The Solar War (The Long Winter Book 2)

by A. G. Riddle

  On the viewscreen, I feel myself holding my breath as the Jericho rounds the dark side of the planet. At the terminator—the line where the star’s light turns to dark—the ice ends. On the other side, in the light of Eos’s sun, is a vast desert, interrupted only by the wide rivers snaking through it, like veins in a hand.

  The far side of Eos is a frozen barren wasteland. The near side is a scorching barren wasteland. We can’t survive in either. I’m suddenly reminded of Camp Seven, in Tunisia. Before the Long Winter, it was a scorching desert. And after, a frozen wilderness that would have killed us. We have both here on Eos, like two sides of a coin.

  There’s one difference here. In the small area at the terminator, where the light fades to darkness, is a valley that runs down the entire planet. The wide rivers flow through it. Mountains rise up, as if holding back the snow on one side and the desert on the other.

  In that semi-dark valley, I see hope—a cradle where human life can survive. A plain with blue-green grass spreads out from the riverbanks. Massive trees with green and purple leaves rise in the shadow of the mountains, seeming to climb over each other to grab the shreds of orange light shining through the peaks.

  From orbit, it looks like someone took a giant knife and cut the planet open from top to bottom, revealing this lush paradise in the place where the ice meets the sand.

  James smiles. “Deploy the probes.”

  Now is the true test. Is the atmosphere breathable? What pathogens are waiting for us down there? What sort of creatures lurk in that valley? I’m thrilled and terrified at the same time.

  “Move to geosynchronous orbit?” Min asks.

  James stares at the image on the screen. “No, let’s not wait on the results. There’s probably a habitable zone at the other terminator.”

  No one says what we’re all thinking: there are no settlements down there. Maybe we are the first to arrive.

  “I’ll check the system logs,” Grigory says.

  “No,” James replies quickly. “I’ll do it. Your time is better spent checking the capsules to make sure they’re ready for entry.”

  Grigory stares at James, clearly puzzled. Finally, he nods and opens his console.

  As the Jericho rounds the planet and the vast desert stretches out below, Min turns abruptly to James. “I’ve got line of sight on the Carthage. It’s on the other side of the desert.” He studies his screen. “It’s orbiting at an altitude of roughly four hundred kilometers. Speed is thirty thousand kilometers per hour.”

  Cautiously, Grigory says, “If there was a colony down there, it should have been in synchronous or stationary orbit.”

  Min calls up a model of the planet and does a few calculations. “Not possible. The synchronous orbit altitude is outside the planet’s Hill sphere.”

  Brightwell squints. James looks puzzled.

  Min supplies an explanation: “The Hill sphere is the region around a celestial object where that body exerts a dominant gravitational influence. The problem here is that the altitude for a synchronous orbit would put the ship outside Eos’s gravitational influence. The gravity from a star or another planet or moon would interfere—altering the orbit.”

  “Has it sent a message yet?” James asks.

  “No,” Min replies. “Should we activate our comm patches?”

  “Yes.”

  When the prompt appears on James’s station, he types a message that appears on the main viewscreen.

  << CARTHAGE, JERICHO. DO YOU READ? >>

  Neither ship has the ability to broadcast or receive transmissions of any kind. Our reasoning was that broadcasting anything might put the ships in danger of being discovered. As would receiving a signal that might hack the ships’ systems.

  Though we can’t broadcast, we have a more rudimentary communication system. There are cameras on the outside of each ship. These cameras constantly scan for comm patches: panels on the outside of the ships that are like the old e-ink technology: they form symbols that rapidly flash and disappear. The symbols are nearly indistinguishable from the outer hull—unless you know what to look for. If you do, they form a simple message system. It’s Lina’s design, from the first battles with the grid. Thinking about her still brings me a flash of remorse.

  On the screen, the cursor simply blinks. No response comes from Carthage.

  “Are you transmitting on repeat?” James asks.

  Min nods gravely.

  “They could all be down on the surface,” I comment, hoping I’m right.

  The Jericho flies in silence after that, crossing the vast desert below, the Carthage in orbit above us. We all want to see the valley at the other terminator. I sense we’re all holding our breath, expecting, desperately wanting to see a flourishing colony down there.

  Min slows the ship as we approach the terminator. It looks similar to the other valley, though this one has wider plains spreading out around the rivers and the mountains bordering the desert aren’t as tall. It looks, in a word, warmer.

  “We’ve got something,” Min says, voice cautious.

  On the viewscreen, an image of the surface appears, an aerial view of a triangle of land where two rivers meet. Dozens of long barracks stretch out in neat rows, black solar panels on top, white walls seeming to dig into the grass. They’re ours, the parts we transported from the Atlantic Union.

  What I don’t see breaks my heart. There’s no movement around the barracks. No sign of Harry, Charlotte, Fowler, Earls, and the other settlers. Purple vines grow up the sides of several buildings, reaching to the top as if they’ve trying to drag them down into the sea of grass.

  Some of the buildings are caved in. Some have gaping holes. Tree limbs lie in the punctures. In some buildings, there are carcasses of large animals, picked clean and degraded by the sun and time.

  At the tree line, I spot piles of rubble—barracks and buildings that were probably blown there by the wind. A storm must have come through the camp. But it didn’t completely destroy it. Is that why they left?

  No one offers a theory. No one comments. You could hear a pin drop on the bridge. Everyone is thinking the same thing: They’re gone.

  James breaks the silence. “Deploy probes.”

  A week later, I stand at the front of the bridge, motioning to the readings on the screens behind me.

  “The long and short of it is that Eos is essentially as the grid promised. The air is breathable, a little high in nitrogen, but won’t cause any long-term health issues. Gravity is about ninety-two percent of Earth’s. Our descendants will be a good bit taller than the first generation of settlers.”

  Descendants. It feels good to say that word.

  “And our children are likely to be taller,” James says, a small smile forming on his lips.

  “That’s likely. And they’ll have plenty to eat. We’ve identified several grain-like plants and tubers. We need to do some testing when we land, but they’re promising.”

  “Predators?” Brightwell asks.

  “In abundance,” I reply. “The biggest threat is a species of large carnivorous reptiles.”

  “Dinosaurs,” Grigory says.

  “An oversimplification—” He opens his mouth to speak, but I add, “—that is generally accurate.”

  “How hard are they to kill?” Brightwell asks.

  “Pretty hard.”

  I pull up an image that one of the probes captured of a corpse of one of the reptiles. It’s lying on its side, an uncanny resemblance to a Tyrannosaurus rex. “We believe this is the apex predator in the ecosystems of both valleys.”

  “Vulnerabilities?” Brightwell asks.

  “The skin is thick and scaly, but with the right weapon, it can be punctured.”

  “I’ll start working on weapons,” Brightwell says. “Hopefully we can modify what we have. As you all know, we didn’t bring nearly as many as I would have liked.”

  James smiles. “But we did manage to bring all of our people.”

  “A fair point, sir.” />
  “How about the climate?” James asks.

  “We can’t survive long-term on the near or far side of the planet, but both valleys are habitable.”

  “It would seem,” Grigory mumbles, “that the crew of the Carthage came to the same conclusion.”

  No one says anything for a long moment. Finally, James steps to the front of the bridge and stands beside me.

  “Let’s start with the facts. There are abandoned barracks on the surface—in the eastern terminator valley. Some are damaged. The Carthage is still in orbit. It’s not responding to comms.” James pauses. “That tells us that a group from Carthage went to the surface and set up the barracks. That is all we know. There are a lot of possibilities.”

  “Such as?” Min asks.

  “They might have found something down there they didn’t like. And they left everyone else in stasis on the ship.”

  “Can we interface remotely with the Carthage?” Brightwell asks. “Find out when it got here, maybe what happened?”

  “No,” James replies. “By design, neither ship has wireless control. Too much of a risk. The ship’s simple AI won’t respond to comm patch signals unless a bridge officer authorizes it. If we want to find out anything about that ship, we need to go over there.”

  He glances at Grigory. “You up for it?”

  Grigory nods.

  I turn to him. “Me too.”

  James’s face goes slack. “You just had a baby.”

  I shrug. “That was a couple thousand years ago.”

  He smiles patiently. “Biologically, it was a few months ago.”

  “I’m fine. And I have more EVA hours than the rest of the human race—combined. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 73

  James

  Though no one says it, I know that every member of the command crew is deeply troubled by the Carthage colony’s disappearance. Were they killed by a pathogen? By predators? Some other environmental threat?

  Or was it the grid? That’s the thought that lingers in my mind.

  When I saw the deserted colony, my first instinct was to wake Arthur and interrogate him. But before I wake Arthur, I want some answers of my own. I need to know what I’m dealing with. The other issue is that bringing Arthur out will raise countless questions from the crew—and rightly so.

  He’s in one of the storage containers in the cargo bay. When I woke from stasis, I locked it from the outside and barred the door. He made no movement or sound, though I suspect he knows I’ve confined him.

  I checked the hardware logs. As expected, there were more mechanical failures after I went back into stasis. Each time, Arthur intervened, likely with help from some grid vessel or device. Maybe they have repair ships that service the harvesters. Our ship would be a lot easier to repair than their complex machinery.

  In total, the journey from Earth to Eos took almost six thousand years. It’s an unimaginable time scale, more than half the time period that civilization existed on Earth.

  Missing the Carthage’s arrival by sixty years would have only been 1 percent of our total travel time. What if we missed them by 3 or 4 percent—hundreds of years?

  A better question is if the grid saw both ships safely to Eos, why didn’t they synchronize our arrivals? My conclusion is that having Carthage arrive first must serve some purpose—and that outcome is one the grid wants.

  I need answers and some are waiting aboard the Carthage.

  Both ships have docking ports. They were last used when the vessels were docked to the ISS. There is, however, a problem: we don’t have a docking tube to connect the ships. We didn’t have room for it and, frankly, we didn’t think we’d need it. Hopefully we haven’t forgotten anything else on this grand interstellar voyage.

  We brought the EVA suits along in case we needed them to do work on the outside of the ship.

  Min has maneuvered the Jericho alongside the Carthage, aligning the two docking ports.

  Emma, Grigory, and I are suited up and standing in the airlock staring across the gap. Eos looms below. Through the clouds, a vast desert ends in ice, a lush valley demarking the two hemispheres.

  Staring down from up here is like a dream. It feels as though the two ships are just hanging here in space, the orange star to our right, the bizarre planet below, us barely moving.

  Emma gives me a playful smile before turning and lunging out of the airlock toward the Carthage. She floats in space, her tether unfurling behind her. She activates her thrusters as she reaches the other airlock, making contact almost gracefully. Yeah, Grigory and I would have probably squashed ourselves like bugs on the Carthage’s hull.

  She activates a magnetic clamp that holds to the side of the ship, then attaches the tether to the clamp and pulls some of the slack out. We’ve got what amounts to a zip line in space.

  At the airlock, she places a control box in the slot and a second later, it slides open and she drifts in. The device was specially made to open the airlocks. We figured any sort of keypad or remote entry could be hacked.

  Grigory and I, both still tethered to the Jericho, grab the line Emma has strung and pull our way across.

  When the three of us are in the airlock, we close the outer door, pressurize the compartment, and open the inner door.

  We’re still too cautious to use broadcast radio communications, but we’ve attached a data line between the three of us.

  Emma’s voice sounds in my headset. “Environmental systems must be operational. The command sections are pressurized and life support is online.”

  She reaches up to unclamp her helmet. A bolt of fear runs through me. I hold a hand up to stop her, then unlatch my helmet. Here on Eos, she is far more valuable to the colony than I am. More than that, if one of us dies here, I’d rather it be me.

  The air flows past the helmet, cold and stale, the smell so devoid of anything it feels unnatural.

  I wait a few seconds; then I nod to Emma and Grigory.

  We march single file through the narrow corridor, our boots clacking loudly on the floor. Above and below, LED lights flash on as we approach.

  There’s no sign of a struggle here. Nothing out of place, nothing left in the corridors.

  “Hello!” I call out.

  No response.

  At the bridge, the lights and viewscreen snap on.

  Instantly a video begins playing. Harry sits in the command chair. Behind him, Charlotte and Fowler are discussing something quietly.

  “Hey, guys,” Harry says jovially. “Looks like we got here first. I told you not to take so many bathroom breaks. Anyway, we’ve done our local readings and opted to set up camp in rest area number two.” He smiles. “I’ll try to have some Eos rex on the grill when you get here.”

  He pauses, the smile fading. “We’re also going to set up a ground-based comm patch to communicate with you all. If you’re seeing this message, hopefully you’ve just boarded the Carthage out of an abundance of caution, and we’ll see you soon.”

  He reaches down and cuts the video off.

  Emma, Grigory, and I stand there for a moment, all considering what we’ve seen. They arrived safely. The planet was habitable at that point.

  Grigory moves to the operations station. “Video was recorded five years ago. They stayed in orbit two years before the video was recorded.”

  “Taking readings?” I ask.

  Grigory nods. “It’s all here: they made a thorough survey of the planet, looking for any changes in weather patterns or ecosystem disruption. All capsules have been deployed. The stasis sleeve bays are empty. So is cargo.”

  “Did the ship make video recordings after they left? Can we see what happened down there?”

  Grigory shakes his head.

  “Okay. Let’s download the ship’s database and then have a look around.”

  We untether from each other and split up, Emma going to the med bay, Grigory to reactor control, and myself to the cargo hold. I make a beeline for the compartment where I locked up Arthur on
the Jericho. Holding my breath, I reach out and turn the handle on the hard-plastic door.

  Empty.

  Did the grid place an agent on the Carthage? Or did they monitor it remotely somehow? They must have. Or they removed their agent right before the Carthage arrived at Eos.

  After searching the rest of the cargo hold, I make my way back to the bridge, where Grigory is waiting on me, a shocked look on his face. I know the look—I was wearing it too when I saw the hardware logs. I didn’t even think about him scanning them when he went to reactor control.

  “James,” he begins slowly.

  “Let’s talk about it back on the Jericho.”

  He cocks his head.

  “Talk about what?” Emma asks as she strides back onto the bridge.

  “Engine performance. Sounds like the reactor is still in good working order. It must have outperformed the Jericho slightly.”

  Grigory stares at me, looking as if he’s about to explode.

  “The cargo hold is empty,” I continue casually. “How about the med bay?”

  “Also empty. The logs don’t report any adverse events. All the stasis sleeves were intact when they arrived. Only the command crew was extracted from stasis. If the cargo hold is empty, they must have used the capsules to get everyone to the ground.”

  “All right, let’s get back to the Jericho.”

  I’m in the bunk room off the bridge, getting ready to bed down for the night, when Grigory approaches me. He doesn’t say a word, but I know what he wants.

  He marches out of the small compartment and through the bridge, and I follow, mentally sorting through how to respond to the barrage of questions that are coming.

  In the reactor control room, he closes the hatch and spins around to focus on me. “Six thousand years! There are dozens of critical failures in those logs. Hundreds of alerts.” He eyes me. “I checked, James. It’s almost the same here. And I saw the stasis retrieval logs. You were up a thousand years ago—and you checked our hardware logs then. You saw it.”