Event · disaster
The White Night
A Carrington-class solar storm; the Partition's hardened grids survive.
Read more in The Missing Century
2140s · The White Night: a solar storm of Carrington class strikes Earth during the Partition, with aurorae seen as far as the tropics. Solar storms strike grids through their long transmission lines, and the old continental grids lose their large transformers and stay dark for months, and in states already failing the dead are never counted. The grids rebuilt in the Partition, as small islanded networks with hardened transformers, survive almost intact, and for a century the White Night is the strongest argument for the Partition. It also adds a layer of dead satellites to the debris belt left by the Shattering · The Carrington Event of 1859; the Quebec blackout of 1989; the storm of May 2024, whose aurorae reached unusually low latitudes
The Sweep (2170s–2240s). No elevator cable could cross a debris belt, so the Elevator waited for the sky left by the Shattering of the 2080s to be cleared. The Sweep was the first lasting project the future blocs ran together. Ground lasers burned the surface of fragments so that they dropped and burned up; drag sails were fitted to dead satellites; robotic collectors cleared the high band, where nothing falls on its own. Much of the low band had decayed by itself, but the White Night of the 2140s added a new layer of dead satellites, and the low band was clear only in the 2180s, in time for the early Great Lift to run, slowly, on rockets and fusion shuttles. The high band took sixty years more. A laser that can drop debris can also blind a satellite, so the Sweep ran under mutual inspection: the Sealing Treaty's first test off Earth. The Elevator Treaty of 2244 was signed in the year the Sweep's last high-band survey came back clean, and its drafters added the Sweep to their precedents (see Who built it, below). The Landing still keeps the orbits around every cable clear, and leaving junk in orbit is an offence under every bloc's law.
The Mercury Storm (c. 2457). Mercury takes the hardest blow from every solar storm aimed its way. A storm larger than the White Night kills crews on Mercury and in ships caught in transit, most of them Freehold's Raised crews, and fries the arrays' industrial controllers, the race's bottleneck, so every bloc's array loses years of growth while the inspected fabs make replacements. Freehold renegotiates its share of every array afterwards. For a few weeks the blocs share repair data; then they stop. The Accord's Storm Protocol follows in 2460 (see The Storm Protocol, in The Mirror Race).