Pulse Arrival, Hanoi, Vietnam

 

The aging KLM A380 was on final approach for landing, third in line in the usual mid-morning stack of heavy tin being squeezed into the busy airport. Captain Richard Mackenzie was sipping coffee, keeping only a bored eye on the autopilot that was doing all of the work - not that there was much to do as, despite some threatening clouds on the horizon, the conditions were almost perfect with a five-knot headwind and only slight turbulence from the Emirates behemoth ahead of them. He glared at it. A bloody electric wide-bodied jet, I wouldn't even have thought that was possible when I started flying three decades ago and now I'm going to be on the scrapheap along with this old bus when the next increase in carbon credit rates finally kills off fossil-fuelled planes for good.

All of a sudden, the multi-coloured display panel went black and the cockpit became strangely silent - absolutely nothing apart from the faint sound of air rushing past outside. Must be what it's like in one of those electric bastards, then the shear impossibility of this occurrence hit the captain. Complete power failure in all systems, including all redundant back-up. Just not possible!

Now he could hear the first sounds of panic from the passengers, which increased in volume when someone started hammering on the cockpit door. Electric lock and armoured door to keep out terrorist nutters. Well, there's nobody coming in until we get power again.

His co-pilot, Richard Koenig, had stirred from his dose and was looking around in an almost comical state of confusion. At that point the plane stalled and started to plummet towards the ground. Although both pilot and co-pilot automatically fought with the controls, a strangely calm area in the back of Mackenzie's head had already recognised that this would have zero effect on a fly-by-wire jet that was completely blacked out. It should be impossible, or at least one in a million, but somehow statistics don't seem to mean anything anymore. He had several seconds to ponder this thought after watching the Emirates flight explode into a city suburb, just short of the runway.

Mackenzie was an expert sky-diver and well familiar with ground-rush, but experiencing it in a cockpit was a novelty that held him transfixed, a contrast to his screaming co-pilot who seemed to think that the brace position was going to help him in some way. Hey, that's the Hilton... was his last thought before the 380 turned it into an inferno.

 

Pulse Arrival, Gotthard Rail Tunnel, Switzerland

 

Vreni Fricker was driving the high-speed goods train through the Gotthard Alp-transit when the controls suddenly went dead and the tunnel went dark. This was anomalous enough, but the emergency brakes failed to engage and only the slight uphill gradient acted to slow the train down. As her eyes adjusted to the faint green phosphorescence that identified the escape hatch from the cab, she also began to make out the blur of a similar green from the tunnel itself, also showing escape routes. Over the next five minutes, she marked her decreasing velocity by their rate of progress past her window while trying to work out whether she would be able to stop before the train crested the invisible rise ahead and started to run downhill towards Italy. As a precaution, she turned the handle that opened the side escape hatch and wondered how slow it would have to be for her risk of injury to be low enough to justify jumping.

By the time that the train had slowed to a fast walk, Vreni's sense of responsibility had taken over and her focus had shifted to stopping the train completely, ensuring that runaway either forward or backward was prevented. Although never having had cause to use it, she remembered that the locomotive possessed a hydraulically-operated parking brake which, if timed just right, might be fit for the job. The tricky thing's to apply this at just the right moment - too early and the brake will simply burn out, too late and I risk cresting the summit and starting irreversible acceleration.

She wiped sweat from her eyes, straining to determine if the train was still slowing. It was now crawling along and she could easily jump out, but forced herself to wait. Suddenly she spotted a phosphorescent number on the tunnel wall, indicating the maximum elevation of the route, and immediately started pumping the hydraulics with all her might. A terrible screeching resulted and the train slowed further while the smell of burning brake-pads filled the air. The hydraulic pump then jammed and Vreni bailed out, realising she could do no more.

The movement was almost imperceptible, but the train was still creeping forward while smoke issued from the locked parking brake. Fighting an irrational urge to jump in front of the locomotive and attempt to stop in by brute force, she cast about in the deep shadows to try to find a solution to this challenge.

"Chocks, where're the bloody chocks?" Vreni cursed aloud when finally remembering the steel wedges that were required to be placed on the lines when locos or wagons were parked in stockyards. She painfully barked a knuckle while searching along the side of the train, relying more on memory than on vision. "Yes!" she pulled the heavy wedge free and dropped it in front of the second bogey, jumping back as it exploded with a deafening screech and a hail of sparks. Within seconds, she reached the first of the goods wagons and pulled another chock free. This one was simply pushed forwards, again accompanied by sparks and the scream of tortured metal. A third chock and the train finally stopped, but Vreni worked her way further along, applying the wedges to both sides of the wheels, as the train was long enough to straddle the summit and there might also be potential to slide backwards.

A quarter of an hour later, the exhausted driver clambered back into her cab and, as specified in the operational manual, settled down to wait for the recovery team. Normally this'll be fairly quick, but I've never heard of a complete power loss ever happening before. Maybe there's been a big accident, so the wait might be longer. Anyway, nothing further that I can do, so I may as well try to take a nap.

 

Pulse Arrival, Amman, Jordan

 

After almost a decade on the CIA most wanted list, Achmed had almost forgotten his real name. He changed identities every month, whether there was any indication that they had been compromised or not. He also changed cities, countries, even continents. Anywhere that Islam was fighting the infidel and bombs were needed.

The common or garden terrorist has no need of my skills - they could concoct an acceptably powerful explosive device from material that you could pick up in any department store, following a recipe downloadable on the internet. The open internet, that is, not any kind of dark net. But I'm anything but a hoi polloi raghead.

Achmed was fluent not only in Arabic, French, German and Italian: his native tongue was English, but the class of English possible only from his Eton and Oxford classics background. The scion of a Saudi family that built a fortune out of brokering contacts to the country's royalty - rather than being part of it - he knew that he would always be an underling of the host of Princes born to privilege. Rebellion thus came naturally, under the cover of a religion that he had once earnestly believed in, but was now nothing but a route to his ultimate goal.

A fucking bomb-maker, that's what I am on the CIA list. True, I do put bombs together, but that's just for the fun of getting my hands dirty - and the cred that accrues from the cannon-fodder that I use to deliver these devices. 9-11, that's when the power of the attack manager was revealed. It wasn't only a cost-effective way to hit the enemy at home, the economic fallout vastly amplified the impacts of the initial attack. It's not just knowing how to make bombs, but planning their use so that it has the maximum possible impact.

"Jesus, fuck, but I'm good!" he congratulated himself, just before the device he was working on exploded, setting off the entire inventory of bomb-making materials that he had stored in the basement. If they had ever been able to reconstruct what had happened, the authorities would have been pleased to find that the charred mass in the sub-basement comprised thirty-seven martyrs who had already decided that their early deaths would be rewarded by hosts of virgins in the afterlife.

Of course, there is no afterlife, but, if there was, enough fresh virgins would have been supplied by those vaporised in the kindergarten directly above the bomb factory; not only the infants but also their young teachers, who had turned a blind eye to the activities in their basement.

 

Pulse Arrival, Nagoya, Japan

 

The day started so well. It was a beautiful spring day in Nagoya and the cherry trees scattered around the University were in full bloom. As a visiting professor, I lived on campus in a very neat - if rather small - apartment that was just five minutes' walk from the Department of Environmental Engineering and Disaster Management. A rather strange discipline juxtaposition to most Westerners, but typically Japanese. In any case, a three-month boondoggle as far as I'm concerned: time to catch up on the literature, write some papers and give the odd lecture. A holiday away from the cut and thrust of international technical consultant work.

It being a Sunday before the start of term, the building seemed deserted when I entered mid-afternoon, intending only to sort out accumulated email. After a couple of hours, I switched off the desktop peripherals linked to my pad and settled back to savour a coffee from my thermos, admiring the sakura through the window. Suddenly, a post-doc crashed through the half-open door of my office. I started in surprise, spilling hot coffee on the cuff of my shirt while turning in my chair to face this most anomalous intrusion.

"Shoko, what's up? You look like you've seen a ghost." Indeed, the normally quiet and demure young woman was wide-eyed and visibly shaking. "Has something happened, is someone hurt?"

Shoko responded in a babble of Japanese, then seemed to pull herself together while she clenched her hands into tight fists. "Sensei, it's the control room. There's something very shit... I mean shitty... Shit, you must come to the control..."

I could feel a cold shiver going up my spine. We've been monitoring increasing seismic activity in the region of Mount Fuji and it's really only a matter of time until something bad happens. I jumped to my feet and grabbed the shocked girl by her elbow. "Okay, let's go. Fuji, is it?"

We were cramming though the door when she resisted my push for a moment. "No, it's not Fuji, I think. Worse..."

I was going to respond to this when I noted that I was being diverted towards the stairs. "Come on Shoko, we're going to the sub-basement, it's faster to use the lift."

"Lift doesn't work, all is out."

As I let myself be led to the stairs, I noted that the ubiquitous air conditioning was silent, light was limited to that from windows and the emergency fluorescent lamps. The twinkles of flashing LEDs were strangely missing from the offices and labs that we passed. "Power cut," I muttered, aware that I hadn't experienced such an event in a developed country for decades and guessed that this could be a novelty for young Shoko, causing her to freak out.

"Yes, there's electric only in the control centre," Shoko confirmed in a trembling voice. "It's all a shit!"

I could never remember this polite young student's English being less than perfect or her using even such mild curses, so this further confirmed how upset she was. I almost tripped as I tried to keep up with her headlong clatter down the stairways. "Shoko, slow down, you'll break your neck - or I'll break mine. I'm not as fit as I used to be."

I caught a slight trace of a smile and noted her shoulders relax a little as my joke registered. I am a great believer in pre-emptive excuses and this is my usual mantra whenever some of the young post-grads talked me into doing some sport with them. Just before I thrash them running up hills, swimming, mountain biking or in the dojo. Not that I am especially fit - just that Japanese science and engineering students are notoriously sedentary, work incredibly long hours and live on junk food.

I puffed and panted in an exaggerated manner while we hurtled down seven flights of stairs and then along the corridor leading to the DMRC - our disaster monitoring and response coordination centre. After the darkness since we hit basement levels, this was an oasis of light and the normal background buzz from the banks of electronic kit filling the main control room.

The glass door with its embedded mesh of thin copper wires slid aside as we approached and silently closed behind us after we entered the large circular room. I automatically glanced at the Fuji monitoring system and breathed a sigh of relief when I confirmed that there was nothing beyond traces of the usual continuous background micro-seismics and acoustic emissions. There was, however, one warning showing: loss of all signals. I quickly scanned around the circumferential work stations, it looked like similar warnings were showing on them all. Okay, this must be a must be a truly huge scale power outage.

Shoko dragged me over to a chair facing a bank of monitors that I did not immediately recognise. Clearly this was what had worried her - a baffling series of red warnings was scrolling down the screen. "What's this...?" I ground to a halt as I caught sight of the bilingual banner over this niche. "Self Defence Force link: this should only be active if Japan is being attacked. There must be an error somewhere."

The young researcher dropped into the chair and issued commands in rapid Japanese while her fingers flashed over a touchpad and the wall of screens switched to status overview mode - luckily for me defaulting to English. "It was this that set off all the warnings, this EMP."

"An electromagnetic pulse that's big enough to knock out our entire national monitoring network? That doesn't seem possible. Okay, it would explain why everything is running fine inside our Faraday Cage and that we're picking up stuff only over a nuclear-hardnet, but an EMP would have to be local, regional at worst. It looks from this as if it's national."

"That's what I thought, Sensei, but look at this..." Strangely, working on the problem appeared to have calmed Shoko, although I felt as if her initial terror was being gradually transferred to me. The screen displaying an electromagnetically dead Japan zoomed out, to show all of South-East Asia.

"Jesus fuck! Even an all-out nuclear exchange couldn't totally black out such a huge area."

"So, it's some kind of equipment fault. I hoped it would be something like that. At first, though, it really looked like the start of a nuclear war."

I grabbed a chair from the neighbouring work station and pulled it over so that I could sit beside the student and take a closer look at the monitors. I took my palmtop from its pouch on my belt and it immediately linked to the control centre. This made me feel a bit better for a moment, until I remembered that it, like everything in the DMRC, was military specification and hence its survival did not prove a lot. My bespoke expert system took charge and the results of a preliminary synthesis flashed onto the main screen.

Earlier I had thought that I was on the verge of pissing myself, now I felt as if I was about to lose control of my bowels. "No, Shoko," I whispered, "this isn't a nuclear war - it's a hell of a lot worse than that!"

 

 

PA+3 hours, Golden Harvest, English Channel

 

Captain Lee had almost begun to relax. He had been on the bridge ever since the massive bulk ore carrier had lost all power just before entering one of the busiest sea lanes in the world. He had been preparing to decelerate from normal oceanic speed to the crawl required for the Channel transit into Rotterdam when everything went dead. That shouldn't be possible but at least, looking on the bright side, the pebble-bed reactor that powered this juggernaut was inherently safe and, even without power and left completely to its own devices, would shut itself down safely. This process was driven only by the immutable laws of physics.

Unfortunately, it was also physics, specifically Newtonian mechanics, which caused his real concern. With a mass of over one million tons and a hull constructed to reduce drag to a minimum, this ship was going to take a long time to stop. Due to loss of all communications, he was powerless to issue a warning to other ships in the vicinity; but the coastguards must have noted this by now and he could entrust that task to them. What he couldn't understand was why a helicopter had not yet been out to investigate. Indeed, the sky seemed strangely clear of all aircraft.

Captain Lee again lifted the binoculars to peer through the squalls of rain, aware that this was the first occasion he had used such ancient technology since taking command of this ship. A grey mass seemed to be emerging from the gloom dead ahead. "What the hell are these guys doing?" he muttered under his breath, catching the attention of the two other men who shared the bridge with him - Flynn, the Exec Officer, and Flaherty, the systems analyst.

"Despite this shitty vis, they can't possibly have missed us on radar. This monster has a profile like the bloody Empire States Building," Flaherty commented, peering through the sheeting rain.

The ghostly shape ahead was rapidly gaining substance as it neared, a very large white vessel that wallowed in a bizarre manner.

"Christ, it's one of those mega-cruisers," Flynn gasped. "It's not supposed to be possible, but it looks to have also lost all power. Those babies are designed to be dynamically unstable, to increase manoeuvrability. But look at the way it's bouncing about now - makes me feel sick just to look at it. There's going to be a lot of spew to mop up on that boat."

Lee automatically punched down on a large red button, one of the few controls that was not a touchscreen or voice operated, and was shocked for a moment by the absence of the blare of the ship's horn. "We're going to ram her and there's not a bloody thing we can do about it. Anybody have a clue what powers her, is it also a nuke?"

"Hydrogen fuel cell, I'm pretty sure. I think there's a cryogenic tank that runs the length of her keel," Flynn supplied with a frown. "It's well shielded though and supposed to fail safe, pressure release valves below the waterline, if I remember correctly."

"So, it's a potential fucking Hindenburg if they also lost power the same time as us."

"But, Captain, that can't be right. Why'd we both lose power at the same time," Flaherty objected.

"Occam's Razor," the captain glared ahead as if hoping to remove their victim by mind power alone. "It's either a coincidence that two ships that are designed never to lose power have not only done so but are about to collide with each other, or it's some kind of external cause."

"You mean like some kind of terrorist hack?" Flaherty asked.

"Not a fucking clue, lads. But, whatever the cause, I'd get strapped in for collision if I was you. We're almost four hundred metres from the bow and, although our closing speed seems to be only about fifteen knots, we're going to ram her amidships and will probably cut right through. Even something as bloody big as that cruiser. It's going to be a big bump though and that's without whatever happens to the hydrogen."

To Lee, everything thereafter seemed to take place in slow motion. A first shudder as the elongated prow made first contact, immediately followed by a shockwave that visibly ran along the deck towards them, ahead of a wall of flying debris from the stricken vessel. The jolt reminded Lee of a large earthquake he had experienced on the 50^th floor of a Tokyo skyscraper, but with much more noise, despite the thick armoured glass of the bridge.

The first hundred metres of the ship was hidden by mist for a moment, before the cloud of hydrogen exploded in a fireball that closed inexorably as the ore carrier ploughed through it. Lee was frozen to the spot, eyes wide like a rabbit in headlights. The hull of this ship may be unstoppable, but that probably doesn't hold for the superstructure.

He was right.