Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke

“Lunchtime. I guess you might want to call your Prime Minister, Siobhan. Either of them. Then we get back to work.”
    14: Missing in Action
    Too soon, time ran out for Bisesa.
    Myra’s school reopened. The headmistress understood that for some families, bereaved, displaced, shocked, or simply frightened, more recovery time was needed. But as the weeks wore by a note of insistence crept in. Disaster or no disaster, the education of the young had to go on: that was the law, and it was up to parents to fulfill their obligations.
    For Bisesa, the pressure was mounting. She was going to have to release Myra before the social services came looking for her. The cocoon she had built around the two of them was starting to crack.
    But it was the British Army that finally broke her out into the daylight. Bisesa received a polite e-mail asking her to report in to her commanding officer.
    As far as the Army knew Bisesa had simply disappeared from her posting on June 8,
before
the solar storm, and her five-years-too-old ident chip making her untraceable, she had not been heard of since. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the Army, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had had other things to think about. But now the service’s bureaucratic patience was running out.
    Her bank accounts hadn’t been frozen, not yet, but her salary had been stopped. Linda was still able to draw on the funds for shopping and bills, but Bisesa’s level of savings, never high, was quickly dropping.
    Then, still unable to find her, the Army switched its assessment of the cause of her vanishing from “possibly AWOL” to “missing in action.” Letters were hand-delivered to her next of kin: her own parents in Cheshire, and Myra’s paternal grandmother and father, parents of the child’s deceased father.
    Bisesa was lucky that the grandparents reacted first, and called her flat in a great flurry of concern. Their call gave Bisesa the chance to contact her parents before they opened their own letter. She wasn’t close to her parents; the family had fallen out when her father had sold off the farm where Bisesa had grown up. She hadn’t even contacted them since June 9, though she felt a little guilty about that. But they certainly didn’t deserve the shock of opening such a letter, with its grave Ministry of Defense language about how all efforts were being made to trace her, and her effects would be returned to them, with deepest sympathies expressed . . . et cetera, et cetera.
    She was able to spare her parents that. But she’d had to give away her location, and when the authorities came looking for her seriously she wouldn’t be hard to find.
    So she braced herself, and asked Aristotle to put her through to her commanding officer, in the UN base in Afghanistan.
             
    While she waited for a reply, she continued to worry at her peculiar memories.
    Of course there was one obvious explanation for it all. She did have scraps of physical evidence for her adventures on Mir—her own apparent aging, the scrambling of her ident chip. But all she really had to rely on were her own recollections of the event. And it didn’t need the construction of a whole new Earth to explain that. Perhaps she had gone through some kind of
episode
that had scrambled her mind, impelled her to go AWOL, and brought her home to London. She might, after all, be crazy. She didn’t think so, but it was a simpler explanation, and in the mundane calm of London it was a hard possibility to discount.
    So she looked for verification.
    She had known Abdikadir Omar and Casey Othic, her companions on Mir, before the Discontinuity, of course. Now she used Aristotle, and a not-yet-canceled password, to hack into Army databases and check out their service records.
    She found that Abdi and Casey were still out there in Afghanistan. After June 9 they had been pulled off their peacekeeping duties to help out with civil emergencies in the nearby town of Peshawar, Pakistan. They were