Big Supernatural Sale going on for Kindle! 13 books from the likes of J.R. Rain, Jeff Bennington, Mark Tufo, and me. 99 cents each (plus one $2.99 box set). Horror, zombies, paranormal, and more. Offer good Feb. 26-28. Stop, shop, and shock!
I'm currently working on both the AFTER prequel (a novella of about 15k words) and AFTER: THE ECHO, for release at the end of March. The prequel will be free to introduce readers to the series, but if you like to be among the first to receive it, just sign up for my mailing list (You'll also be eligible for a Kindle Fire and gift card giveaway for the After: The Echo launch.)
For a taste, here is the unedited first draft of the AFTER opening, for those who like their apocalypse with a little research!
AFTER: THE STORM
By Scott Nicholson
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 the 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-launched observatory
performing a continuous, real-time monitoring of solar activity, it used an
array of solar panels as it 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 was 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 he liked to tell his friends, was cool.
Chien still found 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 multiple 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. 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, huh?” 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 solar flares,
but his cataclysmic scenarios were pushed aside for what were considered the
more-relevant dangers of low-flying nuclear missiles. The military couldn’t
fight the sun, and neither could it procure billions of tax dollars by
provoking the administration’s fear of the sun. Besides, terrorist threats were
far sexier than probability modeling.
Last year, Chien had co-authored a report that painted a
grim picture of infrastructure failure on the heels of a massive solar storm,
calling it “the greatest environmental disaster in human history.” Since then,
Katherine and the other SDO researchers had wryly called Chien “Dr. Doom.”
Chien had stood firm in his quiet way. Besides, it really
wasn’t a matter of “if.” It was a matter of “when.”
But even Chien didn’t really expect “when” to be now.
“Look at AR1654,” Chien said.
Katherine’s keys clacked as she brought up an image on
her laptop screen. “It’s only an M-1,” she said. “At worst, we could get a few
radio blackouts in the polar regions. No biggie.”
“But AR1654 is aligning with the Earth. That means we
will be right in the path of the plasma stream if a flare erupts.”
“And it will pass right over us. That’s why we have an
atmosphere, so we’re not exposed to constant radiation. Otherwise, we wouldn’t
be around to have this conversation.”
Katherine, apparently satisfied with her prognosis,
resumed typing. Chien watched the image on the screen for another minute, as
sauce leaked from the edge of the pizza’s crust and bulged out into space in
huge, curling ribbons.
Maybe I’m no different than Newton, a sensationalistic glory hound. But
he died a virgin, so I’ve got him beat there.
Chien went through the rote recording of data that
occupied much of his duties, but his mind wandered to Summer Hanratty, the
woman he’d been dating for the last six months. He couldn’t escape the irony of
her first name, and its connotation with sunny weather had fueled their initial
conversation at a colleague’s party. Maybe they were getting serious.
Heating up, huh? Well, even Dr. Doom needs a little
comfort in the night.
Katherine’s
clipped voice interrupted his reverie. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Chien had flipped away from the satellite
imagery to tables of temperature, X-rays, and magnetic energy.
“Check the Magnetogram,” she sad, referring to the
telescopic image that mapped the magnetic energy along the sun’s surface.
Chien summoned the proper screen, which now showed the
solar pizza as a mossy tennis ball pocked with violent orange and cobalt-blue
acne. The area near AR1654 showed a brilliant plume erupting from the surface.
“It will loop,” Chien said, referring to the sun’s habit
of bending much of its escaped energy back into the thermonuclear maw. As
turbulent as the imagery made the sun appear, most of the activity took place
deep inside, where hydrogen and helium burned away at astonishing temperatures.
It took light 200,000 years to emerge from the center of the sun to the surface,
and from there a mere eight minutes to reach the Earth.
Chien thought he would share that little factoid with
Summer when he dropped by her apartment tonight. It was the kind of romantic bon
mot that would wash down well with a glass of Chablis.
“Even with a loop, it will likely shoot some electrons
our way,” Katherine said.
“Should we log a report?”
One of the center’s responsibilities was to warn of
potential interference with satellites and telecommunications equipment, which
helped justify the $18 billion NASA budget. A caricature of a notoriously penurious
Republican senator was pinned to the bulletin board near the restrooms, with a
handwritten admonition: “A phone call a day keeps the hatchets away.” Providing
a practical public benefit was essential to the long-term survival of the
center.
“The usual,” Katherine said. “Possible disruption of
regular signal transmission but no need for extraordinary measures.”
“A little static on the cell phone,” Chien said. “A
little snow for the TV viewers with a dish. No Doomsday on the radar.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
“I’m thrilled. An apocalypse would be terribly
inconvenient. I’ve got a hot date tonight.”
Katherine managed a rueful smile. “Wish I could say the
same. Take my advice and never get married.”
Chien didn’t want to tiptoe through those conversational
landmines, so he shifted back to business. The bulging projectile of the solar
flare clung to the sun’s surface like a drop of water on the lip of a leaky
faucet. Usually, the flare would collapse again, the charged particles of
helium and hydrogen reeled back by the intense gravity. But this one kept
swelling, a ragged dragon’s breath of plasma leaping into space.
Chien flipped through the suite of instruments, observing
the flare at different wavelengths. “Are you seeing this, Katherine?”
“Let me get this bulletin out first.”
“I’d hold off on it for a moment. We might be upgrading.”
“We can’t upgrade. This is M-1 already.”
Chien’s mouth went dry and his heart hammered. The solar
flare’s footprint grew both on the surface and in its bulge in the heliosphere.
“Looking like an X.”
“Daniel, that’s serious. It means rerouting high-altitude
aircraft and damage to satellites. If we send out a red alert, we’d better be
right.”
“The sun doesn’t care who’s right or wrong,” he said,
watching the ragged hole on the sun’s surface widen further and the plume take
an immense leap.
X-class solar flares dispensed radiation that could
threaten airline passengers with exposure if they were not adequately shielded
by the Earth’s atmosphere. Such flares were rarely recorded, but Chien was well
aware that human measurement of such phenomena was but the blink of an eye
against the ancient history of the sun. No doubt thousands—perhaps millions—of
massive flares had swept across the Earth in ages past, scouring the planet
with radiation and scrambling its geomagnetic fields. Chien was alternately
excited and frightened that he might be witness to one of them.
But Katherine was right. Issuing an X-class bulletin
would set a whole range of actions in motion, affecting the telecommunications
industry, defense, and air transportation. Rerouting flights alone would cost
millions of dollars, not to mention throwing off flight schedules that could
disrupt international travel for weeks. Any shutdown of telecommunications and
satellite service could quickly run to costs in the billions as well. This was
a panic button that, once pressed, could not be easily dismissed.
“You know what happens if we cry wolf,” Katherine said.
As project director, Katherine would be the scapegoat for
any political fallout, but Chien would likely be drummed out as well. Sure, he
could always return to university life, where notoriety was little more than a
mildly eccentric selling point. But he’d likely be done in the field of
government-funded research, and there wasn’t a whole lot of private-industry
opportunity.
But data was data, and the numbers were screaming X all
the way.
“Okay, I will give a warning of ‘possible disruption,
monitoring closely,’” Katherine said. “That should keep us covered until we can
analyze all the data.”
She issued the alert to the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal
Communications Commission, and the departments of Defense and Homeland
Security. The data She rated the threat a G3, a strong geomagnetic storm as
measured on a scale of one to five. She logged the data and noted the time,
saying to Chien, “Your shift is up. You better go play Romeo.”
“No way,” he said. “The solar cycle doesn’t peak again
for 11 years, and I’m not getting any younger.”
“Your call. But take my word for it. When you get to be
my age, you wish you’d had more dates with people and fewer with computers.”
The solar plume on the screen had grown to epic
proportions, so much so that Chien had to zoom out on the imagery just to fit
it on the screen. Even for a trained scientist, it was difficult to equate what
looked like a bit of Hollywood illusion with
billions of tons of solar material hurting toward the Earth a two million miles
an hour. Even if the plume proved truly dangerous, the solar wind and its
charged particles wouldn’t reach Earth for at least a day, maybe two.
“Something’s got me worried,” Chien said. “The SDO has only
been operating for two years, and in that time we’ve had no major solar
storms.”
“So?” Katherine had apparently already swallowed her own
downplaying of the threat and accepted mild space disturbance as fait
accompli.
“The SDO is itself a satellite. With a vicious enough
solar wind, we’d lose uplinks and downlinks, as well as orientation. Worst-case
scenario, we won’t be able to track the effect.”
“Well, let’s just pray it’s not a worst case, then,” Katherine
said, with a wry smile. Religious references were rare in the space center.
Chien, a Taoist, was not amused, nor was he comforted.
It's time for another Kindle Fire giveaway! Kindle Book review and Digital Book Today are teaming up with a handful of authors for this giveaway of a Kindle Fire and a $50 Amazon gift card. Details at http://www.thekindlebookreview.net/kindle-giveaway/
Giveaway lasts all month, so make sure you enter as often as you can. I'm busy working on both the After prequel and the second After book, so please forgive the lack of blog posts! Thanks to all the German readers who helped put three Deutsch thriller son the Kindle charts, including Enzweiung: Thriller to #8 overall!
