by A. G. Riddle
James is getting animated now.
“At a depth of two hundred meters it’s about 8 degrees Celsius. If you go down to five thousand meters, temperatures can get up to 170 degrees Celsius.”
“You can drill that far down?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Farther.” He taps on the tablet, bringing up a wider image of the bunker complex. In the zoomed-out schematic, the tunnels, bunker, and aquifer seem so close to the surface. Lines descend from some of the smaller open spaces directly toward the center of the earth, like fishing lines hanging from a boat.
“Our plan is to get to a depth of ten thousand meters. The temperature there will be 374 degrees Celsius. Water pressure will be 220 bars. The amount of energy we can generate is enormous. Easily enough to sustain the bunker.”
“Incredible,” I whisper.
We’re almost to the center of the building, and the opening to the tunnels looms ahead. It has a gentle downward slope, like a highway tunnel that runs under a river. As we walk into it, I feel as though we’re wandering into the mouth of some massive beast buried in the Earth.
James goes slowly to keep pace with me. I still can’t walk nearly as fast as I once could, or as fast as I want. The doctor was right: I’ll never regain my full strength, but I have adjusted to my new reality. That’s life.
There’s a rail system at the mouth of the tunnel, and we board a small electric car, James driving. The temperature drops as we descend, and the light from the warehouse fades away, leaving us in darkness except for the LED lights above.
Up ahead a cavern looms. As we approach I realize its scale: at least a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet deep, with a twenty foot ceiling above us.
James is grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Welcome to the Citadel, Commander Matthews.”
“It’s amazing.”
He stares ruefully at the cavern. “I worked on a plan to grow food down here. I had hoped to create a self-sustaining colony. But we don’t have the time or resources. Or the space. Every inch will be dedicated to housing.”
As I look around, I can’t help but wonder what life will be like down here. Never seeing the sun. Never walking on the surface, breathing fresh air. Away from nature. It’s sort of like the ISS—a whole new world, separated from the earth.
Back at the surface, we pass by the white modules of the ship.
“These will be part of Sparta One, the largest space ship humanity has ever built. She’ll be loaded to the hilt with ordinance: nukes, attack drones, rail guns, you name it.” He studies it a moment. “I just hope it will be enough to bring the crew and me home.”
I stop walking and stare at him. He actually thinks I’m going to stay here while he goes out there and risks his life on the mission? Never. I’m going with him. I know we’re going to fight about this. And it will be a fight to the end, because it’s not something I’m going to give up on. No matter what.
That night, Abby and her children come over. Jack and Sarah seem to be adapting well to life here in Camp Seven. Madison, David, and their two children come over too. And Oscar’s here, of course. It’s probably the closest we’ll ever get to an extended family reunion.
We have dinner, and afterward James has a surprise for everyone: a robotic dog. It barks and does tricks and everyone is floored when it actually talks. The kids are obsessed with it. Half the fun is figuring out what it’s capable of doing and how it will react. There are no pets here in the camp. In the race to get here, they were deemed a luxury. Extra mouths to feed at a time when the government wasn’t sure they could even feed all the humans.
As the world has gotten colder, Abby has thawed. She and I have actually become friends. She’s gone from being standoffish to cordial to actually nice to James. I’m glad to see it.
Noticeably absent is James’s brother. I’ve begun to wonder if Alex will ever come around. James has never let on that it bothers him, but I know it must. Alex is the only family he has left.
When everyone is gone, we straighten our humble abode. It’s sort of nice having a messy house for once. James, Oscar, and I generally keep it in order—with the exception of James’s office, which is easily remedied by closing the door. You can tell kids have been playing here. I almost don’t want to destroy the evidence.
When we’re done, James sits at the dining table and studies his tablet while I do the same. Oscar watches an educational video on the AtlanticNet, a series about mining. When he first began watching the series, I wasn’t sure why. Now I know: he’s studying up to help support the construction of the Citadel. Or perhaps in case there’s an accident down there. Educational videos seem to be all he watches. I haven’t been able to identify any hobbies or affinities he has outside of helping me with rehabilitation and assisting James with his research.
There are a couple of things I have to talk to James about. I’ve been putting them off, dreading them, but I can’t wait anymore. After seeing the ship today, and what he said, it needs to happen.
I motion to the living area, where my exercise equipment dominates almost half of the floor space.
“We could get a lot of this out of here.”
He looks confused.
“It would open up more space for the kids to play. As cold as it is, they won’t be able to play outside much longer.”
“There’s the gym.”
“Which is constantly crowded.”
He glances at the exercise equipment again. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Your recovery is the most important thing going on in this house.”
I chew my lip for a second.
“What if I told you my recovery is finished?” I say.
He sets down the tablet. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, that I’ve probably made all the progress I’m ever going to make. This is my life. From here on out. Walking with a cane, the fatigue, the brittle bones.”
“Doesn’t mean you should stop exercising.”
“True. But I can get all the exercise I need at the rec center at one of the barracks. I’m sure some folks would like to use this equipment. I appreciate you bringing it here. When it was harder for me to walk, it was really nice to have it close by.”
He just nods.
I can feel my palms getting sweaty now, anticipating our next conversation.
“How do you feel about the fact that I’m not going to get much better?”
He studies me curiously, as if he doesn’t understand the question.
“Well,” he says, “how do you feel about it?”
I smile nervously. “I asked you first.”
“All right. I knew your rehabilitation would be an uphill battle, and that you would plateau somewhere. I know you led a very active life before. I knew it would be an adjustment. But frankly, life is an adjustment for all of us right now. Everything’s changing. We’re having to reassess our own capabilities and whether we can cope with this new reality. In some sense, we’re all going through what you’re going through. The whole human race is learning to walk again.”
“How does it change the way you feel about me?”
He gets that same confused look. A flicker of fear runs through me. Have I completely misjudged what’s happening between us?
There’s a knock at the door, and James rises and rushes over to it, perhaps happy to be off the hook. I desperately want him to answer that question. I need an answer to it.
I hear Fowler’s voice. From his tone, I know it’s important. I walk over, making the best speed I can without my cane, but Fowler is already gone by the time I get there.
James’s face is a mix of excitement and apprehension.
“The meeting is set. Fowler and I are going to Caspia to make our presentation.”
“What presentation?”
“We’re going to ask for their help.”
“You think they’ll agree?”
“I don’t know. I just hope they don’t declare war. And keep us as hostages.”
Chapter 42
James
The run-up to the meeting with Caspia—that’s what we’re now calling the Caspian Treaty nations, as well as the land that now holds them—is a rushed, frantic affair. I had expected more time to prepare. Upon contacting the Caspians and requesting a meeting three weeks from now, they replied and said we had to come now or not at all. Maybe the Caspians think that forcing us to come on their schedule will throw us off balance.
One thing is certain: they’re extremely paranoid. They’re permitting only Fowler, me, and a team of six experts and scientists to make the trip—only the people we need to make our presentation. No military. No diplomats. No security detail. Their message is clear: they want the facts, and they’re very suspicious of us. The Atlantic Union’s ramped-up military activities don’t exactly inspire trust.
They probably also suspect we’re about to have the same conversation with the Pac Alliance, and they want to get the information first.
We leave at night and fly east in a convoy of two helicopters. They’re the stealth variety, and I’m amazed at how quiet they are.
I was confident in my abilities on the Pax, directing our strategy in space. I’m out of my element here. Political intrigue is just not something I understand. And I know very little about the people we’re going to meet.
Caspia, like the Atlantic Union, comprises dozens of nations. In the AU, there are perhaps half a dozen with any real power (their leaders sit on the AU’s Executive Council). In Caspia, two nations hold a plurality of the power: Russia and India. But that’s about all I know about their internal structure. Perhaps that’s because the Atlantic Union doesn’t know much more; or perhaps it’s because they didn’t think that information was pertinent to share with me.
The rest of what I know about Caspia is strictly geographic. The state lies in what used to be southeastern Iran. The capital, Caspiagrad, is located in the Lut Desert. It’s one of the hottest, driest deserts in the world. The surface temperature has been measured at 159 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, that was before the Long Winter. The desert lies in a basin, with mountains around it, like a bowl carved into the Earth.
Once we enter the Lut, the ground below is only rock, sand, and salt. The dunes are beautiful. They seem endless, like waves of sand, a brown sea reaching to the horizon. Here and there, punctuating the ripples, a few dunes rise high in the sky, almost a thousand feet.
Some of the geography reminds me of the American Southwest, and some of what I see, I don’t understand. I point to a scattering of what looks like the hulls of shipwrecks, and I ask Fowler over the radio, “What are those?”
“Yardangs.”
“What did you call me?”
He laughs. “The wind carves them out of bedrock over very long periods of time.”
“How do you know that?”
“Lifetime of geekhood.”
I smile. I like Fowler more and more. I really hope the Caspians don’t kill us.
The Persian name for the Lut region translates to “Emptiness Plain,” but it’s anything but empty now. A city glitters ahead.
Where the Atlantic Union’s Camp Seven looks like a nomadic settlement, Caspiagrad looks as if it’s here to stay. Skyscrapers rise out of the desert, with high walls ringing them. Helicopters circle in the air, a patrol likely launched as a show of strength for our arrival; they would’ve picked us up on radar a long time ago, and they probably have hidden base stations throughout this expansive desert.
But there’s no formal welcome ceremony, only a handful of mid-level diplomats who introduce themselves before escorting us into a building near the helo pad. Security checks us out thoroughly, then remands us to the diplomats, who offer us water or coffee and ask if we need to use the restroom (we do).
Finally, they lead us into an auditorium. The room is packed. There are far more people than in the gymnasium where Fowler and I gave our presentation to the Atlantic Union.
There are no introductions, no preamble. We are simply instructed to “Say what you came here to say.”
When we finish, the questions are much the same as those we received from the Atlantic Union. The Caspians have brought in experts, and those experts question us at length. Fowler knows some of them. They’re his counterparts from Roscosmos and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). That helps our cause. We share all our information on tablets—none of it could be transmitted ahead of time—and they’re reviewing it on the fly.
Through a translator, a Russian scientist asks the question I would ask in his position. “Dr. Sinclair, what do you think is out there? On the mission you’re proposing, what do you expect to find?”
“Our working theory,” I say carefully, “is that there’s an entity or device here in our solar system that is creating the solar cells.”
“Where?”
“From the locations of the cells we’ve found and their vector, there really is only one place that it could be. The asteroid belt.”
“Because it would need raw materials to build the cells.”
“That’s our thinking. The asteroid belt is the most easily accessible source of raw materials in the system. It’s in a good location, just beyond Mars. The harvester, as we have named this potential device, could conceivably come to our solar system, attach to asteroids, manufacture the solar cells it needs, and dispatch them to the Sun to form a solar array that would harvest the Sun’s output.”
The room falls silent.
The Russian president is the first to speak—in fluent English.
“As I understand it, there are thousands, perhaps millions, of objects in the asteroid belt. Even if you know the general location of this harvester, will it not be a ‘needle in a haystack,’ as you Americans say?”
“That’s a fair question. And one of the risks to the mission. But we have enough data to develop a working profile of our enemy’s behavioral patterns.
“We believe the solar cells are actually very simple machines. The way they reacted to us was no more complex than what you might see from a one-purpose drone. We’re assuming that they have limited defensive and communication capabilities. They seem to be tailor-made to travel to the Sun and capture energy. As such, it would make sense for the harvester to prioritize its actions based on economy of energy. Harvesting energy and conserving energy—those are likely its only mission parameters. And, of course, it seems to be monitoring us—its principal enemy or impediment to its mission—and taking action accordingly. We think those actions include destroying the ISS and trying to disrupt the launch of the Pax and Fornax.
“At any rate, that hypothesis allows us to make an assumption about where the harvester might be. Over half of the mass in the asteroid belt is contained in four asteroids and dwarf planets: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The largest, by a wide margin, is Ceres. It contains almost one third of all the mass in the asteroid belt. And it’s directly on the path from which the solar cells are originating. We think the harvester is on Ceres.”
“Impossible,” a Russian scientist mutters. He’s a pudgy man with bushy eyebrows and thick glasses. “We can see Ceres with ground telescopes. And it rotates completely every nine hours. There is nothing there, Doctor Sinclair.”
“Nothing we can see. Our working assumption is that any entity sufficiently advanced to shroud our sun could easily camouflage itself on Ceres. It’s there. We’re betting on it.”
After the presentation, they make us wait in a conference room. After the first hour, I start to wonder if we have indeed been taken hostage. It would be quite a play.
To Fowler, I say, “How easy was it to make this meeting happen?”
“Not easy. They rejected the initial approach.”
“How did you pull it off?”
“I had some help.”
He opens his laptop and starts a video.
“This was in a hidden, encrypted file on the Pax escape capsule—something your crew sent home to help your efforts,” Fowler says.
The video was definitely recorded on the Pax. I recognize the padded walls of the modules. I also know the voice muttering in the background: Grigory. He floats into view and stares directly at the camera like he can see right through it and into me. He speaks in Russian, but there are subtitles at the bottom.
To my countrymen and my colleagues at Roscosmos, our mission aboard the Pax has been a success. But we are entering a dangerous phase of the mission from which I likely will not return.
I, along with the members of this crew, have elected to send James Sinclair home. The reason is very simple: he is a genius. If anyone can solve what’s going on out here and stop it, he can. I’m storing this message using a NASA encryption method that the crew of the Pax has access to. The file will unlock after he arrives home. I have one request—that you give him any assistance he requires. He is trustworthy, and I have placed the lives of my family and everyone I know in his hands.
I’m once again thankful for my crewmates. Even millions of miles away, they’ve managed to be there when I needed them.
My general expectation was to get a yes or no answer to the mission we’ve proposed. Instead, one of the diplomats returns to the conference room and tells us we’re free to leave.
When we touch down in the Atlantic Union, I don’t even get a chance to shower or see Emma and Oscar, or to sleep in my own bed. A military detachment escorts me directly from the helicopter to a plane. The Pac Alliance wants to meet immediately. No doubt our meeting with Caspia influenced that decision; they don’t want to be in the dark.
I wish we had a yes from the Caspians. I sense that humanity’s future will be decided soon. These three nations either band together and go out there and fight together—or they descend into a global civil war over what’s left of this withering planet.
I manage to get to sleep on the flight to Australia. When I wake, I find Fowler hunched over his laptop.