The Testimony of Those Lost in the Sky

Nine

Katy liked to think that she was the first to see it.

That probably wasn't true. The first person to realize the imminent danger was probably some technician out on a high plateau, stationed to watch the sun through the many spacecams shoved into the sky like vaccines into an unsuspecting child's arm. Katy's post, which was then standing outside to watch flares at the edges of the bright bulb in the pale sky, couldn't compare. But she saw it then, flares scooping out of the sun, making it appear to grow in the sky. Slightly.

Katy blinked. The sun was normal again, an overripe melon in the expansive blue field above town.

Jack had gone into the store to pick up their weekly liquid nitrogen allotment while Katy dawdled behind to keep their bikes safe. Jack had said he'd be five minutes, but the sun had gone down a whole hand length since he went in. Katy stared at the shimmering sky again. Maybe she was just tired.

A man staggered up to Katy, leaning like a drunk. Katy's father had been a drunk too. She did not recoil. He pulled a tattered tunic further over his head and leant on the silver bicycles.

"Thems some nice rides, miss..." He leaned further into the metal, pushing the handlebars into Katy's stomach. "I kin git a...a good price fer...what was it?" His breath reeked of beer. Katy stepped back and watched him pitch over the bicycles and stagger to his feet.

"What's your name?" she asked.

The man clutched the bicycle for support, then managed to right himself on the cracked ground. "Morris... Whatchamacallit Morris... Something or other Morris. I don't know, I just dunno." He staggered and leaned away. "Somethin' Morris. What's it now..."

A boy exited the weathered shop, carrying two heavily padded parcels. "Wouldn't give me the rations. Say it's getting warmer," he muttered, "said you won't need it when you're in a dead fever." Then he saw his sister and quieted.

This boy was Jack Londonderry, tough and stocky and old for his age. Not really the type to value results over means, Jack held up the bags to Katy. "They gave me a hassle. Very annoying, actually. I reckon everyone here thinks that if we're going to die soon they can do whatever they please." He looked from the drunk man to the bicycles. "We got the nitrogen, so let's go home."

Katy took one last look at the sun. Jack had said if. It wasn't if but when. The sun would supernova any day now and, like it or not, people might as well do whatever they wanted to. Everyone knew that the town wasn't large or important enough to receive a rescue ship.

"Sun will fall! Sun will fall!"

The drunkard stood on a plastic trash bin, flapping his arms and shrieking his prophecy like an urban crow. Katy turned away. And the sirens started.

The siblings turned, eyes wide, from their bicycles to see the rusted streetlamps along the sandy road blaring red. Everyone knew what this meant.

What Katy had seen earlier, she didn't know how, that imperceptible sense that the sun moved closer, had been the beginning of the end.

The alarms worked like this. Every country, every city, every town had reception stations set up on their tallest plateaus or mesas, receiving feed from a multitude of cameras floating around their sun. The cameras showed flares, chemical composition and heat signature, but none of those things really mattered anymore.

What mattered was when the cameras went out.

The satellites had strategically been placed in what those scientific technicians called 'the point of no return'. After engulfing the ring of machines their star would be unable to contain its own energy, bursting out into a superdeadly ball of flames. After their planet's sun passed and fried the ring of cameras it would be a mere nine minutes until the sun reached the 'point of no return' on Earth. The point at which every living thing would be dead.