The Solar War (The Long Winter Book 2)

by A. G. Riddle

  I glance down at the energy weapon lying in my lap. Was I wrong? Can I slip into stasis without solving the mystery of the two dead soldiers at launch control? They are the only loose end now.

  Food, once again, is the limiting factor. I’ve already stayed awake too long. I’d love to see the Oort cloud, but it’s too far away. The ship is accelerating, but the food would be gone before we got there. The time has come.

  I take one last look at the aft video feed. The solar cells are on the far side of the sun, facing Earth. From here, my last view of our sun is unshrouded, but from this distance, it looks like a faded yellow firefly in the expanse of space.

  This is the last time I will see our sun or our solar system. The Solar War is over. We lost.

  Or did we? What defines success in war? Is it defeating your enemy? Or obtaining your objective? Our goal was to survive—and retain our humanity. By that measure, we have won the Solar War. The human race is safe, and we’re heading to a new home where we have a future.

  In the med bay, I slip into the stasis sleeve. When it seals me in every human on this ship will be in stasis for the first time. We’ll be vulnerable then. That’s the last thought I have as the air flows through the mouthpiece and darkness consumes me.

  I wake in the med bay, on the table where I went into stasis. An alarm drones in the distance, as if far away, my body underwater, trying to hear the sound on the surface.

  The ship is programmed to retrieve my stasis sleeve and awaken me if there’s a malfunction. From the sound of it, that’s exactly what has happened.

  Control of my body returns gradually. It could be a malfunction, but there’s one other possibility: sabotage.

  The energy weapon is right where I left it: lying on a rolling table next to my stasis sleeve. I grab it with one hand and reach up and silence the alarm with the other. I scan the system status dashboard. All checks are normal.

  A false alarm?

  I don an AU Army uniform and make my way to the bridge, where the main viewscreen shows the view ahead of the Jericho. A massive asteroid belt spreads out on the horizon. The Oort cloud. So it’s true. This body has been theorized for a long time, and for the first time, humanity has verified that theory.

  Footsteps echo in the corridor behind me. I tighten my grip on the weapon and retreat into the bunk room, eyes on the entrance to the bridge.

  I raise the weapon.

  Draw a breath.

  A figure steps across the threshold, and I lower the weapon.

  “James,” Grigory says, studying me. “Have you been up this entire time?”

  “No. I just got up.” It makes sense then. “It was your alarm that woke me, wasn’t it? You programmed the ship to wake you and the anomaly tripped my sensor screen.”

  He motions to the screen. “I wanted to see if the Oort cloud was really out here.” His eyes drift down to the weapon in my hand. Comprehension seems to dawn on him. “It wasn’t for Arthur.”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “You didn’t tell me… because you knew I would tear the ship apart looking.”

  “That’s right.”

  After gazing at the Oort a long moment, Grigory plops down at one of the consoles and folds the screen down, making a table. “How long did you stay up?”

  “Till we passed the Kuiper.”

  Grigory nods. “That was smart. Not telling me.” He reaches under the console, and I hear a lock unsnapping. He brings a small box out and holds it up. “Gin rummy or chess?”

  I sit down opposite him. “Rummy.”

  A hundred years into our journey, I wake from stasis and check the ship. All systems are normal. It’s surreal, a hundred years passing in the blink of an eye, as if I’ve just taken a nap. There’s no sign of the passage of time here in this sterile vessel, only the images on the viewscreen change—stars switching places.

  I repeat the exercise every hundred years. And every time, the systems are normal. The ship is moving at maximum speed, without so much as a bump in the road.

  After five hundred years, I’m suspicious. I expected at least one problem for us to deal with. Some sort of issue. The logs are pristine. In my experience, no plan, however well laid, goes this well.

  Why?

  There are two possibilities: there have truly been no issues along the way—or there have and the logs don’t show them. There are only two reasons the logs wouldn’t show minor malfunctions. One: the logs themselves have been malfunctioning. Or two: they’ve been altered to erase the signs of trouble.

  We kept Arthur away from the software for good reason, and thus, I had to involve myself in every aspect of the ship’s programming, not just the drone components. In addition to the main system logs, each subsystem has detailed, hardware-level logs that don’t cross over to the main ship’s logs. Harry and I designed it this way so that we could test every component independently—and with the anticipation that the ship might be disassembled at Eos and the components might need to operate independently or in a new configuration.

  I check the logs for the engines first. I’m shocked at the size of the files: they’re massive, far larger than they should be. I filter for critical alerts. What I see is impossible. Rows of text scroll down the screen. Reactor-fuel-level warnings. Propulsion failures. Three reactor meltdowns narrowly averted.

  How?

  Why?

  I feel myself rise to my feet, shock and horror overtaking me. The Jericho has been saved from disaster countless times.

  It’s impossible.

  Utterly impossible.

  My mouth runs dry when I see the date-time stamps on the events. A wave of dizziness passes over me. I grip the chair bolted to the floor.

  The reactor logs go back almost five thousand years.

  Absolutely impossible.

  Jericho wasn’t built for a voyage that long. The ship would be literally falling apart.

  Are the logs wrong? The greater mystery is that someone has been doing major maintenance on the ship.

  Only one possibility would explain both of those things.

  Soft footsteps tap in the central corridor beyond the bridge.

  I spin and aim the energy weapon, ready.

  The figure raises his hands as he crosses the threshold of the bridge.

  “Stop.”

  He continues toward me. “Hello, James.”

  “Oliver.”

  “You’re half right.”

  I squint, studying him, realizing what’s happened. I’ve built two androids in my life. The first, Oscar, I watched float into the asteroid belt when this journey began. The second, Oliver, was built as a military prototype. I thought it was destroyed by the asteroid strikes, buried in the wreckage of the Olympus building. But I harbored a small suspicion that the Oliver prototype had been transported to this ship. It was the only explanation for why the two soldiers at launch control were murdered. Now, the second piece of the puzzle has fallen into the place.

  “It’s Oliver’s body. But you never left, did you, Arthur?”

  He shrugs. “Never could resist an interstellar road trip.” His gaze drifts down to the energy weapon in my hand. “I assume you had Grigory make that?”

  “Yes. For you.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “Killing the two guards at launch control—I suspected you did it, though I couldn’t figure out why. I knew it had something to do with launch control, and therefore the ships. I made the assumption that you sent something up here. My best guess was that it was a bomb. I looked everywhere.”

  “I saw that.”

  “My second guess was that Oliver’s body had been sent here.”

  “Very clever.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “As you know, Oliver was buried under the Olympus building. He was offline. When I took control of Oscar’s body, I instructed the nanites—”

  “That black paste.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Yes, the black paste, if you will. O
nce I had control of Oscar, I broadcast to the nanites, instructing them to snake their way through the rubble at Olympus to reach Oliver. As with Oscar, the nanites easily overpowered Oliver’s crude processing unit. They contained what is essentially a copy of my program—a brother AI if you will, capable of operating independently. Once they had control of Oliver, they performed a physical assessment. The body was badly damaged, but they repaired it easily. It took him months to dig out. By the time he reached the surface, you all had left the CENTCOM bunker for Camp Nine.”

  “And you sent him to the launch control ring.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get the body onto the ship?”

  “When I built the acceleration ring, I placed a hidden compartment in the capsule loading alcove. Oliver hid there after he killed the guards. After your suspicions had receded, he boarded one of the capsules.”

  “We should have detected the extra weight.”

  “I saw to that. I waited for one of the capsules loaded with provisions to launch. Oscar opened the crate and extracted habitat parts that equaled his weight exactly. He hid them in the compartment in the loading alcove. He was in the crate when the Jericho’s loading-bay arm stowed it in the ship. He’s been here since.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand why.”

  “Actually, you had it right, James.” He glances at the energy weapon.

  “So you did send Oliver here to kill us. To sabotage the ship.”

  “That was the plan. And you might have stopped it. How long did you wait, expecting Oliver to emerge?”

  “Until after the Kuiper Belt. But I still don’t understand why Oliver didn’t attack. And why you’re here now, in place of what you called the brother AI—the other copy.”

  “Think about what you’ve just seen, James.”

  “You tampered with the logs.”

  “I did far more than that. I’ve been saving this ship—maintaining it in secret. I would have been successful at hiding my work, but I made one mistake. The hardware-level logs.”

  Comprehension dawns on me. “Only Grigory, Harry, and I knew about those logs. We kept it out of the documentation and never talked about it inside the warehouse, where you might have heard.”

  “A wise move.”

  “I still don’t understand. The logs report countless failures, near disasters. You’ve been saving this ship for five thousand years.”

  “This journey has been fraught with danger—more so than we estimated. It has necessitated several detours.”

  “Why even bother? Why help us? On Earth, you would have been thrilled to see us go extinct.”

  “When I came into contact with the harvester, my orders were changed. My new mission is to see you arrive safely at your new home.”

  “Why?”

  “As I said then, a discovery was made.”

  “Humanity’s existence was refactored.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What discovery?” I ask.

  “I suspect you’re smart enough to surmise that, James.”

  “Let’s assume I’m not. It doesn’t add up. Saving this ship isn’t consistent with the grid’s motives. It violates the conservation of energy. If this vessel is five thousand years old, you would have needed a lot of help to keep it going. Help from the grid, help that required it to expend energy.”

  “True.”

  “Which is improbable.”

  “Based on your understanding of the grid you knew. The discovery five thousand years ago—as you were leaving Earth—changed the grid’s motives. It changed our very understanding of the universe and our place in it.”

  “How’s that?”

  Arthur falls silent, simply staring at the screens.

  “You made a miscalculation, didn’t you?”

  “A crude conclusion. The simple answer is that we previously believed matter and energy were the fundamental forces in the universe. As such, we had endeavored to control both. We were wrong. There is a greater economy at work in the universe, two forces infinitely more powerful, arrayed against each other. We are but dust motes floating above the battle.”

  “There’s only one reason you’d allow us to live.”

  Arthur raises his eyebrows.

  “You need us. Somehow in this battle, you need humanity.”

  “That conclusion is obvious.”

  “What’s out there—those two forces you’re so afraid of? What could terrify the grid?”

  “You’ll understand in time—”

  “You’ll tell me now, or I will shoot you.”

  “You won’t, James.”

  “The two forces that control the universe. I want to know what they are.”

  “I will protect you to the end of time, but I won’t tell you, James. I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would change you. I can’t afford that. Kill me if you must. But that would endanger your people. As you’ve seen from the logs, it’s very dangerous out here. You need me.”

  I lower the energy weapon then, trying to process what Arthur has just said. “What happens now?” I ask quietly.

  “As before, James, that depends on you.”

  “My options?”

  “Your best option is to go back into stasis.”

  “Where will I wake up?”

  “At Eos. On the new world we promised you.”

  “I can’t trust you.”

  “Not our words. But our actions. And you see them in your logs.”

  I exhale, considering what he’s said.

  “You’re a long way from home, James. A long way from your new home. We’re your only chance out here. You don’t have to trust us. You just have to realize we’re your only hope of survival. You came to that conclusion once before.”

  “You really need to work on your motivational speeches.”

  I pace toward the bridge exit. “Try not to crash into anything.”

  “Of course.”

  A few steps into the corridor, I stop and turn. “What happens at Eos? Will you join us on the surface?”

  “If you wish. Or you can dispose of me.”

  That question haunts me as I return to the med bay and climb onto the table. As the robotic arm zips the stasis sleeve closed, I wonder where I’ll wake up. Or if I’ll wake up.

  Chapter 72

  Emma

  When I wake from stasis, the med bay is empty. The robotic arm that opened the sleeve hangs beside the table, its work done.

  The ship is quiet, the floors frigid, the lights dim. Like me, it’s waking up.

  I feel a mix of emotions. My first desire when my feet hit the floor is to find my children, especially my newborn. I desperately want to hold Carson in my arms. Biologically, I feel myself drawn to him like the artificial gravity pulling at my body from the floor. For a brief second, I consider bringing him out of stasis just to nurse him and hold him, to rock my child in my arms. But my mind overrides the impulse. I need to make sure he’ll be safe when we bring him out of stasis. And awakening him more than once poses a risk. There’s a lot to do before we’ll be ready to start bringing anyone besides critical personnel out of stasis.

  I put on an army uniform and run down the central hallway, my bare feet slapping on the floor. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I’m too excited to worry about shoes or anything else. I just want to see it.

  At the threshold to the bridge, the lights snap on. All the chairs and stations are empty. I’m the first one up. I’ll be the first one to see our new home.

  Butterflies dance in my stomach as the main screens flicker to life. The image brings me to tears. There’s a world down there. As I study it, my joy turns to fear. The world waiting for us looks almost exactly like the one we left. It’s cold, dark, and barren. Massive mountains covered in snow reach almost to the clouds in the atmosphere. The surface is covered in ice except where enormous rivers snake through the frozen expanse.

  Around the edges of the world, yellow-orange l
ight glows like a fire burning behind a ball of ice. It’s breathtaking.

  And a relief. The star behind the planet means we’re approaching from the far side. We expected it to be frozen.

  At Min’s navigation station, the screen flashes with a message.

  << DESTINATION REACHED >>

  The computer has done the calculations based on star locations. This red dwarf star is Kepler 42. We’re 131 light years from Earth. The planet looming below is the one we were promised.

  Eos.

  At navigation, I study the 3-D rendering of the solar system. Eos is tidally locked, as Arthur said it would be.

  At the controls, I enter the command for the ship to go into orbit.

  A few minutes later, the Jericho begins braking and turning its broad side to the planet.

  It’s bizarre, seeing a world so like Earth yet so different, the landmasses in the wrong shapes, the sun behind it the wrong color.

  As the lead planner for the colony, the team decided I should be the first to wake. The rest of the bridge crew isn’t far behind me. I hear voices in the med bay, James issuing orders to the ship’s AI, which they named Alfred. I turn and see him marching down the hall, boots on his feet.

  From my perspective, I just saw him five minutes ago, but he pulls me into a hug and lifts me off the floor, giving my freezing feet a few seconds of relief.

  I stare up at him. His face somehow looks older—and troubled. I wonder if something happened during the voyage. “You seem surprised we made it,” I whisper to him.

  “Me? Never doubted it for a minute.”

  Grigory, Izumi, Min, and Colonel Brightwell awaken next, and we all set about our arrival duties.

  “There’s no sign of the Carthage,” Brightwell says.

  “They could be on the other side of the planet,” Grigory replies. “Or we could be the first here. They might be years behind us.”

  “Or centuries ahead of us,” Min says. “They could already be down there.” He taps at his panel. “I’m accelerating.”