The Solar War (The Long Winter Book 2)

by A. G. Riddle

  In the dim light in the basement, Grigory stares at the two space suits.

  “This is madness.”

  “This,” I say, pointing at the suits, “is the only way out of here.”

  He squints at me. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re healthy enough to make the trip. And I know how bad you want to get out of here. I would too if it was Emma up there. And finally, when we get to the surface, we need to determine the best way to get everyone out. It might mean changing the plan—possibly trying to clear the elevator shaft or one of the escape tunnels. I need an engineer.”

  “Glad you finally admit I am hero in all this.” He studies the suit. “This is going to be the strangest EVA in history.”

  When we’ve suited up, we make our way to the water treatment plant, where Oscar lowers himself into the small pool at the entrance to the backup water tube. The pool was meant to be a staging area where we could deploy repair drones to go into the pipe and perform maintenance. I never envisioned it being used like this—as a staging area for people going into the tube. It’s cramped and the tube itself is barely big enough for Grigory and me with the suits on. There’s no way we could swim inside it. But Oscar can.

  When I give him the go-ahead, Oscar ties an electrical wire around his waist, checks it, and dives headlong into the tunnel. He kicks his legs and disappears in a bubbly wake.

  I hold the wire, waiting, until I feel his signal: four sharp tugs followed by three tugs.

  I tie the wire around my own waist, let out some slack, and Grigory does the same. We both enter the pipe and Oscar begins pulling us through.

  Inside the tunnel, it’s pitch-black except for our helmet lamps. The darkness and lack of control in the confined space is nerve-racking. If the suit catches on anything and tears, it will be a slow, agonizing death. I feel sweat forming on my brow, and I realize I’m holding my breath.

  The time in the pipe seems endless, the view ahead always the same, almost as if I’m staring at a still image of a dimly lit pipe.

  We’ve attached a comm tether between Grigory’s suit and mine, but we have no way to communicate with Oscar.

  “I feel like fish being reeled in,” Grigory says.

  I laugh and that helps my nerves settle a bit.

  Finally, I see a faint light up ahead. A few seconds later, the pipe opens into the vast expanse of the aquifer.

  I immediately glance upward. A few small pinholes of white light shine down from the dark, rocky dome. It reminds me of looking up at the stars at night.

  Our helmet lights cut beams through the water, which is dotted with particulate and dust, like a cloud floating through space. The asteroid impact has left its mark here too.

  We drift to the top of the aquifer and follow Oscar as he climbs into a large crevice, which looked smaller from below.

  I reach up carefully, gripping the rocky opening and try to pull myself out of the water. The suit, now wet, is too heavy for me to manage. This is a new model, state of the art, but it simply wasn’t constructed for Earth’s gravity. Oscar grasps my upper arm and pulls, careful not to snag the suit. I push hard when my right foot grips the rocky ledge above the water, leg muscles burning. When I’ve cleared the water, I collapse and sit there, panting as I take my helmet off and breath in the damp air.

  Oscar helps Grigory out of the water, and we methodically take the suits off and place them on a ledge. There’s no way we could climb through the rocky pass above carrying their weight—and they’d likely snag and tear. Better to leave them here.

  Oscar opens a duffel bag and hands each of us an LED headlamp and a belt, which we hook to a rope that connects to him. The passage to the surface will be winding and although I expect there will be some ledges, I still instructed Oscar to bring the rope in case one of us slips. The rock is damp, and I’m not an experienced climber. I doubt Grigory is either. This should be interesting.

  We climb slowly at first, Oscar testing every hand- and foothold, often shining his headlamp down on us, making sure we’re okay. My fingers are soon raw and aching. I wish I had asked Oscar to get some gloves. Like a kid on vacation, I want to yell, How much longer? But I push on silently, climbing and crawling, occasionally coughing when a dust cloud drifts down.

  Oscar stops twice to give us a break.

  “I miss being fish on line,” Grigory says.

  “I miss the elevator,” I reply.

  Above, a sliver of light shines into the passage at an angle, silently saying, Just a little bit farther. That, and the thought of Emma and Allie below, gives me the energy I need to press on.

  I wonder exactly how long I’ve been gone from the Citadel. I glance at the clock on my phone. Almost seven hours. The journey to the surface was much more difficult than I imagined. And it’s taken a lot more time. I should’ve known that Oscar would understate it. It’s nothing to him. Even if we could get enough space suits, this isn’t a viable route to evacuate everyone from the Citadel.

  My thoughts go to Emma. She must be worried sick. I figured I would have a look at the route and impact crater and be back before she woke up. She’s no doubt awake now, and she won’t be happy that I didn’t tell her about my plan.

  We make the final push, and by the time the sunlight is blazing through the opening at the top, my arms feel like spaghetti noodles. Oscar reaches down into the passage and takes my arm and pulls me up in one swift motion.

  I squint, trying to blot out the sun. It doesn’t shine nearly as bright as it did before the asteroids struck, but compared to the darkness of the last eight hours, it’s nearly blinding. As my eyes adjust, I try to estimate how much solar output has fallen. My guess is 50 percent. The sky is hazy, a dusty cloud that stretches as far as I can see.

  It’s cold too. I wonder: is it only from the asteroid’s dust cloud—or has the grid repositioned the solar cells left in the system between Earth and the sun? Those solar cells were manufactured by the first harvester sent to our system, built specifically to collect the sun’s energy. They’ve been adrift since we defeated the harvester at Ceres. We made no move to attack them for a simple reason: they’re small and the solar system is vast. Even if we could find the solar cells, they could disperse. We’d have to chase them down. There are likely thousands, maybe millions of them.

  Are we facing a double attack—from the asteroids and the leftover solar cells? Has the Long Winter already returned?

  The asteroids alone might be enough to end all life on Earth. Their effects are far deadlier than what happens at the impact site. When an asteroid makes landfall, it sends a blast outward, a fireball that burns everything in its path. When the fire runs out, the force of the blast continues, knocking over trees and buildings. The asteroid impact also sends chunks of earth into the sky. For hours, the ejecta fall back to the ground in fiery impacts. The impact also causes earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes.

  Things get quiet after that, but the short-term consequences are just as dangerous. Acid rain begins. The sun is blotted out, plunging temperatures. Crops die.

  The long-term effects of an asteroid impact ultimately depend first on its size and secondly on where it hits. The worst consequence is ozone destruction, which would open the planet up to deadly UV radiation. Beyond that, a potential runaway greenhouse effect could increase the CO2 in the atmosphere and heat the planet up too much.

  There’s nothing I can do about the immediate effects—the blast and the earthquakes and ejecta have come and gone. The short-term effects are what we face now: acid rain and cooling from the dust cloud. We’ll have to face the long-term effects at some point—if there is a long term for us.

  Oscar opens another bag and hands Grigory and me some warm clothes. When we’ve slipped into them, I take the satellite phone from the bag.

  As Oscar reported, the phone can’t connect to the network. The satellites are gone, likely hit by asteroids or maybe even ejecta thrown up by the impacts. I leave the phone on just in case it connects.
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  It’s a long shot, but I activate the handheld army radio. “This is James Sinclair, a survivor in Camp Seven. If you can hear me, please respond.”

  A minute passes, Grigory and I sitting on the ground, Oscar watching impassively. I repeat my broadcast, wait another few minutes, then toss the radio in the bag. “We’ll repeat the broadcast on the hour.”

  Grigory looks at me curiously, silently asking why.

  “Might be some helos flying over looking for survivors.”

  That’s a long shot. Camp Seven is, or was, the Atlantic Union’s seat of political and military power. If anyone were flying helicopters looking for survivors, it would probably be us. We’re struggling to even get above ground. Odds are the other camps fared even worse.

  But our rescue is only half the reason to leave the radio on. There might be some people who are trapped calling for help over the radio. It’s a long shot, but if we can help them, we have to try.

  There’s an electric army car parked nearby, which Oscar also recovered from the CENTCOM bunker. Grigory and I pile into it, and Oscar commands it to proceed to the coordinates where the warehouse above the Citadel used to be.

  Before the asteroid impact, the ground here in Tunisia was a rocky desert, like the surface of Mars. Now it’s scorched and smooth. The rocks are gone—melted or blown away by the impact shockwave.

  The ground is dotted with streaks of glass where the heat melted the sand. It’s surreal. In the hazy silence, I feel like a space explorer roving across an alien planet.

  Oscar stops the car at the lip of a vast crater, and we all get out to survey the destruction. The bottom of the crater is like a dust bowl, smooth and perfect. The asteroid wasn’t massive. Not a dinosaur-killer-sized piece of rock. But it’s still breathtaking. The crater must be a mile across. The destructive impact is incredible. My stomach twists in knots thinking about the wave that would have hit Camp Seven. It’s miles away, but it would have been hit hard. Probably not by the fireball, but certainly by the force of the blast. Grigory, standing beside me, stares at the crater. I know what he’s thinking—and hoping. That we’re not too late to save Lina.

  But at the moment, we have a larger crisis to address.

  “Let’s state the obvious,” I begin. “The tube to the aquifer and passage above isn’t viable for evacuating everyone from the bunker. Even if we brought food back to the Citadel, we couldn’t transport it in large quantities. It would take a lot of trips to keep everyone supplied and even more to get people out. It would take weeks, maybe months to evacuate everyone. We might run out of food down there and accidents could happen.”

  Grigory nods. “Even if we could solve the time and supply issues, I don’t like it. The passage out of the aquifer could collapse at any moment. We need a better solution.”

  “Sir,” Oscar says, “I could drive to another camp and try to make contact and see if they can assist us.”

  “They’re probably in the same shape as us. Traveling there by car would take time, which we don’t have. As Grigory said, we need a solution that gets everyone out safely and reliably.” I pause, thinking for a moment. “Oscar, did you see any excavation equipment at CENTCOM?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. We’ll make a quick survey of the camp, then head to CENTCOM, and see what we have to work with.”

  Grigory shoots me an anxious glance, and I know what he’s thinking—that maybe we’ll find Lina at the Olympus building. I hope we do, and that she survived somehow.

  Without another word, we get back in the car and drive at top speed toward the camp. When we reach the first buildings on the outskirts, my fears are confirmed. They are flattened like wooden prairie homes hit by a massive tornado.

  We drive farther into the camp, over the rubble and pieces of buildings lying in the street (thankfully, the army vehicle is equipped for this). Seeing the devastation is gut-wrenching. Anyone inside one of these buildings had no chance of survival.

  Deeper into the camp, the buildings change from blown-over remains to crumbled ruins, domes that are caved in, lying in head-height piles of debris.

  Grigory fidgets next to me. Up ahead, at the center of what’s left of Camp Seven, lies the remains of the Olympus building, which housed NASA, NOAA, and several other scientific organizations. Olympus was part of a campus that included a hospital, the CENTCOM military headquarters, and the government administration building. Being at the center of the camp certainly helped the buildings avoid the full force of the blast, but their height didn’t. All of them are heaps of rubble. Olympus used to be six stories tall. It’s about two stories high now, a lumpy expanse of debris.

  Before the car even stops, Grigory jumps out and runs toward the pile. I’m right behind him, listening for any signs of life—screams, crying, or voices. I hear only the wind blowing across the ruins.

  The smell is worse: sewage, rotting food—and death.

  Grigory calls out at the top of his lungs, “Lina!”

  He bounds into the rubble pile, climbing across the cracked hard-plastic walls and twisted steel beams, yelling her name, slipping and catching himself as he goes. Then he stops suddenly, turning to me, fear and anger in his eyes. “We have to find her. Help me. James, please.”

  “Grigory—”

  “James, please.”

  I turn to Oscar. “Take another vehicle and head back to the Citadel. Bring Izumi and Harry back. Hurry. We’ll start searching for survivors while you’re gone.”

  As I wade into the rubble pile, the hazy sun is starting to set on this wasteland, the only place I ever wanted to call home.

  “Okay, Grigory. Let’s find her.”

  Chapter 16

  Emma

  I lie in the bunk, my back to the wall, Allie beside me, a place left for James. I thought he’d be back by now. Last night, he left a note saying that he and Grigory were going to the surface and that they would return as soon as possible. I figured I would see him by lunch. But he didn’t return. I looked for him again at dinner. And when Allie and I emerged from our bath. He’s still not here. If he knew he’d be gone for twenty-four hours, surely he would have woken me to tell me that instead of simply leaving a note for Fowler? I can’t help wondering if something’s happened to him. And I can’t help leaving a place for him in the small bed, hoping he’ll be there in the morning.

  “Da?” Allie asks.

  “He’s at work, sweetie.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, he has to work at night right now.”

  “Home…”

  “We’ll go home. I promise. Right now it’s time to be quiet and go to sleep.”

  A few weeks. One way or another, that’s the truth.

  We have enough food for roughly sixteen more days. That’s the terrifying thought I go to sleep with.

  The next morning, the team meets in the kitchen for two very good reasons. The first is that we don’t want anyone to hear our conversation. The second reason is that one of us now has to stay in the kitchen at all times. No one has called kitchen duty what it is: guard duty. Food is our most precious resource. It’s the ticking clock. If someone raids it, it could be deadly.

  Everyone is here except for James, Grigory, and Oscar.

  “We’ve had some requests from some of the parents…” Izumi pauses as if searching for the right words. “They’ve asked about the rationing.”

  “We’ve been over this,” Fowler replies, “no exceptions.”

  “They’re not asking for exceptions, per se. They’re asking that they be allowed the right to forgo their rations and that those rations be added to their children’s allotment.”

  “That’ll open up a whole can of worms,” Fowler replies. “Namely, what about the kids with no parents down here? And if we do it for some parents, I think the other parents will feel pressure to follow suit.”

  “Even if we say no, they’ll likely do it anyway,” Min says. “They’ll just hide their food. Some of that will spoil.”

>   “What have you told them?” Fowler asks Izumi.

  “Only that we would consider it. Are we considering it?”

  “I agree with Min,” Harry says. “What choice do we have? I don’t have any kids, but I’m certainly willing to give up my rations for the children down here.”

  A knock sounds at the door to the kitchen. I for one am relieved to have a break in the debate.

  “Come in,” Fowler calls out.

  Oscar presses the door open and strides in quickly.

  “Where’s James?” I ask before I can even think about it.

  “He’s on the surface.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He and Grigory made it safely.”

  “Can we evacuate via the aquifer?” Fowler asks.

  “No, sir. James has ruled that out. He has another plan. I’m sorry, but he instructed me to hurry. I need Dr. Tanaka and Harry to come with me now.”

  Chapter 17

  James

  My hands are aching and freezing. The climb above the aquifer was bad. Digging through the rubble of the NASA headquarters building might be worse. The wreckage is heavy and sharp and my hands are freezing.

  The sun has set and the temperature is dropping by the minute. But Grigory and I keep digging in silence.

  Beneath the thin layer of snow and ash, we find things I expect: shattered solar panels that once covered the top of the building, the hard-plastic girders that held up the structure, and strands of electrical wire that were just under the roof, close to the solar panels.

  There’s also something I don’t expect: a thick, black, gooey substance scattered across the debris, like oil sprayed haphazardly.

  Grigory reaches out and picks up a piece, rubbing it with his fingers. “What is this?”

  “Not sure.”