leader sounded the gavel while she rose from her chair and stuffed her paperwork and meeting notes into an embroidered cloth tote-bag emblazoned with the unofficial motto of the sisterhood: "If you can't do what you love, love what you do."

Easier said than done.

"Belinda, can I have a word with you for a moment?" I tapped her shoulder to get her attention.

"Oh? Do you want to speak to me?" Her smile flashed like sunshine as she turned to face me. "Or would you rather talk to the Frost Queen?"

The glow vanished behind a dark scowl accented by thinning lips and flaring nostrils as she transformed from beauty to the beast before my eyes. I took a step back and opened my mouth to say something, but before I could utter a word, my frowning companion raised her hand like a crossing guard stopping traffic.

"Silence. I know all about your pet names for me."

Her smile returned as a grin, more sinister than sincere. She took a step forward. It took all my willpower not to move back as her body invaded my personal space. At the primal level, I knew that to give ground would be an acceptance of her dominance. I moved closer to her until the tips of our toes touched.

"Yes?"

Since she was looking for a fight, I would be ready with the sharpest sword of war: diplomacy. Seraina and Darlene were Belinda's friends. Given their tendency to overshare information, I wasn't surprised that Belinda knew my secret name for her.

"Frosty, they are my friends also. I know you are concerned. We are all worried. Like you, I love them both." I gently touched her arm with my hand. "They can take care of themselves. They'll be back in a day or two. Three at the most." I moved slightly backward, enough to give each of us space sufficient to ease the tension.

The stress of the moment slackened and time slowed as the space between us widened.

"I've got a bad feeling about this." Belinda brushed my hand away but did not let go of it. "We've got to find them, and..." She paused and struggled to get her emotions under control as tears welled in her worried eyes and her lower lip quivered.

"We'll get them home. Just give 'em a few more days. Okay?"

My eyes watered. Frosty's love and affection for the two women mirrored my own. She looked like I felt.

"You have my word."

I brushed a tear from her cheek as I wrapped my arms around her in a quick and gentle Hollywood hug. "Any friend of Darlene and Alice is a friend of mine, Belinda."

Her body stiffened, but she did not resist. I got the message. Frosty didn't favor hugs, at least not wolf hugs.

"I don't know why, but I trust you." She gave me a surprise kiss on the cheek as she whispered in my ear, "Do not disappoint."

~~~

As a rule, council meetings were closely monitored and sparsely attended. Clan members preferred to stay informed via the meeting minutes posted to the community BBS. That was then, and this is now. As I took my place next to my boss' vacant chair, I took a long gulp of ice water and watched as the hall rapidly filled with curious and concerned sisters.

Fingering my Vietnam service necklace, I surveyed the faces in the gathering for any sign my status had changed. The event's cosmic curveball made me acutely aware of my minority male status. My concern was more practical than paranoid. Crisis situations bring out the best and worst in people. Catastrophic events can unite folks from diverse backgrounds as we discover new common ground in mutual fears.

Starshine beamed out a radiant smile and waved her hand at me as she settled into her seat near the center of the amphitheater. I returned her smiling wave with one of my own and followed with a pantomime gesture of drinking as I pointed in the direction of the kitchen and mouthed the word "coffee."

The second time clicked. She got the message and gave me a thumbs-up and raced for the galley. I cringed at her innocent enthusiasm; the poor kid was trying too hard to please me. She missed her mom and clung to me like an incestuous daughter.

"Damn clever, these North Americans," I chuckled under my breath as I admired the antique grandfather's clock someone had dragged on stage as a mechanical timekeeper for the assembly.

Analog electrical clocks in the cabin were all frozen in the Rigor Mortis of time as their big hands, and little hands marked the moment of their demise forever. It would be a long time, if ever, before the fossilized electronics of the media center would be repaired or replaced. Until then, the dead desktops and lifeless video displays would haunt the hall as dismal reminders of yesterday.

Martha covered the live microphone in front of Sheila's vacant chair and whispered, "Do you know where she's at?"

"Over there."

I pointed toward Sheila striding across the stage with her tote bag slung over one shoulder and a working laptop nestled in her arms like a sleeping child.

"Sorry about that, nature called," the leader said to everyone in general and no one in particular as she lifted the gavel from the table, glanced at her wristwatch and brought the hammer down with a BANG! "We are back in session."

She flipped open her computer and finger clicked a button. The dark screen of the video monitor mounted on an easel in front of the table flashed to life with a copy of the meeting's agenda.

"Is everyone settled in?" she asked as she withdrew a folder of papers from her tote-bag and passed the copies around the table.

"Next up is Mister Wolf's six-month performance and evaluation report. Our bylaws require I provide the council with a performance and evaluation report for any new member. Today is Mister Wolf's six-month anniversary, and this is my report as required by Article Seven of our charter."

The first page of her report replaced the displayed agenda.

"What the hell?" the quartermaster gasped as she read the last page. "Terminate and reassign?"

"Oh, that?" Sheila smiled. "I'll explain. Ever since we established our base, we've been in the planning for something which will end of the world as we know it. Now that the shit has hit the proverbial fan, the time for preparation has ended. Ready or not, we are now operational."

Sheila paused as she looked around the room before turning her attention to me. The drumbeat of my heart sounded like thunder in my ears as beads of sweat trickled down my back. I licked my dry lips and wiped my forehead with my hand as I returned her gaze with a tentative smile and dried my hands on my quivering knees. Now what?

"We've been blinded by the light of a new day. We know nothing about what this event has done to the world beyond these walls. Until we re-establish communications with them," the commander waved toward the lands beyond our cabin, "we can only assume. But this much we do know. Our unprotected devices and microchips took fatal beatings. We lost one hundred percent of our chip-based electronics. If what happened to us is representative of the damage from the solar storm, and there's no reason to think otherwise, technology has been booted back to the days before the First World War. The grid has been obliterated."

Her next words were lost as the lights of the conference hall flared and died, and our meeting was plunged into darkness.

"Oh shit! Not again," I moaned as the shimmering glow outside the exit doors grew and intensified. "Why does this shit keep happening to me?" I grumbled under my breath.

Despite the growing knot of terror in my gut, I burst out laughing at the self-centered absurdity of my complaint. The me at the moment was the entirety of mankind. Again, nothing personal. Shit happens, carry on. My sun was doing what stars must do if they are to comply with the laws of physics. I understood well the eleven-year min-max sunspot cycle.

I also knew we hadn't been around long enough to experience all the other cycles rippling through time. Nature had just pounded the last nail into our technological coffin with a sledgehammer. If the first SkyFire event had reduced high-tech to rubble, this second event was making the rubble bounce.

"Oh, my God, we are so screwed," I laughed to myself, loud enough for Sheila to hear.

"What's so funny?" Sheila said in a voice resonating with alarm and curiosity, probably wondering if I had gone off the rails.

"Nothing." I paused as I patted my pockets for my Bic. "I was having a 'Why Me' moment." I flicked my lighter and looked at her in a bubble of light. "Mother Nature is a blind lady. Her blessings and curses are randomly dealt and seldom earned. None of us deserve the earthquakes and plagues which ravage our lives."

After a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the abysmal lighting conditions. Aside from my tiny flame, the glow from the entrance doors was the only source of illumination.

"Does anyone else have a light?" I called out as I raised my lighter and searched the void.

Initially, crickets answered. But, within a few moments, sparks from flint on steel danced and twinkled. The fireflies ruled the night.

"We stand in recess 'til further notice. Please exit safely and gather in the Great Room," Sheila commanded as she sounded the gavel on wood.

~~~

"...but it's impossible!"

Jennifer's eyes opened wide as she pointed at the pulsing aurora's dancing along the dark blue northern horizon. We were close to solar noon and overhead, the sun's rays blasted through the rainbow sky like a searchlight shining through a cathedral's stained glass windows.

I was dazzled by the mesmerizing effect as the sunlight's tint shifted by the second. The subtle changes in color altered my perspective. I was inside the rainbow looking out.

"If it's happening, it ain't impossible. What we need to know is what," I paused and did air-quotes with my fingers, "'it' is. Like, what the hell is going on?"

I moved beside Jennifer and gave her a quick hug to distract her from her fears.

"I've seen worse. I used to do acid in the sixties."

"Ha! Back then, your bad trip ended when you woke up." She relaxed a bit and returned my hug as she stepped away and let out an ear-splitting two-finger whistle followed by a loud bellow, "Science Group! Team Meeting! STAT!"

Chapter 38

I peeked past Sheila's shoulder as she looked over the semicircle of women from the Science Team gathered around Jennifer as the Dark Lady of Data studied the computer screen in front of her workstation. Her fingers flew across the keyboard while she scanned hundreds of files, crunching numbers and extracted the information she needed.

The thirty-four-year-old Boston descendant of Zulu warriors became a legend within the Society as a math prodigy with an uncanny ability to ferret out hidden trends and meaningful information hiding in the shadows of bewildering numbers. As an ace statistician, she wore her African heritage with pride in the form of an exquisitely trimmed afro, worthy of any high-end fashion magazine. Like the forty-niners and prospectors of yore, she panned rivers of data in a relentless search for nuggets of golden truth.

"We have no way to directly measure the strength of a solar storm. We know it was big, but we don't know how powerful," Jennifer said without turning away from her duties. Her slender black fingers were a shadowy blur as they danced across the keyboard. "Let's see what kind of footprints this critter left."

Jennifer glanced over her shoulder and, for a moment, she locked eyes with mine and gave me a curious grin. I nodded my head and returned her smile as I recalled the sensual memory of inappropriate lust. Nice to see the memories were mutual.

"We record and monitor the output of our solar array, twenty-four/seven. Like a movie camera, the system takes a snapshot of the line voltage once a microsecond. I can manipulate the results in dozens of different ways, including visually. I can turn it into a song, a movie, or a graph. Maybe the last string of numbers has something to tell us."

She mouse clicked the auto-save file and opened it in her Excel spreadsheet. Digits drifted across the monitor's screen in a blizzard of numbers before freezing in place at the end of the transmission.

"Interesting, let's go visual."

Two or three fast mouse clicks transformed the row of numbers into a three-dimensional emerald green bar graph twinkling against a black background. "Ahh ha! Got it!" She whooped with glee as she zoomed to the final moments before the line went offline.

"See?" she cried the instant the panels' flat-line trickle of sunset power started to spike. "In the final tenth of a second, we captured the first moments of the event." Her long slender finger traced the nearly vertical slope of the bar graph. "Death was not instantaneous; it took one-twentieth of a second for the line to die. The last five frames of our digital movie tell us a story. In that sliver of time, current surged from nine to over seventy volts."

She pointed at the monitor. "Note, in these final images, or bars, the voltages are increasing at an exponential rate, nine volts, eighteen, thirty-six, seventy-two volts. My gut is telling me that ain't where it topped out. I have a guess the surge occurred more like a tsunami wave than a spike." She tapped her finger on the top of the last bar on the screen. "We need one more bit of evidence to finish the picture."

A few moments and a dozen clicks later, the graph vanished beneath a dark spectrum, false-color image of our solar system's central star as seen from the Solar and Hemispheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite orbiting the sun.

"Let's see what the old lady was up to over the last twenty-four hours; we'll fast play the day in sixty seconds."

She pushed start, and we watched in morbid fascination as a few degrees beneath the equator, a collection of huge sunspots merged into one gigantic tempest, several dozen times the diameter of the Earth. A few seconds later, a massive chunk of the sun's surface vented into space as the new sunspot erupted in a brilliant M-Class flare. The tremendous flash momentarily overloaded and blinded the satellite's camera in a wash of white light. Nine minutes later, the current from the array spiked as the burst of electromagnetic radiation slammed into the Earth's magnetic shield.

"Big and fast. We were lucky; the plasma cloud mostly missed us." She advanced to a spike in strength fifteen hours later. "If it had been a direct hit rather than a passing blow, the network would have been seriously damaged."

She suddenly yelped. "Look! There's a second one!"

Nineteen seconds into the video, eight hours real time, another flash of white light sparked into existence, ejecting billions of tons of celestial mass into space on a collision course with the earth.

"X-Class is reserved for the strongest flares. It's a speedy little bastard. It hit us nine-point-three hours later as an X-20." She shook her in disbelief. "Velocity and mass determine the strength of an event. The faster the particles travel, the higher is their kinetic energy when they collide with us."

She focused our attention on a third blip, three times as large as the previous spike. "That one made the grid wobble, but we didn't fall down. It's not the big one, no way close."

Near the end of the broadcast, another enormous sunspot exploded in a flash which overwhelmed the satellites' capacity to process. Jennifer extended her arm and tapped the spike at the end of the feed from the collectors.

"That there is our assassin. Transit in five hours, fifty-two seconds." She hesitated and punched her keyboard and let out a long whistle. "The CME hit at over five-thousand miles a second, damn close to maximum theoretical velocity. It is improbable, but not impossible. Mass from each ejection struck us with at least a glancing blow. The killer hit us dead center along a pathway already cleared by the preceding two storms."

The Zulu Number Warrior rose from her seat and turned to face us. "Net result? Three days ago was a Carrington Level Event times two. And the shit outside? It's at least an order of magnitude stronger than the last one."

She murmured something which could have been a prayer in an African-sounding language.

"Tech is dead. The first storm killed him. This one?" She looked around. "This one is cremating the corpse." She paused, inhaled deeply, paused for a second, and shivered as a single tear streamed down her coal black cheek. "My dear friends, I fear the Gods of the SkyFire have stolen our future." She choked back a sob and turned away from us as her shoulders shook to the sound of weeping.

"It only took yesterday's tomorrow." Sheila thrust her clenched fist high above her head and roared like a lioness. "We are the future! Can I get an echo?" she called.

"We are the future!" I howled as I hiked my paw above my head and my voice joined the defiant choirs.

Count on the boss to turn bad news into a pep-rally. Crap! She was good.

~~~

On the morning of the seventh day, I was jolted out of bed by the sharp, bright notes of reveille echoing from the rafters of the great room. It took a dozen heartbeats and a deep breath to reconcile the martial medley with the time and place of now. Ahh, yes! Today, I would be riding with the Commander's search party. We were going into town to find Darlene and Serania.

I opened my bedroom door as naked as a newborn and looked down from the balcony at the Society's supply officer as she allowed the final call to fade into silence before her cheeks puffed out and her face flushed purple as she sounded, "CHARGE!" The colony's transition from civilian to a soldierly society was complete.

"What happened to the pagan pipes?" I shouted down to Brenda.

The Society's day usually began with a Celtic-sounding something I had been told was a Wiccan chant for bounty and blessings. The boom-box that substituted for the dead speaker system was missing in action, replaced by a human. Fate favored us with a supply sergeant with a secondary MOS as a company bulger.

"Our first mission deserves a proper send-off, don't ya think?" She smiled as she gave me a thumbs-up.

"Great idea! Make it a tradition," I laughed. Start the day with a morale boost and a reminder we ain't in Kansas anymore.

"Don't worry, looney tunes will back in the morning." She sent a playful note in my direction.

I shaved and showered in a rush. I tend to leave on the installment plan. To avoid a return to quarters to recover a forgotten item of necessity, I made a quick to-do list in my head of the personal junk I would need for three or more days in the bush: three packs of smokes? Check. Disposable lighters? Check. Weed for a week? Check (no sense running short). Eyeglasses and microfiber cleaning cloth? Check. Change of socks and underwear? Double check. I was good to go.