The Solar War (The Long Winter Book 2)

by A. G. Riddle

  “Locations!” Brightwell demands.

  Danforth. He was working with Chandler at Camp Five. We should have had him under surveillance. I used Danforth’s wife and child as leverage to take him down. This is bad. Emma is out there in the chaos somewhere. We need to find him, quickly.

  What’s Chandler’s plan for the two men now? If he had used them to directly sabotage or attack us before now, we would’ve found them, questioned them, and maybe discovered the speakers. He had to wait until this moment. Now he has nothing to lose. What’s their best use? I realize the answer as the technician stands, an expression of rage and horror on his face.

  “We’ve got Corporal Caffee on video—”

  “Where?” Brightwell shouts.

  “Situation room. Forty-five seconds ago. His sidearm was drawn.”

  The situation room is just down the hall—

  A gunshot rings out, then another and another. The sound seems to blow the room apart. Instantly, everyone around me is in motion. The sergeant standing guard at the entrance falls. Brightwell draws her weapon and returns fire as she shoves me away from the entrance. More gunshots join the cacophony until I hear one of the soldiers roaring, “He’s down!”

  A pool of blood spreads out on the floor around Colonel Brightwell. I crawl over to her, placing my hand on the shoulder wound, applying pressure. A young man runs over, tossing a medical bag on the floor beside Brightwell. “I’m a corpsman, sir. I’ll take over.”

  Through the doorway, I see Corporal Caffee lying dead on the floor, body riddled with bullets. He went for the situation room. To kill the leadership. Where’s Danforth? What’s his target?

  The main screen was hit with a bullet, but the smaller screens around it are still active. In one of them, a video camera feed shows a man in a crowded corridor, a handgun held at his side. I know that corridor. It’s right outside my flat. The face is enclosed in a rectangle with block letters below it:

  <>

  It’s Danforth. He’s going for Emma. To use for leverage. Or to kill her. That’s the sort of order Chandler would give.

  I’ve never killed anyone. A week ago, I couldn’t even bring myself to kill Chandler. But I would kill to save Emma and my unborn child.

  Earls is already barking orders. “Reassign the closest platoon to find Major Danforth and apprehend if possible, kill if necessary.”

  I turn and run, stopping only to pick up Brightwell’s sidearm from the floor. Voices call after me: Harry, Min, and Earls. But I don’t stop.

  I hear Fowler’s voice echoing over the PA as I pound through the hallways, my lungs burning, legs aching, heart feeling as though it will beat out of my chest.

  Soldiers and civilians are everywhere, reaching into the air conditioning ducts, ransacking boxes of supplies, urgently searching for the speakers. Others are arguing with each other, desperately trying to figure out what’s going on.

  I study the gun a second, find the safety, and disable it. I’ve fired a pistol once. My dad taught me. He used to carry one when he went squirrel hunting, to protect us in case we came across a bear.

  I run faster, heart beating in my ears like a drum pounding.

  I turn the corner onto the corridor that houses our flat. The door stands open, no sound coming from inside.

  A man stands in the middle of the hall, grimacing as he boosts another person up, the feet resting awkwardly on his shoulders. The person he’s lifting is thrashing around on the top side of the ceiling. A speaker with Chandler’s voice goes out as I pass them.

  As I go by our flat, I slow down, peering in to confirm that the living room is empty.

  From the intersection ahead, I see commotion: children and adults talking, people running, and an AU soldier issuing orders I can’t make out.

  Fowler’s voice booms down from the PA system. Chandler’s voice is still in the background, and I can make out some of the recording.

  Tell me, Lawrence, how will it work? People aren’t just going to sit and watch their neighbors fly off into space and leave them.

  In Chandler’s recording, Fowler replies, The lottery will remain classified.

  Classified. Bureaucratic speak for a secret you keep from the public.

  As I reach the intersection of the corridors, I raise the gun and slow my pace, feet slamming into the concrete. I turn the corner, my eyes scanning, body numb from exertion and adrenaline.

  A man stands fifteen feet from me, his back to me. He’s wearing a black ribbed sweater and gray pants, arms forward, holding something. Farther down the corridor, I spot Abby and the children. They’re closer to the next intersection, where soldiers are flowing by. A bolt of fear runs through me when I realize they’re carrying Emma in their arms. Her eyes are closed.

  Time seems to stop.

  The man’s arms lift slightly.

  “Danforth!” I yell.

  The man doesn’t turn. But his head shifts toward me slightly, just enough for me to see his face.

  I press the trigger.

  The bullet hits Danforth in the upper left shoulder. He jerks, the gun in his hand going off. The bullet digs into the wall just a few feet away from Emma.

  I press the trigger again and again and again as I step toward him.

  His body jerks with every bullet.

  I stand still, staring down at the dead man when a shot rips through the wall beside me. The soldiers at the end of the corridor are firing on me.

  Chapter 62

  Emma

  Gunfire rages around me. I feel the children crouching, lowering me to the floor. When my feet hit the ground, I reach out and try to gather them behind me, shielding them.

  Suddenly, the shots stop and a soldier is standing over me, a tall hulking woman, hair pulled back tight, a rifle in her hand. “Hold your fire,” she shouts.

  In the place of gunshots, voices fill the void, everyone talking at once. It’s like being in a hurricane, the rush of sound everywhere, indecipherable.

  Izumi’s voice pierces the din, seeming to cut through it like a boat parting the water. “Step aside, I’m a doctor. Step aside, please.” She leans over me, placing a hand on my cheek. “It’s going to be okay, Emma. You’re going to be just fine.”

  She grabs my right arm and places something cold against it. I feel a pinch, pressure in the vein.

  “No,” I cry.

  “It’ll help you relax.”

  “The baby—”

  “Will be fine. This won’t harm him. It will just delay the delivery until we’re ready.”

  Chapter 63

  James

  Still holding the gun, I raise my hands and freeze. A tall, hulking soldier looming over Emma yells for a ceasefire. Her voice is like a cattle prod hitting me. It has the same effect on everyone else in the corridor.

  The shots stop instantly.

  I’m panting. The noise from my breath exiting my nose sounds as loud as a wind tunnel. I feel the adrenaline leaving my bloodstream, gradually, like a drug that’s being withdrawn. Sensation slowly returns to my body. My mind seems to unlock, returning to the moment.

  A skinny soldier in winter fatigues reaches down and grabs Danforth’s gun. “You okay, sir?” he asks.

  I nod absently as I step forward, unable to tear my eyes away from the man I just killed, a man who was sent to kill either me or my wife, or both. Walking by him feels as if I’m walking over a bridge, crossing to a different world on the other side, a world where I’ll never be the same.

  I have taken a life.

  Izumi crouches over Emma, holding a health analyzer to her finger. Emma’s eyes are closed, her breathing steady. Abby and Adeline are holding her head, both staring down with stricken expressions. Sarah is crying. Jack and Owen have fixed their faces with hard stares, but I know that inside they are scared to death, as they should be.

  Madison is rapid-firing questions at Izumi. They’re all the questions I want to ask.

  “I’ve slowed the contr
actions,” Izumi says, glancing from Madison to me. “They should stop soon. I have this under control. James, please resume doing whatever you need to do.”

  I hear footsteps behind me, and I spin, raising the gun. The two men throw their hands up as they try to halt their advance. I lower the gun when I realize that it’s David and Alex. They’ve been searching for the car speakers blasting Chandler’s message like most of the other trusted civilians. My brother fixes me with a horrified look, his eyes going from the dead man on the floor back to me.

  Madison rushes into David’s arms, burying her face as the tears flow. Abby reaches out a hand to Alex, who takes it.

  “What do you need?” he asks me, voice steady.

  I hand him the gun and say to the soldier standing nearby, “Sergeant, do you have an extra magazine for this firearm?”

  She reaches into a pocket on her belt and hands a magazine to me, which I transfer to Alex.

  “I need you to get everyone to the infirmary. You have to guard them. There may be more people trying to get to her. Use that if you have to.”

  He nods and begins directing the children.

  Allie finally breaks her hold on her mother and runs to me, crashing into my legs almost hard enough to knock me over. “Da!” she cries.

  I bend down and hug her tight. Time isn’t a luxury we have, but if it’s my fate to die tonight, I want to hug my daughter one last time.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I whisper to her as I take Emma’s hand in mine. “Go with your uncle and do as he says. I’ll be home soon.”

  “Stay,” she pleads.

  “I can’t. I need to work.”

  “Where’s Sam?”

  “He’s with me. He’ll join you soon.”

  I kiss her forehead and motion for Alex to go. Allie turns her head, staring at me and crying as they move down the corridor toward the infirmary, three soldiers carrying Emma now.

  The moment they turn the corner, a slight rumble flows under the floor, as if a giant monster is moving through the ground beneath us. Explosions echo in the distance.

  Fowler’s voice over the PA is the only one I hear now.

  A large female sergeant directing the troops at the intersection turns and shouts to me, “Sir, we’ve engaged the enemy. You’re being requested at the CP.”

  She dispatches four soldiers, who jog with me back to the command post.

  Earls is pacing when I arrive, eyes trained on the screens that still work. The region south of the plant is a smoldering battlefield. The grenades we fired have left deep pits in the snow. Dirt shows through like open wounds in the earth.

  The white expanse around the craters is littered with blood, body parts, and shrapnel, all giving off steam in the frigid night. It makes my stomach turn.

  Tracer fire lights up the night—red beams from our troops in the warehouse, green beams from our enemies. Against the backdrop of the snow, one might take it for a Christmastime laser light show.

  General Paroli is here now too—sulking in the corner. I get the impression I missed another battle—Earls and him fighting over who should be in command. Luckily Earls seems to have prevailed.

  Harry walks over to me. “We think about a hundred soldiers were tunneling towards the plant. The grenades took out a bunch of them.”

  “How about the convoys?”

  “They haven’t altered course.”

  Earls joins us. “James, we’ve taken out all the speakers.”

  “Count them and compare it to the number taken from the vehicles. Let’s make sure there aren’t more hidden, waiting to be set off again.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “And bring one of the radios here to the CP. Leave it on and tuned to the channel they were using.”

  He nods and turns to give the order.

  “How’s Brightwell?”

  Earls grins. “Mad as a hornet. Keeps trying to leave the infirmary.”

  “I count that as a good sign.”

  Fowler stands from the desk where he’s been broadcasting on the PA. “Can I stop this now?”

  “Sure, Lawrence. Come join us.” To Earls, I say, “What’s our deployment status?”

  “We’re massing our troops as directed. I also have a platoon sorting through the civilians, enlisting anyone of fighting age and fitness. We’re concentrating the non-combatants in flats spaced around the warehouse.”

  “Good.”

  “Regarding Arthur,” Earls says. “We have six soldiers guarding his cell. Should we pull some of them off?”

  That’s a dilemma. If we leave him unguarded, it would be the perfect time for him to attack us. He could destroy us from the inside while Chandler overruns us from the outside. But guarding him takes soldiers away from defending the warehouse. We need every person we can get right now.

  “Have the guards bring him here,” I reply. “We’ll bind his arms and legs to a chair and Harry and Grigory will guard him. We need all the soldiers we can muster. And he may even give us some help.”

  I’ve known Earls long enough to read the micro expressions that seep out around his stone-faced façade. He doesn’t like that call. But when he relays the order, there’s no trace of hesitation or skepticism in his voice.

  On the screen, the tracer fire dies down by the minute.

  “We have a survey drone inbound, sir,” Earls says. “ETA ten minutes. With the snow cover gone, we’re hoping we can use infrared to paint the targets for our snipers.” He pauses. “If you want prisoners, we can venture out now and try to capture some. It will be costly.”

  His word choice strikes me as strange: costly. From his perspective, soldiers’ lives are a cost of battle.

  “The operation would be more efficient,” Earls says, “after the drones get here—we could separate live combatants from the dead. But that costs us some time.”

  Another cost: time. To me, lives are far more expensive.

  “Have them hold their positions,” I reply. “We don’t need prisoners. I doubt the soldiers out there can tell us anything we don’t know.”

  “Sir,” a tech calls out. “A single vehicle is breaking from each convoy. Pulling ahead. Should we have the drones follow the lead car or maintain position on the main column?”

  Earls cuts his eyes at me.

  “Follow the breakaway cars. See what they’re up to.”

  In the doorway, Arthur appears, an amused expression on his face. “Sergeant Arthur, reporting for duty,” he says with mock enthusiasm.

  Earls nods to the chair and his guards usher Arthur over to it.

  “We have to confine you,” I say to him. “You understand that.”

  “I understand that you believe that,” he replies, letting his arms drift back to the chair frame. He stares at me as the guards wrap his arms with heavy-duty tape and affix zip ties over it.

  “We’re under attack,” I say quietly.

  Arthur raises his eyebrows. “I see that. Brilliant move by your species. You’re going extinct, so you try to kill each other.”

  “This wasn’t our idea.”

  “But you could use some ideas about defending against the attack, couldn’t you? That’s why you brought me here.”

  “Well, you claim to have thousands of years of experience battling hostile species on thousands of worlds.”

  “Millions of years, James.”

  “I stand corrected. So what would you do?”

  “Let’s see. You’re outnumbered. And trapped. Assuming you could escape, where would you go? There are only so many places to weather the cold. They’d find you and kill you. It’s better to fight here than there.”

  “We had gotten that far actually.”

  “My advice? It all comes back to energy. Can’t live without it.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “I’m afraid that’s all you’re going to get, James. I want to see if you can figure it out.” Arthur raises his eyebrows. “I have to amuse myself somehow.”

  I
exhale, shaking my head. In truth, it’s to his advantage for us to slaughter each other. It would save the grid from spending any more time or energy on us. I wonder then: is he somehow in on this? Does he have something planned?

  We may have more enemies in this battle than we think.

  The few remaining troops tunneling in the snow are dead. With the drones painting the targets, the snipers picked them off, their life signs fading from yellow and red to purple and then black.

  “The lead cars are stopping,” one of the technicians calls out.

  Earls, Fowler, and I stand and watch the video feeds.

  Soldiers dressed in Pac Alliance and Atlanta Guard winter fatigues exit their vehicles and begin milling about, grabbing items from the trunks and cargo compartments. They’re offloading what look like white PVC pipes. They set them in stands in the snow, arraying them in neat rows. Each vehicle must have twenty or so of the pipes, lined up like pickets in a fence, tilted toward us.

  The soldiers return from their vehicles, one holding a large sack, the other carrying what looks like a can of hair spray.

  “What are they doing?” Min asks.

  Harry shakes his head. “It’s a potato cannon.”

  Earls squints at him. “A potato cannon?”

  Harry smiles. “You take a piece of PVC, seal one end and jam a potato in the other. Then you fill the sealed end with a propellant and ignite it. Boom!” He spreads his hands out. “Tons of fun till the neighbors complain to your parents.”

  On the screen, a soldier reaches into the bag, drawing out what looks like a taped-up tin can. He marches down the row, dropping the makeshift rounds down into the pipes. Another soldier crouches at the sealed end, where he sprays with the aerosol can and flicks a lighter. The first gun goes off, sending the can out in a puff of white air. The guns fire rapidly after that, blasting rounds into the air.

  “Plenty of PVC plumbing pipe in the rubble,” Harry says. “Easy to recover. And lots of empty soup and bean cans. Probably filled them with water.”

  “We’re getting land-mine impacts,” a tech says. “Two. No, three. Four now.”