Winter World (The Long Winter #1)(54)

My nerves ratchet up even more. I actually feel sweat forming on my palms. What he’s asking for is no big deal. It’s just performing surgery in space with baking mitts on—while going tens of thousands of miles per hour. If the drone slips out of my hands it will be gone forever, floating in space like a grain of sand on a beach, our only clue about what happened, gone. Piece of cake.

I nod as if I’m unbothered. “What’s the target?”

“See what happened to it first. Peel it like an onion. Slowly. Inside, you’re looking for the data drive. You know where it is.”

And I do. I built this drone. I screwed that data drive to the drone’s central node. And I have the most experience and dexterity with the arms.

I dread doing this. I’m scared to screw it up. But at the same time, I absolutely want to be the one doing this. Because my crew is counting on me. The last crew that counted on me… I lost them. I’ve carried that weight halfway to the sun, and I’ve never quite shaken it. I probably never will. But I know, deep down, that this will help. I know my time on the Pax has helped.

James is watching me.

“Okay,” I breathe.

“Get the black box too. If the operation goes sideways, and you have to choose between the drive and the black box, get the black box.”

I nod. The black box was Harry’s idea: another data drive buried deep inside the drone, shielded, with real-time, filtered data replication from all the drone’s systems.

I take the controls and work the robotic arms, carefully detaching the drone’s outer panels. They float away the second they come loose, like dandelion seeds in the wind, gone forever into the vastness of space.

Past the outer panels, I try to pry open the inner housing. I glance at the tension readings on the arm. Too high. Why?

James floats closer and studies the screen. “What’s wrong?”

“Too much resistance. Like it’s stuck or fused somehow.”

“Use the laser.”

I swallow hard, nervous.

Holding the drone with one of the arms, I activate the laser with the other and shear off a piece on the edge of the drone. It floats away, revealing the drone’s insides.

The wires are melted like a box of colored crayons, mangled, colors flowing together like water paint in a stream. The circuit boards are flattened, the resistors, LEDs, capacitors, and diodes looking like a tiny city that has been burned to the ground.

Charlotte speaks first. “What happened? What could have done this? A solar flare?”

“This is not natural phenomenon,” Grigory says. Charlotte opens her mouth to argue, but Grigory continues: “Is statistical impossibility.”

“We’ll know soon,” James murmurs quietly. “Keep going, Emma. Carve it up.”

Five minutes later, I’m staring at the drive on the screen.

“Bring it into the cargo module,” James says.

The next hour is grueling. Absolute concentration on my part. And it’s a success. I recover both the drive and the black box. I take samples from around the drone and put them into containers. Finally, I release the shell I’ve carved up. Gutted, it drifts away into the black of space.

In the cargo module, I use smaller arms to connect the black box to a tether connected to Lina’s firewalled computer.

“I want to see that message,” Charlotte says.

“We need to see the video first,” James says quickly, his tone matter-of-fact, not challenging. No one argues.

Lina types away, then the video plays, every eye glued to it.

We see Beta in the distance, the first contact drone closing from behind.

The Fibonacci numbers scroll on the screen in white. A number pops up in red—a reply. Another number in white, then a question mark in red. That must represent the artifact’s non-numeric message.

The next second the screen goes black.

“Play it back,” James says. “End minus two seconds. Slow it way down. This thing is capturing a hundred frames a second. Play back at ten per second.”

The video plays again.

My mouth falls open. The artifact transforms. The hexagonal shape folds in on itself, forming what looks like a bean with two pointed ends. One end swivels to face the comm drone. A flash erupts from the point.

The video ends.

I now know what James has probably known for some time. What Harry realized. What they didn’t tell me: we are at war.





Chapter 32





James





We’ve sent a comm brick to Earth with the video footage of the drone being fried by the artifact. Grigory, Harry, and I have spent hours debating how the artifact even did it. Radiation or some kind of charged particle burst are our best guesses. We’ve decided to harden the Midway fleet against similar attacks. I don’t know if it will work.

Charlotte has spent every waking hour studying the message the artifact broadcast. She’s had no luck. I’m glad she’s trying, but I doubt she’ll solve it, even as smart as she is.

I know what I think happened. The comm drone broadcast a simple message. The artifact assumed it might be someone on its side, a simple messenger. It broadcast the next Fibonacci number back, then an encrypted message in its native format. When the drone didn’t respond in the same language, the artifact figured out they weren’t on the same team after all.